Apprenticeships

Lord Monks Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend Lord Young for initiating this important debate. Unlike him and certain others here, I was never an apprentice but I went to a boys’ technical school and most of my contemporaries went into apprenticeships in manufacturing or in construction. A decade later I was working on the training brief in the TUC in early 1970s, and the apprenticeship system started to collapse—I do not think that there was any direct relationship between my presence in the TUC and what was happening in the country. The apprenticeship system had covered 44% of boys leaving school at the minimum age and about 4% to 5% of girls, but those numbers plummeted, particularly for boys.

Why was that? First, there was a feeling among employers that those who were doing the training were losing staff to those who were not—that poaching was rife—and the lack of a collective approach was a factor. Industrial training boards, instead of being strengthened, were weakened. I must acknowledge too that there was a growth of a youth culture of having money. If you could earn more money at the age of 16 in a labouring job than you could in an apprenticeship, the lure of the youth culture was a major factor that turned many young people away from apprenticeships. Later, other factors clicked in as universities expanded. The attractions of higher education—“uni”, as became the common phrase—became overwhelming to many young people, and was supported by parents. The privatisation of a lot of the utilities in particular, which trained more people than they needed themselves, contributed to this collapse in apprenticeships outside of some blue-chip companies and one or two exceptional industries.

We have come a long way from the apprenticeship model which has survived, albeit not without problems and pressures, on the other side of the North Sea and of the channel. I well remember a visit I made to an apprentice school for motor mechanics in Vienna, where I took part in a discussion in English with the students. I told them their English was excellent and they said, “All our drawings are in English; we have to work in English”. Their apprenticeships were done in a foreign language, which was extremely impressive and showed the high quality of the apprenticeships and the veneration of the concept which existed there. Where we have 11 apprentices for every 1,000 employees, Germany, Switzerland and, I think, Austria—as well as, interestingly, Australia, which is a different culture and more like ours in some ways—have round about 40 per 1,000 workers. Switzerland has a lot of apprentices and not so many young people going into higher education. The university route there has not got the same cachet as it seems to have here. However, we know that even in those countries apprenticeships are under pressure: a lot of young people are aiming for higher education and some employers are looking to substitute much cheaper and shorter training courses, linked to specific jobs, for more expensive ones. It is not a paradise over there, but we succumbed to these pressures to a greater degree and earlier than others.

I am also in the camp welcoming the resurrection of apprenticeships which was started under the previous Government and has been continued under this one. There is a lot to be proud of. There is a lot of agreement in this area, although from our side, as my noble friend indicated in his opening speech, we would like things to go more quickly and more purposefully on this issue. The point he made about procurement was very important—we should know what employers are doing. Looking at what training is going on and the apprenticeship model in particular should be part of the purchasing process of public authorities. Investors in People may be a very useful initiative for this purpose.

I know the Government have started to think about this, but we need to do more to make sure that the minimum wage is properly paid. At the moment, the estimate from the latest apprentice pay survey is that 30% are being paid illegally, which is a very high figure: three out of 10 kids, and in some cases adults, are not getting what they are entitled to. We also know that the whole scheme in most sectors is still geared towards white boys—if I can put it like that—rather than girls or ethnic minorities, who do not feature too strongly in quite a lot of sectors.

The other point to make is about the importance of employer and union co-operation in this area. I was very proud when I was at the TUC of being one of the instigators of Unionlearn, and of the idea that unions could use their influence to get people to have a go at learning who did not have the experience of getting glittering prizes at school and for whom learning was frightening. We could reach parts that employers on their own could not, and that relationship was very important. Although welcoming the Government’s commitment to supporting Unionlearn, I ask the Minister whether they intend to continue that commitment into the future and to give that very worthwhile and big-scale scheme the support it really deserves.