Apprenticeships

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I join in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, on obtaining this debate. I am extremely glad that he has given me the opportunity to raise this important issue. It has been an extraordinary afternoon. I am pleased that the time limits of these debates in Grand Committee mean that you do not bore too many people. We have debated subjects of extraordinary interest. I hope that noble Lords will forgive me for picking up some of the points that were made, which have triggered further thoughts on my part.

My starting point is a speech by Winston Churchill on 20 July 1910 in a debate on the prison estimates, which are often cited in the House in connection with the criminal justice system. In the middle of his speech are the wonderful words that,

“there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man”.—[Official Report, Commons, 20/7/1910; col. 1354.]

Of course, the purpose of that is to say to those involved in the criminal justice system, “It’s your job to find it”. I have often said in the House that the only asset that every nation has in common is its people, and woe betide it if it does not do everything it can to identify, nurture and develop the talents of all its people, because, if it does not, it has only itself to blame if it goes up the spout.

I am extremely glad that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, focused on craft apprenticeships. He rightly referred to the phrase “Education, education, education” used by the former Prime Minister, Mr Blair. I have in my study a monograph written by Glubb Pasha, who noble Lords may remember commanded the Arab Legion. It is about empires. His theory is that empires last for 250 years or 10 generations and are driven initially by ambition but peak when higher education becomes available to virtually everyone, after which people become idle, the ambition goes and they focus on education and not on doing things. Glubb Pasha says that the British Empire lasted from 1700 to 1950, but that is a matter for debate.

The Secretary of State for Justice has just announced that he is going to form new secure colleges for young offenders which will focus on education. This morning I was speaking at a conference and there were a lot of questions about what education actually means. I submit that education does not mean just classroom work but rather identifying someone’s talent and developing it so that they can make use of it as a life skill.

I once spent a fascinating morning with the excellent clerk of works at Salisbury Cathedral when its spire was being repaired. He encouraged young people to learn from the older stonemasons, carpenters and window-makers so that the skills were passed on. A great friend of mine who inherited a house in Dorset had on his land an old building with a collapsed waterwheel which he wanted to repair. There was only one man in Dorset who could do it. He asked him to come and do it and the man wisely said, “I will only do it provided you allow me to bring a young person to learn how to do it because otherwise this craft will die”.

When the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, mentioned a college at Stratford, I was reminded of the occasion two years ago when, as a member of the strategy board of the City and Guilds, I had the great privilege of presenting the prizes to the stonemasons and carpenters. Their skill was incredible. I also presented master carpenter certificates, which go back to the 1480s, to people in their sixties who were being rewarded for bringing on apprentices, which takes me to my last reminiscence. On the wall of my study is a beautiful wall clock that was presented to me when I retired as Chief Inspector of Prisons. It was made in Acklington Prison in Northumberland. The work on it is quite beautiful, including the inlay, because in charge of the carpentry was a master craftsman who insisted that all work was done to the highest possible standard.

At the moment, my elder son is chief executive of the North East Chamber of Commerce. Of course, bringing an area like that out of the recession involves looking in particular for work to employ people. There is no shortage of initiative, no shortage of ideas and no shortage of will to do something. The big problem is skills shortage. The noble Lord mentioned engineers. They need 80,000 engineers, but only 40,000 are available and some of them are ageing. We have let those employers down over the years by not developing people. What we ought to do, as the noble Lord said, is raise the whole status of apprenticeships—craft, building and engineering apprenticeships—because of what they represent in terms of employability.

I come back to my main purpose in speaking in this debate, which is to ask whether this could not be passed on to the criminal justice system, because if you identify talents through aptitude tests, particularly of the young people coming into the criminal justice system, you can then harness those talents. Many of them include just the skills about which we have been talking. We have seen the enthusiasm with which people have suddenly realised that they can do something and the self-esteem that results from that. Taking that on would help not only with rehabilitation but solve the skills shortage problems of employers. It is a question of attitude here, and I think it must begin and end, again, with Winston Churchill saying,

“there is a treasure … in the heart of every man”.

It is our job to find it and then to make sure that it has maximum advantage and is exercised properly.