Digital Skills (Select Committee Report)

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, we in this House are rightly proud of our committees. We understand that the reach of their work goes much beyond these four walls, and it is important that we support them and continue with them. Nothing could give me more pleasure than to introduce as excellent a report as the one we have been discussing this afternoon. We must thank my noble friend Lady Morgan and her committee for undertaking this very substantial piece of work, and thank the committee members for their individual contributions. It is quite clear from listening to the debate today that although these things take a lot of time it was quite a pleasurable gig: you can tell from the remarks that people enjoyed being gathered together by my noble friend Lady Morgan. The description of her as organising her flock is perhaps the key to how they have managed to come up with such an excellent report.

However, as has been said, the report has not been matched by the Government’s response, which I will come back to later. It is not just length that matters—although it is interesting that the discrepancy in page numbers is so large—it is the fact that it was delayed, did not deal in detail with the very large number of recommendations and failed completely to engage with the revolution that the report suggested is necessary if we are going to tackle the digital future that we face as a country and as individuals.

The report, taken as it stands, is still highly relevant despite being published in February 2015. It is refreshing because of its wide reach and the fact that it made every attempt to look in depth at the issues that it addressed, not just in its analysis of the problems but in the possible solutions. It has blue-sky thinking, which we always want to see in these reports, and has very practical proposals about how the recommendations could be made to stick. Of course the basis for that—as it is for all good policy-making—was the evidence that they sought. They not only sat here and received papers and presentations but went out and learned what was happening on the ground. That has all come out in this excellent report. It was supplemented by another good idea, which might be taken up more generally, which was to ask those who submitted evidence to put down a list of key asks. In other words, it made them do some of the hard work that often has to be done in government by refining the broadness of the thoughts so that there was a specific list of ideas from each of those who gave evidence. I think anybody who needs their thinking on this area gingered up could read those key asks and have a very good idea about the temperature out there and what people want to see happen.

When my noble friend Lady Morgan was asked about her report in an interview, she said:

“This report is a wake-up call to whoever forms the next Government in May”—

this was prior to the last general election.

“Digital is everywhere, with digital skills now seen as vital life skills. It’s obvious, however, that we’re not learning the right skills to meet our future needs”.

Interestingly, the newspapers picked up three of the main recommendations in the report. The first was the recommendation that runs throughout the report—although it is in no sense the totality of it—that the current approach in the UK to educating people of all ages needs a radical rethink. Secondly, current internet provision in the country needs a step change—a major boost not just in speed, although that is important, but in bandwidth. An important point was made in the opening speeches—for example, that made by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes—about the danger that if we do not consider coverage and inclusion, not just in physical terms but in terms of groups, gender and previous experience, we are all going to be the losers. I want to come back to that point.

The third point that the papers picked up, which is important and the key to this debate, is that the Government have a key role here. Two very interesting points were picked up in the reports I have read; indeed, they were picked up in the report from the Select Committee in the other place today. A digital agenda goes way beyond what any individual department can achieve in Whitehall. We are talking about a radical rethink of the basic structure under which we undertake education and training and operate our industrial capacity. That cannot be done by any one department, however well resourced: it has to be done by the Government as a whole taking a vow that they are going to do something significant and do it with vigour and for the long term.

Listening to the debate today, I was interested to hear what individual Members of your Lordships’ House picked out and wanted to support. It is in some sense demeaning to pick just a few things from the report because, as I have already said and others have mentioned, it is a very rich resource for people interested in this area. We are talking about very complex issues, but it is interesting to see how the key issues have come to the surface for a number of those who have responded. The first, which again underlines so much of this, is the way in which the economy is changing. Many jobs are going to change. Automation is a risk but may also be an opportunity, given how many jobs will have to change and become different. My noble friend Lord Knight said that he was confident that brawn as well as brain would be required in the future economy, but I think we all feel that in some sense we would not be doing the best by our country if we could not provide opportunities for people to engage themselves in improving the quality of the work that they undertake and how they do that.

This takes us into the question of skills, which the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, just mentioned and which was picked up my noble friend Lord Knight. In thinking about skills, we have a tendency to do two things. First, we apply it sector by sector, which as has been said will not work in this situation. Secondly, we tend to build a skills infrastructure to operate as if it were some object to be applied in the pursuit of an operation. I do not think that is right in this situation. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, picked this up. I may not go all the way with some of the things he said, but he certainly had the right idea that we are missing a big trick if we do not understand how industry wants training to happen and how those who have skill needs may need to tap into it in a way that is not currently seen in the system.

Other points were raised that make this a very important area. There is a need for more agility in training schemes. In a click-through world, we need to think differently about how the outputs of training applied to people will affect their resilience to cope with a changing world, the portfolio of skills they may need, the fact that people will often be operating in a freelance as well as an employed capacity, and reskilling being the norm, not just occasional.

Many noble Lords mentioned schools and the need to think through the implications in that area. Of course, trying to change school curricula is, as we all understand, an extremely difficult ask. I hope that, when the Minister responds, she will give us a sense of how that battle is going, because I suspect it will be a battle royal right across Whitehall.

The idea that one should raise digital literacy to the same level as numeracy and literacy, which I absolutely support, goes against everything that professional educators seem to want out of the education system. That does not mean to say that it is wrong, as the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, also picked up. We have to think this through, because if we are right about how we will operate in a future world, we have to regard that as the central nut to crack, and therefore apply all the force required, and to think through the implications and the collateral damage that may happen.

Curiously, the innovation and creativity that will probably be key to that is absolutely what occurs when one works in the digital world, but the report is right to pick up how difficult it will be to get the teaching force up to the level required, and, I would say, although it is not mentioned specifically in the report, the need to ask parents to think again about how they support their children.

I had a very good example of that around the dinner table at the weekend, when my wife and I discovered to our considerable dismay that the emails that we had finally got around to sending to our children to get them to do even things as simple as coming downstairs for dinner are no longer applicable as they have not read emails for years. They said, “What are you doing? It is all instant messaging”—and other apps that I could not possibly mention for risk of being sued. If we cannot even do this in our home when we are quite computer literate, we are obviously a long way from the place of this debate.

A lot of noble Lords talked about the internet and the infrastructure that will be necessary to support this work. A lot of good things were said today to which I hope the Minister will respond. The internet as a universal service obligation is what is being proposed, but the questions remain: about speeds and bandwidths, reliability, whether it will really get out to the final 10%, and, if it is to be cost-constrained, what the cost will be and how it will it be justified.

As I said, accessibility is not just about hardware, it is also about making sure that those who might otherwise be excluded by background, gender or previous experience also get the chance to be part of the information society. The underlying question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare—a very good one—was: will we be playing catch-up in this game or do we really intend to lead?

The report is very strong about women’s difficulty in getting digital jobs and how they are therefore being excluded. The problem is not just at school, although that is highlighted, the lack of career paths or the way in which subjects are differentiated between schools that teach mainly boys or girls. There is a wider concern here about making sure that we all understand what is important about the technologies and where we are going.

Those seem to me to be the key points that have been picked up today. They are important and we look forward to hearing the Minister’s response. The Government’s initial response was very weak; I hope that she will be able to remedy that today. As was said at the beginning of the debate, the Government are rather good at being captivated by their own rhetoric and failing to deal with the detail. This is not a time for rhetoric; this is the time for real understanding of what is in the digital agenda paper that we are promised. Will it be optimistic and inclusive of all the issues that have been raised today? Will it really tackle the question of how the whole Government can move on this, or will it fall into the problem well illustrated by our current difficulty, which is that the Government appear happy to resist the committee’s call for a Cabinet-level Minister to be responsible for driving this agenda forward? They say that it is perfectly okay to have a Minister of State reporting to two Secretaries of State, because that means that the effort is well resourced at the top level. It will not work; you need powerful committees and departments to make this work and get it through.

I raise some minor but important issues. Will Parliament be consulted on this, will we get updates, or will we have to wait for periodic responses and debates? When we get to the crunch, will there be a commitment to our people to make a real step-change in skills and infrastructure? Will we make it or break it?