Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Stunell Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stunell (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I start by congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Black, on her outstanding maiden speech. I look forward very much to meeting her face-to-face very soon.

This country’s skills deficit is enormous, and it hits a wide range of sectors and industries. Despite periodic reforms, practically every employer in each sector says that those who complete their formal training are still not job ready. At the same time, there is a huge pool of people of all ages with ambition and drive who would love to have the opportunity to develop their skills and transform their employment chances, and who are frustrated that there is no suitable route for them to follow. While I sincerely hope that this skills Bill will succeed at last in joining up the supply and demand, noble Lords will perhaps forgive me if my hope is not entirely matched by my expectations.

I want to outline the dire gap that there is between ambition and reality by its application to the construction industry. The construction industry is strategic for the delivery of practically every government policy. Whether it is free ports, new prisons, 300,000 homes a year, or 40 new hospitals; whether it is a mighty levelling-up agenda, or simply the vital overhaul of 20 million existing homes to make them fit for zero-carbon Britain in 2050; none of that can happen without a flourishing construction industry to deliver them. The ambition is there, but the capacity is not. I hope that this Bill will go some way toward bridging that gap.

Construction faces a desperate workforce and skills crisis. The Construction Industry Training Board says that an extra 217,000 people will need to be recruited in the next four years to deliver on the ambitious targets set before it. This is not about hod-carriers but about skilled tradespeople, professionals at all levels, and a range of completely new skills, some of which your Lordships might never have heard of before.

After the outflow of EU 27 workers from the industry post Brexit, we needed to at least double the output of new entrants simply to plug that gap. On top of that, however, we also need to train for the new skills required to deliver zero-carbon homes and to retrofit 20 million existing homes. We will need completely new roles, ranging from heat-pump installers and air-pressure testers to retrofit co-ordinators and energy managers. Your Lordships may never have heard of those job titles, but all of them were major bottlenecks in the delivery of the ill-fated green homes grant fiasco last winter. Now, the forthcoming building safety Bill will ratchet up another shortage, this time of fire safety engineers.

I am indebted to the CITB for sharing figures that show that, at present, about 100,000 people take up construction-related courses in the further education sector each year. The problem with that is that only 24% directly enter the industry, while another 16% take up construction-related apprenticeships. The remaining 60% of further education construction starters do not reach the construction workforce at all. It is even worse than that, as many of those apprentice starters do not finish their training, and by some accounts up to half of them also leave the sector. Therefore, out of every 100 trainee starters in further education, only around 30 finish up working in the industry.

And who exactly makes it through the training to the workforce? Some 84% are men. The industry has the most unequal gendered workforce in Britain, and only 6% of that workforce is BAME, about half the national proportion. There is plenty of evidence of the industry’s consequential problems: low skills at every level of activity. The stark evidence emerging from the Grenfell Tower inquiry shows that it is not just a shortage of good bricklayers that is the problem but capacity and competency from top to bottom. Poor productivity, consistently the worst of all our major industries, and very low investment in research and innovation, leads to a depressing spiral of poor quality, low profitability and multiple business failures.

I simply say to noble Lords that, in the construction industry, there just has to be a total rethink of the training provision, and that should include but certainly not be limited to: who actually provides the training; what that training is; who is going to foot the bill for the training; and how to make it attractive to young BAME people and to women. Those questions have to be answered first by the Government. This skills Bill has to be the next step towards putting training in the industry, for the industry, at the top of the agenda. Otherwise, every other policy target and best wish of the Government will certainly be missed.