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World Class Skills 2020

I shall be brief. I think it is always a bit of a cheek when one comes into a debate late. However, I have been here quite some time and was in another Committee before so could not get here. It is a sign of the times that we are spoilt for choice when it comes to skills today: the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Secretary of State for Education and Skills are jointly hosting a big conference across in the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre, we had Education and Skills questions today, and much else has been going on. Two years ago, a group of us formed the all-party skills group, the National Skills Forum and the Skills Commission, which I jointly chair. We did so because of the irritation we all felt—particularly in the Select Committee—that every time we discussed early years or mainstream education, higher education or much else the press were there, as were the radio and the TV, but as soon as we turned to skills no one came. I got a bad reputation with the media for berating them for not turning up for discussions on skills. In those two years, we have seen some amazing changes in terms of the level of interest and how we have managed together—with a lot of help from Government and from Opposition parties—to raise skills up the political agenda. That is where we are today, and in a sense this debate in Westminster Hall is a symptom of that success. We must get that success embedded over time, because we have to maintain it and work out. I think the subject is very important. I came into politics because I wanted a society in which every individual could push their talent to the full, could find all the skills that they had in them and could push them until their lives were made full, in the best sense of that word. In some senses, that flowed into a desire to get people the skills that would allow them to live the good life, by which I mean having a decent job, the ability to raise a family, to have a decent home and to go on holiday—all those things that we know intuitively are about the good life and that we all want for our constituents. On the one hand is personal fulfilment; on the other is being able to hold down a good job that provides a reasonable income. A knock-on from that is the fact that we need the skills to make the individual, the community and society successful. We need to sell our industrial wares—our industrial and manufacturing sectors are still large and successful, and we all know about our services in the City of London, Leeds, Manchester and other cities such as Bristol. We want a successful economy, but we also want the individual to use all their potential. Sometimes when we make speeches we emphasise one aspect rather than another, but of course the two must always go together. That is why I got involved. I was lucky to end up as Chairman of the Select Committee on Education and Skills, because with a good group of colleagues of all parties I can do something. Our Committee’s watchword is to add value. We do not inquire into matters about which we cannot do anything; we try to add value to the process. The Committee has just embarked on a major inquiry into skills. We have seen so much activity in skills over the past two or three years that we thought it was time for the Select Committee to draw it all together. We have had a great deal of change on the ground, but we have also had other big changes—the sector skills councils, the modification and the pending further modification of the learning and skills councils, the change in the nature of apprenticeships over a number of years, and the introduction of train to gain. Much has been going on, and we now have the two stages of the Leitch report. We are doing a kind of wrap-around inquiry into skills that we hope will add value. In a sense, we are undertaking a similar inquiry—it is in parallel—into universities. You will remember, Mr. Hancock—I think you were a Member 10 years ago, although quite unfairly you spent a brief time away from the House—that when the Dearing report was published in 1997, it was said to have taken a 20-year perspective but that after 10 years he would like to make another evaluation of our commitment to higher education. The Dearing report had all-party support, and this year, 2007, is the 10th year. I would be interested to know whether the Department will provide independent evaluation of those 10 years; if so, perhaps we ought to curtail our work because that is what we are putting our hand to at the moment. I return to the skills that we are talking about today. When we first started our network of groups, pushing skills up the agenda, we identified something called world skills. We cannot call them the Olympics of skills, but they are the parallel of the Olympics and they take place every two years in capital cities throughout the world. When we started getting organised, we found that bids had been made—it was familiar competition—by the Australians and the French to host the world skills event in 2011. With all party-support, and with a favourable wind from the former Minister of State at the Department for Education and Skills, now the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (David Miliband), we managed to win that competition for London. It is appropriate that the year before the Olympics, we will have a world skills event in London. It gives us the opportunity to build in some new skills. Some of us are talking of adding sustainability skills, and perhaps we should consider adding a range of other new skills. We all tend to get pulled into discussions about plumbers, electricians, bricklayers and so on, and there is nothing wrong with having such skills. Indeed, the other day I was lobbied hard by a gentleman from Lancashire who wanted to impress on me the problems of farriers. Apparently, there are many farriers but they have only one apprentice and within two years of gaining his qualifications he is in competition with the farrier who trained him. However, I also learned that the farrier’s average wage is £50,000 a year, so it is a good occupation. One problem, which I mention in passing, is that, like those in many other occupations, farriers live in a different world to those who go into full-time education. Part-time students do far worse than full-time students. They find it difficult to get funding for courses and they cannot borrow money for it. There are two worlds, one for skills and one for certain kinds of higher education. As Chairman of the Select Committee, many people lobby me about that problem, but if we want a world in which people are constantly upgrading their skills we must make available not only a good range of courses but the necessary funding. Sometimes, we miss out on the funding.