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Jobs for the Girls: Two Years On

That is a huge question. Such a process has to start right at the beginning of people's lives and in schools and so on. The question has to be dealt with right across society. There is no easy answer, but we have to try to tackle it on every available front. In one of my local secondary schools, there was a girl who wanted to go into construction. The young people do a lot of apprenticeships and vocational training. It was a tribute to her father, who was in the building trade. She wanted to follow in his footsteps, just as someone might become a doctor if one of their parents was a doctor, but he did not think that that was appropriate, so she ended up doing health and social care. There is nothing wrong with that, but the father did not see it as a tribute to him that construction was what the daughter wanted to do, so she missed the opportunity to do that. That said, I went into one of our local engineering companies and saw a 14-year-old who was on the young apprentice scheme. She was working for Collis Engineering, a firm that makes signal gantries, and the whole factory had just adopted her—the people there almost did not want to let her go back to school because they thought she was doing so well. It is not obvious how we start to tackle some of the problematic attitudes, but we just have to keep going on. It is about giving people the opportunity to look at different ways of experiencing things. Often, we give people only very limited choices to look at, so they cannot even see that there are other areas that they could manage to take part in. I return to my theme of needing to take action even when we may be in more difficult economic circumstances. I shall take just one local example. The construction industry tends to be first in and first out of downturns, or whatever they should be called if we are not to use the R-word. In my area, one of the greatest advocates of the skills agenda and the first chair of our learning and skills council owns Bowmer and Kirkland, the biggest privately owned construction company in the country and a major local builder. Mr. Kirkland has always been proud of the fact that he employs some women surveyors. I was sitting next to him at a dinner hosted by the Minister for Housing, my right hon. Friend the Member for Derby, South (Margaret Beckett). I challenged him, saying, ““Well, it is all right having a few women surveyors, but what about the rest of your work force? Why not survey it to see what is going on?”” He took up the challenge; he came back surprised and rather excited because he had more women in positions of responsibility than he realised. The Government's latest proposals talk about transparency in the work force, yet Mr. Kirkland, the owner of a company and a positive man, was not aware of what was happening in his company. We discussed getting together with his women employees to try to ensure that their skills and those of other women in the company were fully utilised, and how to bring on more people. It will obviously help Mr. Kirkland to have a work force with a broader base of skills; when the building trade picks up again, he will need those skills, which are often in short supply when demand is high and supply is limited.