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Work and Skills

My concern is that we have a lot of qualifications, but underneath the qualification the level of skill is often inadequate. German factory workers can typically not only do mathematics but speak a foreign language. They can handle a foreign language, and their language, very well. We are failing in that. The OECD has shown time and again that the gulf between the best educated—the highest achievers in Britain—and the lowest achievers is wider than that in almost any other country in the developed world. We have to address that problem. There has been a lot of debate about the fact that we are facing a recession, in which there will be unemployment. There will not be jobs. It is obvious that supply-side reforms, welcome though they are, will not solve a demand-side problem. I am glad to say that last weekend, the Chancellor mentioned the great John Maynard Keynes again. I used to teach economics, and Keynes used to be highly regarded—in fact, I still regard him highly—but we have been through a period of madness in which lesser brains have dominated the economic policy agenda. About 15 years ago, I had a debate over lunch with a former deputy economic adviser to the Treasury. I asked him a simple economic question; he could not answer it and lost his temper. I suspect that Keynes would not have done that. According to last night's Evening Standard, even Bertrand Russell found Keynes's intelligence intimidating. I do not think that any of the monetarists intimidate me. We have to look to some of the Keynesian recipes, used in the '30s to solve our problems. When the economy recovers, we will need people to be skilled. The modern world cannot rely on people just picking things up on the job, without being able to do mathematics or even handle their own language very well. We have to tackle those basic skills problems. There are many small companies, and many more smaller companies today, and some apprenticeships cannot be sustained by them. They are fearful of taking on an apprentice because they fear that once the apprentice is trained, he or she will get a job with someone else who pays better. One case that I have written to Ministers about concerns those in the historic vehicle restoration business. Apprentices in that business are highly skilled, but as soon as they are trained, they can get much better paid jobs in the motor sector looking after insurance repair jobs. People in that field are very highly paid; of course, insurance companies pay well for cars to be repaired. Apprentices have to be sustained properly in such small companies. The only way to ensure that is to place a levy—based on turnover, not headcount—on all companies, so that the whole economy pays to sustain apprenticeships, particularly among small companies. I hope that I can urge my right hon. Friend the Minister to persuade his friends in other Departments that the issue is important. I have said most of the things that I wanted to say. Many other Members want to speak—