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Welsh Affairs

I absolutely concur. There needs to be a mixture of skills in that body. There certainly needs to be a lot of private sector experience, but given the evidence that we heard, it is also important that the people involved can talk to different arms of government in different parts of the world. Another issue that came out of the evidence that we heard was a general concern about skills. A lot of employers said to us in evidence and outside the Committee that people coming out of schools and universities simply were not equipped for the world of work. The recent programme for international student assessment report suggested that skills among Welsh school leavers in certain areas were well below the OECD average and the lowest in the UK. That ought to worry people. I have expressed personal concern before about some of the university courses being offered. I do not know if it is still happening, but at one time Swansea was offering a four-year degree in surf studies. As somebody who has spent 20 years surfing, I do not think someone needs a degree in it. I did not get any degree in anything, but that is another story. I certainly do not think I missed out by not spending four years studying something like that. There are a lot of Mickey Mouse courses about, and people come out of them expecting to be able to walk into a £30,000 or £40,000-a-year job, having spent years of their life and quite of a lot of their money on such a course, and are surprised when it does not happen. When the Committee went to GE Aviation, I talked to some of the directors, a lot of whom had come up from the shop floor. They were quite happy to take on hard-working, bright people who did not necessarily have great academic qualifications, show them all about the job and allow them to rise to the top. It is interesting to think about the image of heavy engineering and manufacturing in Wales, and perhaps in the rest of the UK. Having worked at British Steel in the late 1980s, even I went into some factories with the Committee expecting loud and perhaps slightly dirty places. That is no longer the case, as those of us who went on the factory visits know. Some of them have to be so clean, to keep dust out of the atmosphere, that they are like hospitals. It was very interesting to talk to Tata and hear that it had taken it upon itself to bring school leavers on to the premises, and to hear how excited those school leavers had been. Some of them had gone on to work at Tata. Why are not all companies doing that?