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Digital Skills (Select Committee Report)

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my friend the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond. He was my friend even before he chose to join the wrong political side when he came into this House. I agree with much of what he said and I pay tribute to this fine report and the chairmanship of my noble friend Lady Morgan. I was especially pleased to see the emphasis on hard infrastructure in the report. I personally think that it is a higher priority for us to connect everyone with reliable high-bandwidth broadband than to connect a couple of urban areas through High Speed 2.

I was particularly pleased to see mention of soft infrastructure. I am the chair of the Tinder Foundation, which has an amusing name these days and delivers digital inclusion largely on behalf of government but for other people as well. We try to get online those people who currently do not have the skills and confidence

to be online. We get about £6 million to £8 million-worth of government money to do that, for which we are very grateful.

I also certainly endorse the call from the Science and Technology Committee of the other House today that we need to continue our efforts to ensure that the 10 million people in this country—the committee puts the figure at 12.8 million, but that is probably over-egging it—who at the moment are excluded from the digital world. That costs them dear financially, culturally and socially.

I will focus most of my comments on education, and the implications for that in the report, where perhaps I would have hoped for the committee to be even more radical than it was. I shall start with some statistics from the Tech Nation 2016 report prepared by Tech City in partnership with Nesta to remind noble Lords of quite how important this area is. There is some easy stuff around the digital tech economy being worth 1.5 million jobs with job creation between 2011 to 2014 running at 2.8 times the rate in the rest of the economy, and that digital tech industries had a turnover of £161 billion and grew 32% faster than the rest of the economy in that time. But what particularly struck me is that 41% of digital tech economy jobs exist within traditionally non-digital industries. That underscores a really important perspective for noble Lords, which is that this is not a sector. We cannot think of digital as just another industrial sector; it is universal and is of universal importance.

The noble Lord, Lord Holmes, talked about digital jobs growth and the deskilling effect of digital at the same time. I know a number of roboticists and I am full of wonder, trepidation and fear at what robots can now do. I am excited by the potential of artificial intelligence to help us mere humans be more effective in what we do, but I am nervous that technology is and will continue to take jobs of brain as well as brawn and will continue to hollow out the labour market. But I am also one who thinks that the dystopian future is a choice and that we can chase after a more utopian one in the labour market. There will be enough work, but in terms of the effect on unemployment the key will be to have in any particular geography the right mix of the supply and demand of skills to service the labour market.

I was interested in the publication a couple of weeks ago by Professor Lynda Gratton, professor of economics at the London Business School, and a colleague who is a professor of economics at Oxford, of a book entitled The 100-Year Life. In combination with the debate around the effect of technology, it is significant to start thinking about the fact that in this country, a child born today has a more than 50% chance of living to 105. What that means is that a child starting school in September is likely to continue in work until the turn of the century, because there is no way that we will be able to finance the long retirements that many of us understood as being the promise when we went to school: work hard, get a decent qualification, go to a good university, choose a career, get a final salary pension scheme, get a 25-year mortgage, pay it off, retire early and look after our kids—great. That is clearly over.