My Lords, I am glad to have the opportunity to speak in support of Amendment 85 in particular, to which I have added my name.
We had a long debate on the first day of Committee about issues relating to the economy of the future, the new industrial landscape and the overwhelming need to ensure that workers have the skills necessary for the jobs of the future, and that workers who will have to transition from their current employment are given the opportunity to reskill in order to do so. In her response, the Minister was very helpful in assuring us of the Government’s recognition of those priorities, the important role that they will play in future and how they will need to form part of the background—if I can put it that way—to local skills improvement plans.
However, as many others have said already, we do not yet join up the dots in this Bill. We do not respond to the recommendations of the Green Jobs Taskforce, which were just highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, nor those of the Climate Change Committee, which in its recent progress report to Parliament recommended that the Government
“develop a strategy for a Net Zero workforce that ensures a just transition for workers transitioning from high-carbon to … climate-resilient jobs”
and
“integrates relevant skills into the UK’s education framework”.
We do not see the way in which that will be done; nor, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, do we see how we can ensure that local skills improvement plans look to the future, not just the present. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, we do not see how they fit in or how to ensure that national priorities are understood and integrated into those plans in locally relevant ways.
The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, spoke about the ecosystem for skills and post-16 education and training. I do not think that we can get the ecosystem right unless we ensure that the national priorities—they are accepted by the Government in the 10-point plan, in all their documentation and in the words of Ministers all the time—have a proper way of filtering down, not by framing it as “a man in Whitehall knows best” and dictating what happens at local level but by providing a coherent national framework in which the essentially local work that takes account of place, as we spoke about last week, can be undertaken.
I very much hope that the Minister will understand our need for mechanisms in the Bill to ensure that this national framework is clearly in place, and that it will support and underpin the work that is done at the local level.
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