My Lords, I will speak to all three amendments. In different ways and on different aspects, they set out a clear path for the Government to address some significant issues that, unfortunately, are not covered in the main text of the Bill at present.
In passing, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, on his experience of public transport: welcome to everywhere that is not London. It is not just that there are no buses in rural areas outside London; he should try the urban areas.
At the moment, there are fundamental problems with how we deliver education to potential parents on how they might best help their children to develop and grow. There are also problems with delivering education in our formal education system for children and in our adult education and further learning courses and opportunities that are available to people not only immediately after leaving the school system but in later life. The noble Baroness, Lady Blower, made that point powerfully, and I will reinforce it: in a rapidly changing technological society, what you might describe
as in-course training is vital, even for people like me, to discover how to use the latest devices properly and effectively. That is very much the case for those who come out of the education system with a limited level of skills, and maybe without even having the resilience and skills to learn and develop themselves without substantial help and assistance.
So we have a ladder: literacy is certainly an issue in the absolutely crude sense of the word—whether people can read and write—but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, pointed out, it is a question not just of that but of being able to use that process to inform and educate yourself, to learn from what people present and give to you. That shortage spills into an inability or failure, at the end of your school career, to get magic pieces of paper that are the doors to routes to acquiring skills and qualifications. Of course, that failure means that there is an inability to get and hold high-value, high-quality jobs.
The consequence for the individual is, clearly and very often, a waste of their potential, a lack of fulfilment and, sometimes, an alienation from wider society. But the impact for the community is also negative, and the impact for our country and economy is very negative indeed. I say to the Government that, for levelling up to be successful, there has to be more economic growth in areas that are not flourishing at the moment.
To best spend taxpayers’ money on levelling up, however and wherever that tax is collected, it needs to go to areas that need the growth and help. It is exactly those areas where there is that deficiency in skills and professional qualifications, and where it is difficult to recruit people. That means that we are not getting the productivity growth in the industries and geographies where they are most needed. For instance, we get high economic growth in London and the south-east but not in the north-east of England. Unfortunately, all of these are connected in a line that starts with the process of how children grow and flourish in our education and training system.
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We know that, to get that growth and development, we need to recruit highly skilled people in large numbers, so I say to the Minister that if we want to have a flourishing green economy, we need many more engineers and people with the skills necessary to develop the industry right across the country. If we want to have a flourishing service sector in the broadest sense, we need many more doctors and many more nurses. Incidentally, I saw an article in the evening newspaper yesterday which said that we are running out of judges, and the Ministry of Justice has just appointed an extra 140 judges—part time, of course—with a view to dealing with the backlog of criminal cases. Indeed, I quite often read reports about how this or that industry needs so many tens of thousands of people with special skills if it is to flourish. However, those people do not exist. Unless we get the issues set out in these amendments clearly in focus in the Bill, as they should be, and clearly and strongly projected forward by the Government, as they should be, it is impossible to see how the various industries and regions which are clamouring for skilled people will ever be able to fulfil their targets to achieve their objectives.
I therefore strongly ask the Minister to please consider these amendments and the thought behind them carefully, and give us some hope that the Government recognise the problem, as well as the opportunity of the wasted talent being brought into focus and use. I hope she will give us a positive answer.