HC Deb 05 April 1962 vol 657 cc811-20

Motion made and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Chichester-Clark.]

11.33 p.m.

Mr. Kenneth Lewis (Rutland and Stamford)

The subject of this short debate is certainly less complicated than the last one, thank goodness. I think that it follows well upon the debate we had earlier today on the universities, though I do think, looking round the House, that this debate will be anything like so contentious.

I want to concentrate mainly on the improvement of apprentice training. However many scientists we may turn out from the universities, if we are deficient in craftsmen the national productive effort is certainly bound to suffer. The subject of this debate may be a minnow compared with the big fish of the Budget which we shall discuss next week, yet, whatever financial considerations or dispositions he may make, the Chancellor will be confounded in confusion, and so shall we, if industry lacks the skill in both quality and quantity.

Training in both management and the skilled trades is mainly a job for industry. In my view, it is not a subject where the Government should undertake large-scale interference or expenditure. Nevertheless, the Government do, and should, co-operate and, if necessary, prod industry.

In management, there are several organisations which do a good job. The Administrative Staff College makes a useful contribution. Recently, I heard that Birmingham University was pioneering a new emphasis on the study of certain aspects of modern management in its social studies faculty, and I think that it is to be congratulated on doing that. Beyond this, however, there is, I think, a strong case for setting up a post-graduate school of business on the lines of the Harvard school in the United States, and we could probably learn from some of the mistakes which have been made there.

The Institute of Marketing and Sales Management organises a series of worthwhile courses in selling. Again, a good case can be made for expansion here. It would probably pay off in exports if some tuition were given to people in industry, salesmen especially, on how to sell abroad. In general commerce and distribution, there is a great lack of organised training. Too much of the "Go as you please, and everything will come out in the wash" attitude prevails, and anything which my hon. Friend can do would be helpful in this direction.

What of apprentice training itself? This is the main theme of the debate. We have, of course, made a good deal of progress in recent years. I doubt, however, that we shall have gone fast enough. In the years from 1950 to 1958, the average number of boys entering apprenticeship was 93,000, or 35 per cent. of those entering employment. In I960, the number went up to 103,000, or 36 per cent. of those entering employment. In 1961, it rose again to 115,000, or 38 per cent. of those entering employment. In addition, there were, last year, 46,000 who were partially trained, most of them semi-skilled. We are training 22,000 more apprentices now than we were during the period 1950–58, and in 1961 we had 12,000 more in training than in 1960, an increase of 11 per cent.

A certain amount of progress has been made. However, the increased numbers are out of a very large increase in the pool available. It should be pointed out that 1962 is the peak year of the bulge. We must, therefore, in this year go forward not at a shuffle but at a stride. In this connection, perhaps the Minister will say what he thinks the prospects are for summer leavers.

In the whole matter of industrial training, we cannot afford to fall behind our competitors. In 1954, when the West Germans had a boom year of school leavers, almost half of their school leavers were trained in one way or another, most of them in skilled apprenticeships. Since then, the bulge in Western Germany has gone rapidly down. This should give us an opportunity to train nearer to the numbers in Western Germany. In fact, the West Germans are still ahead of us. I hope that, during the next year or two, we shall make a serious effort to catch up. Our target for apprentice training should be not 115,000 a year but as near as we can get to 150,000.

Productivity is skill equalising the machine, plus the skill to work the machine. The Industrial Training Council, which has the full support of my hon. Friend's Ministry, has undoubtedly been trying to hammer home the need for increased skill. The Council has done an excellent job through its advisory services, apprentice training centre courses, and its grants for group training. In this connection we should pay a tribute to the work of Lord McCorquo-dale, who was for two and a half years the first chairman, and also to the work of his successor. But is the work of the Council or its potential being exploited with sufficient energy? Every small manufacturing management should look at its own needs and see whether those needs can be met by the Industrial Training Council.

I have one criticism of the courses run by the Industrial Training Council for managements. I have no doubt that they are good courses, but I notice that they cost 45 guineas for four days. This seems to me a bit steep and it might deter some of the smaller firms. I do not think that a training course requires either Savoy treatment or Savoy prices and I hope that this will be looked into.

I said at the outset that the job of apprenticeship training was one for industry and not for the Government. Many bodies—employers' organisations, trade unions and industrial welfare societies—have contributed in recent years to an improvement in industrial training. During the last two or three years we have seen a new development in this connection through the educational authorities. These authorities have taken a hand in training by providing first-year courses in technical colleges, linked with local firms. This scheme should be expanded. Too few technical colleges have initiated such courses. These courses are good for the boys and are also helpful to many small firms which can use these boys. More of these courses are wanted.

Government training centres have also offered a fine standard of training. Some of our industries should copy the kind of course that is provided at these centres. I understand, however, that Government training centres are looked upon by the Ministry as being temporary. They are here for the bulge years. No fees are charged for the one-year course. I do not want to see the Government entering upon apprenticeship training permanently and on a large scale, but I wonder whether centres could not be expanded in scope, at any rate for a year or two, perhaps by a link-up with firms to whom fees would be charged for training.

I was a labour relations officer in a large firm many years ago and I was, therefore, concerned with apprentice training. We had a good school, but two things impressed me even twenty years ago. The first was that a boy could quite reasonably have been trained in a year less. Four years seems to me quite adequate for the training of an apprentice. The now accepted period of five years' training has been with us a long time. Methods have been improved since that period was fixed, and it was fixed at a time of heavy unemployment when the general view was taken that the longer the stay the surer the job.

I understand that both unions and managements have been considering this matter. I hope that they will stop procrastinating and that something will be done about reducing the period from five years to four. I should also like the Minister to use his influence to remove restrictions on the age at which boys enter apprenticeship. It can be quite disastrous for a young boy who has the ability to become a craftsman if he is barred because he is marginally beyond an arbitrarily fixed age of entry. Nobody tells a man when he should start to become a doctor, and I think that it is quite wrong that there should be a fixed age limit of 16. Consideration should be given to allowing at least a little scope in that direction. I should like to ask the Minister to consider what can be done to enable boys who are living in remote areas, where there are few opportunities to take up apprenticeships, to work outside their areas so that they can gain the skill which they want.

On quality and quantity of training, can we be satisfied that the training of our apprentices is up to standard? In Government training centres it is good. In our technical colleges there is too little of it but, again, it is good. In the best of our larger firms I think it is very good, but in many of the large firms and in most of the small firms too often the apprentice does too much labouring and too little learning. I wish that employers and trade unions would get together and agree on standards. They might even consider giving awards to the firms which maintain or improve upon the standards and use the Industrial Training Council in other directions.

We want quantity and we need quality. There is a view that the small firms are not doing enough in training in skill. There is some truth in this, and it would be fine if in the next year or two we could interest more and more small firms in making use of group training schemes that are offered.

But I do not think that some of the large firms are doing all that they might. I understand that Metro-Vickers trains apprentices two-thirds above its own normal needs. It does this because it takes the view that good trained men are the best advertisement for the company. Doubtless there are other firms which take the same line, but there are too many of our larger firms which bring in only a sufficient number of apprentices for their own needs.

In matching the need for industrial training with the expansion of our industrial effort which we must have, the larger industries have a special responsibility. Indeed, they have a national obligation, particularly those firms which are given Government contracts. This is a very wide field, and it may be that the Ministry would consider bringing pressure to bear upon those firms to which it gives a good deal of business.

There is, I think, some hope that in the next year or two we shall make a further advance. If it is to be an advance that will match our needs, it must be a quicker advance than we have made in the last two or three years.

I hope that this modest debate and contribution will help firms outside to understand that we in this House have a great interest in this matter. We believe not only that free enterprise should be free but that it must be enterprising. Above all, it must be more enterprising in training.

11.49 p.m.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour (Mr. Alan Green)

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Stamford (Mr. K. Lewis) on raising this subject. He has called it a modest debate, and I see why he says that. But I agree very much with him that training for skill is a vitally important subject. There is hardly a more important one, because the skill of our people must make up for the lack of gold mines or oil wells in our soil. This is really the crux of the matter. The continuing prosperity of our country depends to a very large extent on the increase we can get in our skills.

We have to import so much that we can only live if we process cleverly what we import. As our industrial activity increases, so necessarily must our skill increase. We can therefore only pay our way if we have more skill. I agree also with my hon. Friend that we have to compete with other markets, particularly in this regard. We must measure ourselves not by our own—I hope not complacent—standards, but by other people's standards too. If the West Germans or the Russians or the Americans are going ahead in this field, then we must make sure that we can catch them up.

This is particularly true because the industrial revolution continues. New skills as well as the re-deployment of old skills are a necessary feature of our activity. I agree that we must train more people and teach them to higher degrees of skill. These are our two tasks.

The need to match these tasks is clearly seen when we remember that since the War we have never been able to catch up with the demand for skilled workers. Our expansion has been consistently held up by shortages of skilled labour. This is true even in those parts of the country where unemployment is above the average. Last December, for example—and that is not the best time of the year for employment—there were ten vacancies for machine tool setters—a job requiring a high degree of skill—for every one unemployed. The relation of demand to supply was 10–1 in that trade. For every unemployed turner, there were eight vacancies. And one could give many other examples.

We are thus faced with a consistently changing industrial structure calling for ever-increasing numbers of skilled workers. I must hand this to my hon. Friend he has pin-pointed some of the very important aspects of the subject. I do not believe that I can go into all of them in detail but I must obviously make for the main point he made. It is not original to say that the bulge in the number of school leavers, which reaches its peak this year, is not so much a problem but an opportunity to industry to make good this shortage of skilled labour. The only way it can be done is by increasing the number trained.

My hon. Friend gave the figures, and I do not quarrel with them. He has them pretty well right. But there are a number of additional points to be made. In addition to the figures he has given, it is a fact that more of these young people every year stay on beyond the minimum school leaving age of 15. That is a valid point. They are getting more education before they think of moving into industry. This is the opportunity for industry to train these children to higher levels of skill. That, too, is an important point.

It is not always realised that the field from which one draws apprentices is now perhaps much wider than the mere age of 15. I agree that we would like to see a real acceptance of the fact that a boy or girl can enter an apprenticeship at a later age if he or she has stayed on at school for an extra year or two. We want this to be generally and nationally agreed. For every five boys suitable for apprenticeship training who left school last year there will be six this year. If we maintain even the improvement we got last year, we shall have well over 120,000 boys entering apprenticeship training this year. My hon. Friend put the figure at 150,000.

Mr. K. Lewis

I said towards 150,000.

Mr. Green

Of course, I should like to see it 150,000. Last year we collected figures to cover more than the recognised apprenticeship training because it would be a great mistake to suppose that only those young people who in fact are craft apprentices get real training in industry or commerce. There are more concerned than those. There are, for example, a number of learnerships in the textile trade. There are a number of other efforts made to train young people outside the traditional forms of apprenticeship training. It is worthwhile emphasising that.

I have a few figures which I hope my hon. Friend will find of interest. In 1961 37.9 per cent.—I apologise for the percentages—of boys entering employment got apprenticeships, but a further 15.2 per cent. entered jobs providing training for a year or more. Those were for the most part planned training in various industrial operations. This is sometimes called operative training. That is not all. Many boys entered professional employment and a large number went into clerical employment, some of which certainly provides useful training. If we add all these categories together, we find that getting on for two-thirds go into employment where training is provided.

This is important because in these days the picture is rather projected of all young people preferring to go in for the dead-end job. I do not think that is true. Two-thirds, according to our records, go in for some training. I do not think that the lure of the quick penny or the brightly-lit cafe is as great as it is made out to be.

We are not satisfied that we have gone as far as we can in this matter. Nor is industry satisfied that we have reached a ceiling of endeavour in training. We all know that we can still do more.

In this context I particularly pay tribute to the I.T.C., which my hon. Friend mentioned. It has already done a great deal. All these arrangements take a little time to get under way, and this is no exception, but it is playing an increasing part, particularly in giving advice to firms on how to improve their methods of training and in encouraging group apprenticeship training schemes. Group apprenticeship training schemes are difficult in many ways, and one can understand why, but certainly in several areas, for example, in mid-Tyne, they can be said to have got off the ground and to be making progress.

Again, in looking at training arrangements one would make a mistake if one expected spectacular progress on any one point. We are not after headlines. We want better training for these young people. I do not for one moment pretend that what we are trying to do to secure better training is the best that anybody could possibly devise. But there is within the Ministry of Labour, certainly, and within industry certainly, both from the employers' side and from the trade union side, an urgent appreciation of the need to secure more training for more people of a better standard and content. This appreciation is growing and it only remains to consider whether we have quite the best methods.

I cannot comment at this moment on the methods of training for management, but I hope that my hon. Friend will not mind me correcting one slip of the tongue he made. My understanding is that the I.T.C. instructor training courses, while they may cost forty-five guineas, are for fourteen days and not for four days, which makes the cost more commensurate with the content. It is certainly not on the Ritz or Savoy standard. It is a down to earth and realistic standard.

The question was properly raised whether at the end of a period of training there should not be some form of test of competence. This is being considered. It is not the easiest thing to arrange. It is fairly easy to have a paper examination at the end of a period of training and say, "If you hold that piece of paper it makes you a better craftsman", but I am not sure that this would mean anything. There certainly is a case for a test of competence, but we are still left with the problem of deciding just what should be the test. This is not so simple.

We must, at any rate in the first stage, make clearly available to all those who do training, information about the standards reached and the methods used by those who are agreed to be the best trainers. This is the first thing to do. We have to spread as swiftly and as widely and as competently as we can information about the best methods. Having spread that information, we must try to ensure that those who do not recognise the best are encouraged to recognise it. This is perhaps the best way in which we can go about it.

I assure my hon. Friend that the Minister is actively considering the length of training. We are concerned to ensure that an unnecessary period is not spent on learning a traditional skill when new methods of teaching that skill may easily shorten the period required for training. We are very concerned about this. Because we are concerned, we are having direct talks with the major industries who train apprentices. We hope and believe that, with their agreement and support, we shall make some progress.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at jour minutes past Twelve o'clock.