Lifelong Learning (Paid Study Time) (Hansard, 8 November 2000)

§ Mr. David Chaytor (Bury, North)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to establish an entitlement to a national minimum time allowance for training and educational purposes for people in employment. It is particularly appropriate, in view of the report published a few days ago by the National Advisory Council for Education and Training Targets, that I have the opportunity to present my Bill. The report paints an interesting picture of the level of skills in the United Kingdom and, in particular, compares them with the skills of our major competitor countries. In light of the Chancellor's pre-Budget statement and the emphasis that he placed on raising productivity levels in British industry, it is relevant that my small Bill contains a proposal that would take a small but significant step towards achieving those higher levels.

During the past three years, the Government have significantly improved post-16 education and training in the UK. No Government in my lifetime—or, I would argue, this century—have put as much emphasis on the importance of post-16 education and training, lifelong learning, vocational training and retraining, as the current one. Following the important commissioning of the reports by Professor Fryer and Baroness Kennedy; the publication of the Green Paper "The Learning Age" and the White Paper "Learning to Succeed"; the measures contained in the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998, which restored the important right of young workers to have day release once a week; and, more recently, the Learning and Skills Bill, which consolidates the multifarious streams of funding for post-16 education and training, we now have a framework for the delivery of lifelong learning that we have never had before. The two major colleges in my constituency have certainly benefited from the record investment that is being put into further education and vocational training.

However, in welcoming the importance that is now being attached to lifelong learning and the new investment in it, we must not underestimate the scale of the problem of a work force who are significantly less well trained and well qualified than our major competitors. That is why our productivity levels compare poorly with those of France, Germany, Japan, the United States and, indeed, many south-east Asian countries, and why we cannot shake off the problem of skills gaps and skills shortages.

The recent report by Sir Claus Moser suggested that 20 per cent. of the adult work force in the UK have serious literacy and numeracy problems. In Britain, fewer than half of all adult workers have qualified at national vocational qualification level 3 or above. In Germany, it is almost two thirds. In Britain, one quarter of workers do not have a single level 2 qualification. Let me clarify: that does not mean a full NVQ level 2, or five GCSEs at grades A to C; it means a single component of those level 2 qualifications—a single GCSE or a single NVQ2 module. Among older workers, the problem is more serious: one fifth of workers aged more than 50 have no formal qualifications at all and almost two fifths do not have a single qualification at level 2.

We must avoid the tendency to assume that those without specific job qualifications or general educational qualifications are inadequate in their jobs. However, 348 the reality is that the rapidly changing labour market brought about by the impact of new technology and globalisation means that the number of people without formal qualifications and the number of jobs available requiring only very low-level skills are diminishing day by day. Therefore, the skills level of the labour force is not only an issue of productivity and competitiveness, but one of economic survival for the unskilled and their families. I would argue that a national minimum entitlement to training will, in time, be seen to be of equal importance to the national minimum wage.

The problem in Britain is not necessarily that we do not invest enough in vocational education, but that we do not get the best return for the money that we do invest. The most recent survey indicated that British industry provided 49 million days of training annually, at a cost of more than £10 billion. However, the distribution of that training is heavily skewed in two directions. First, larger firms are understandably better than smaller ones: the skill needs in Britain survey showed that more than 90 per cent. of firms with more than 200 employees provided on-the-job training, whereas only 20 per cent. of firms with fewer than 25 employees did so.

Secondly, the lion's share of training is taken by graduates and equivalent professionals. The recent labour force survey showed that almost 20 per cent. of those with level 4 qualifications had benefited from training within the previous four weeks, compared with little more than 5 per cent. of workers classified as "operatives". Therefore, those unskilled and semi-skilled workers who, as schoolchildren, were victims of a divisive and selective system of education find that, in the workplace, they are still at a disadvantage in terms of the training opportunities available. Training opportunities tend to be allocated to the cause of increasing the skills of those who already have higher levels of skill, at the expense of the unskilled and semi-skilled.

Other countries do things differently. Our major competitors realise that, these days, no nation that wants to prosper in the knowledge-driven economy can afford to be so casual or so elitist about the development of technical skills as the United Kingdom has been in the past. Let us remember that British industry invests more than £10 billion in approximately 49 million training days a year—an average of about 2 days for every adult of working age. Yet, despite that average allocation, millions of our workers have no access to training of any sort.

Many of our major competitors ensure that all workers benefit from training opportunities by establishing a national minimum allocation of training hours, or a right to paid leave for training purposes. Such schemes exist in Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, France, Italy, Belgium and Greece. In the United Kingdom, where 20 per cent. of adult workers struggle with basic literacy and numeracy and there are fewer than two thirds the number of workers with higher technical qualifications that there are in Germany, and bearing in mind my right hon. Friend the Chancellor's call for higher productivity in his pre-Budget statement today, there is a powerful argument in favour of introducing a basic entitlement to training for everyone.

Quality and quantity of vocational training in Britain is not a new cause of concern: it was identified as a serious national weakness more than 100 years ago by a royal commission and it has been the subject of continuous debate ever since. The publication of the "Aiming Higher" report by the national advisory council reinforces the 349 message about the gap between skills in Britain and skills in our major competitive countries. Yet structures that had been patiently built up in the post-war period—industrial training boards, day release for young workers and the training levy—were demolished in the 1980s, along with the remnants of the old apprenticeship system. I am proud that the Labour Government are now developing a modern system of vocational training that will significantly increase opportunities for millions of young people in this country.

The thrust of the Government's new initiatives is, to a large extent, focused on expanding the supply of training, but I would argue that the British problem is not primarily a lack of supply, nor a shortage of training in aggregate terms. However, there is a distortion in the demand for training, and a skewed distribution of training that serves to increase the skill of the already skilled and to neglect the needs of the unskilled. The longer that happens, the wider our skills gap will be.

If we want seriously to tackle the problems of the low level of skills in British industry, the skills gap and the skills shortages, we must approach the problem from the demand side of the equation. That is why I believe that the establishment of a national training entitlement—building on the success of the national minimum wage—which is expressed in terms of an annual minimum number of hours of paid training time for every individual in employment is the most effective way of ensuring that the opportunities opened up by the Government's massive new investment in lifelong learning will be available to people in all walks of life. There will be vocational training for the many, not only for the few.

The national minimum wage established the right to earn. The national training entitlement would establish the right to learn. I commend the Bill to the House.