Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

It is always interesting to follow the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart), but I will curtail my comments, as I hope to be in the Chamber tomorrow night supporting him when he speaks about the Humber bridge, which is in my constituency. A few weeks ago the nation's entire media seemed to descend upon my constituency to follow the protests and the wildcat walkouts at Lindsey oil refinery. The situation was caused mainly by a sense of injustice and anger from unemployed construction engineering workers who saw people being brought in from Italy. They felt that they had the skills and the training to do the jobs on that construction project at the refinery, and what was happening seemed unfair to them. Because of that situation, I want to talk about some aspects of the Bill that relate to apprenticeships and training as they impact on my constituency. I have described the situation of increasing unemployment, of workers being brought in from elsewhere and of a potentially toxic skills gap. If we get the Bill right, it will provide us with an opportunity to stop such protests and strikes escalating in the future. One thing struck me about the public response in my area to the walk-outs. People would come up to me and say, ““Look, Shona, why don't the Government bring back apprenticeships?”” I am probably not the only Labour Member to have heard such comments, because many people have not realised that the number of apprenticeships has increased in recent years. The people making those comments probably remember past mass apprenticeship programmes in the nationalised industries; I am thinking, for example, of the Central Electricity Generating Board, which trained thousands of apprentices. However, in the '80s and '90s, there was a decline in construction and UK manufacturing. Added to the mix were the privatisations and the fragmentation of the markets involved. That led to a decline in the number of companies investing in apprenticeships. Yes, there has been a change in recent years, and I welcome it. I have heard snide comments tonight about the value of apprenticeships, but in my area people are doing high-quality apprenticeship training—four-year courses in engineering, for example. In North East Lincolnshire and North Lincolnshire, the two local authorities covered by my constituency, there are probably nearly 500 young people doing engineering and construction apprenticeships. They are just the people we need, and they will work on huge engineering projects such as the hydrodesulphurisation project at Lindsey oil refinery. As was highlighted by the protests, however, there is a problem. The current itinerant work force, who tour the country working on construction projects and what are called the ““shutdowns”” in the refinery sector, are ageing. A lot of them did their apprenticeships in the nationalised industries; after that, apprenticeships withered because of economic downturns. Young people are coming through, but we have a gap in the middle. A representative from one of the oil refineries in my area told me that there will be an estimated shortage of 17,000 jobs in the engineering and construction sectors alone. Furthermore, earlier we heard my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton, South (Ms Taylor) talk about the gap in the chemical industries sector. We have to address such problems. Nobody today has really talked about the situation: previous generations who have gone through the system are coming to retirement, youngsters are coming through, but there is a gap in the middle. How will we address it? As we saw at Lindsey oil refinery, one way to address it is to bring in people from Italy; in the past, someone from another part of the UK would have been brought in. A few years back, there was similar upset when people from Teesside were brought in to work in the area. People in Grimsby, Cleethorpes and Immingham asked why the jobs did not go to local people. We have to look at how we fill the gap. There could be merit in having apprenticeships for older people, and not only for those of a younger age, to try to reskill people to meet the skills gap in engineering and construction in my constituency. When I talk to employers in my area about skills training and the young people coming through, they say that apart from wanting people to be literate and numerate and to have the high-tech skills that virtually everybody from the age of five seems to have these days when it comes to computers, they want an emphasis on what could be termed ““softer”” skills, by which they mean how people behave in the workplace—for example, their punctuality, attitude and teamwork, which many employers feel is lacking because of the education and training systems. All the stuff in the Bill that we have considered is about hard skills such as those in engineering—there is not much about how to integrate into a workplace, which employers say will be essential. A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit a new academy in my constituency, Oasis academy in Immingham, and what I saw there was quite inspirational. Immingham is only a couple of miles away from Killingholme, where Lindsey oil refinery is located. The academy was a marvellous blend of the academic and the vocational. It had car workshops and small engineering workshops. The head teacher placed equal emphasis on the academic and the vocational. I hope that the careers advice in that school will be very strong because of the ethos of its principal in valuing the vocational within an educational setting. We have to do that all the way through the system. We cannot just suddenly say to someone aged 16, ““Here is some careers advice, and by the way apprenticeships are a really good thing to do.”” I have found that there is a resistance to apprenticeships, particularly in sectors such as engineering. People see those as dirty jobs; they do not value them and there is a resistance to going into them, despite the phenomenal work that has been done in my area by the Humberside Engineering Training Association, among others. I would like Ministers to take on board the fact that we must start valuing the vocational at a much earlier stage in the education system and seriously look at how we deal with the skills gap while we wait for these young apprentices to come through and take on the big construction and engineering projects in future.