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8.8 pm
Mr. Ted Rowlands (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney): Earlier, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) referred to the phrase "line to take" that appeared in a document. I have a feeling that the Secretary of State has made a speech using the line to take on stakeholders issued by Conservative central office. I think that what we have heard will become a familiar refrain. I do not know in which society or world the right hon. Lady is living, but she has not described the world or community that I represent.
I shall tell the right hon. Lady a fact of life over the past 15 years: the Government believe that the frontiers of the state should be pushed back, but the state has never been more intrusive in people's lives. More people than ever before in post-war Britain are dependent on the state
because of the cumulative effect of Government policy. The state intrudes into people's lives because they have had to become more dependent on it because of rising unemployment and growing dependency on benefits. The Secretary of State may talk about an enterprising society and choice, but as a result of Government policy an increasing number of my constituents have been forced into a new dependency culture that they do not like and did not want.
I should have hoped that, if nothing else, there could be a basic consensus on the subject of training. I think that hon. Members on both sides of the House agree that training and skills will be vital to competitiveness. In a world of global trade and transfer of production, one factor that national Governments can still influence, alter and support is skills training. As that issue is crucial, we should analyse what the Government have or have not done about it.
I have been a strong supporter for a considerable time of training programmes in my constituency produced by Ministers and a succession of Secretaries of State for Wales. I promoted and supported modern manufacturing schemes introduced by successive Secretaries of State including the right hon. Lady's immediate predecessor, the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood). The right hon. Gentleman came and supported the sort of schemes that we have been backing in Merthyr.
Over the past 15 or 20 years, there has been a bewildering series of changes in the programmes, which have been set up and then closed. We do not believe in the pick-and-mix approach described by the Secretary of State. The changes have often been driven by Budget changes from one year to the next. Some years a lot of money has been thrown at training programmes, and in other years programmes have been cut, almost overnight. Those changes have created in many people, particularly young people, resentment towards training--they feel alienated. Many people, particularly young people, now take a cynical approach towards the schemes and no longer believe in training. That development, which has been caused partly by the chops and changes made to training programmes over the years, is worrying and must be overcome.
One in five school leavers in Mid Glamorgan cannot be accounted for: they are not involved in training or further education; they do not collect the dole and they do not claim benefit. They have simply disappeared from the system. One in five school leavers in Mid Glamorgan no longer have any connection with the system: they are not scrounging or claiming benefits and they are not following training programmes. I suspect that that large and worrying core of school leavers will provide the basis for future problems and concerns in our society.
That worrying core of school leavers has been created partly because they no longer believe that community and Government training programmes will meet their needs, and who can blame them? Surely the Secretary of State knows that community action provided one of the bridges between welfare and work. I should have thought that there would be a consensus on the need to build bridges and make the connection between welfare and work. But the community action programme, which was one of those bridges, was blown up overnight. Despite the references
in the leaked document to the quality, usefulness and popularity of some of the community action programmes, that bridge will now be blown up.
The community action programme is to be blown up without any assessment of the consequences. I asked the Secretary of State for Wales--the Welsh Office has responsibility for training in Wales--to tell me about the community action programmes. I received a written answer to my question stating that he did not know. The Welsh Office does not know about the programmes that it has suddenly decided to close--it does not have a list or any idea of the programmes' character. In a written answer the Welsh Office said that the information was not available centrally. Presumably, the Secretary of State sat at the Cabinet table and nodded through the closure of the community action programmes without any knowledge or detailed understanding of them.
Many of the people who have been involved in the community action programmes over the years have felt that they were not always good, did not offer much training and were, in some cases, half-baked, but they felt that the programmes provided a necessary link to work. The people involved in the community action programme are those least likely to obtain employment. The Government used falling unemployment as their basic excuse for closing the programme.
I am worried that those involved in the programme will not obtain employment. They are people with special needs and less ability and aptitude than others; such people require the community action programme as they will not automatically gain maximum benefit from the improvement in local employment prospects. They are the victims and are less likely than others to obtain jobs. The right hon. Lady and the Government have closed one of the programmes that provided a bridge between welfare and work.
Has the Secretary of State followed what has happened to the training for work changes that have been implemented and the introduction of the outcome-related schemes? Have the right hon. Lady or Ministers tried to find out what is happening in relation to training for work? It has increasingly turned out to be nothing more than an employment subsidy. I am not necessarily against employment subsidies, but it seems strange for the Government to propose them. Training programmes have shrunk and almost disappeared, and most training providers are paid to move people into employment as quickly as possible, irrespective of the quality or character of the job and irrespective of the potential employee's training or vocation.
I do not know whether my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Meacher) will quote from the Coopers and Lybrand report on the programmes, which spelt out the point that I just made. On the Government's changes to the training for work programme, the report states:
That is the one goal that the training for work programme is not achieving--it is not training a trainee so that he or she has the potential for employment. In most cases, it moves people into work as quickly as possible, irrespective of their skills or training. The programme might sound like a good idea--no one is against it--but it is not a training programme. It is an employment
subsidy. There may be a case for employment subsidies, but the programme is not a training scheme.
How can we square that approach with the desire to lift skills and achieve targets for NVQ3 and NVQ4? The Secretary of State might not know about it and there is no Welsh Office Minister present, but only this week a new report on the 1994 Welsh training and education survey was published. It sets up targets for NVQ3 and NVQ4 to be achieved by the year 2000. The aim is that 60 per cent. of people in Wales should achieve NVQ3 by the end of the century. The figures show that at present only 39 per cent. are achieving that goal. How does the right hon. Lady think that the targets will be achieved when the training for work programme and many other skills and training programmes are diminishing?
In the county of Mid Glamorgan, a part of which I represent, only 42 per cent. of men and 29 per cent. of women have the equivalent of NVQ3 qualifications. We are supposed to reach 60 per cent. by the year 2000. How will that target be achieved in four years? What method and approach will achieve such levels of skills in four years, enabling us to make a leap of the magnitude that the targets require?
We are supposed to achieve a target of 30 per cent. at NVQ4 by the year 2000. At the moment, Mid Glamorgan achieves only 18 per cent. How is that skills gap to be crossed? How will the leap to those standards be achieved?
My worry is that that lot, the Conservative Government, are like Soviet commissar planners. They announce targets and believe that somehow they will be achieved. If one announced Soviet production, it was reality. Similarly, it appears that if one announces training targets for the year 2000, they will happen irrespective of anything else.
I must tell the Secretary of State and her Ministers that the skills and training element of many training, training for work and other programmes is shrinking. I understand that the only target is to get people into jobs irrespective of how dead-end those jobs are and irrespective of what qualifications those people obtain in the process, what needs are met and what training is associated with that.
How will those targets be reached by the year 2000? They are firm, strong, powerful commitments made by the Government. I do not believe that in many cases the programmes that they offer and deliver in the communities that I represent will achieve that type of target. We have a common aim, a common purpose, a consensus in those terms, but I do not believe that the methods that have been adopted, especially the fundamental changes that have occurred in training for work programmes, are likely to achieve such targets.
My hon. Friend the Member for Brightside spoke about the skills audit. We have one as a result of the Welsh training and education survey. The other thing that the survey shows is that, whereas NVQ3s and similar levels of training are achieved by 50 per cent. of employees in the public sector, only 30 per cent. of employees in the private sector achieve them. The old-fashioned public sector has somehow maintained, and tried to pay for and support, training standards.
For all the Secretary of State's passionate support for enterprise and the private sector, which we all support, according to the survey only 30 per cent. of private sector employees are achieving NVQ3s, as opposed to 50 per
cent. in the public sector. A gender gap has opened up and now a gap has opened up in relation to whether one works in the public or the private sector.
I am not being condemnatory. I am not being censorious about private companies and private enterprise. However, the right hon. Lady should know that, in the past 15 to 20 years, in the private sector, people have regarded training as a cost that must be cut, not an investment that must be made. That is the fundamental, simple, basic thing that has occurred.
The Secretary of State may not like to hear talk about stakeholders, and so on, but somehow those attitudes must change, not among employees but among those who employ. Why is it that figures of the type revealed in the survey demonstrate the low skills in much of the private sector in Welsh economic, industrial and employment life?
I do not know which companies Conservative Members represent, but in the 1980s, with the requirement for labour flexibility, under the pressure to achieve the lower costs that were essential for economic growth, which the Secretary of State mentioned, the first thing that went was training. Training was abandoned furthest and fastest by many employers. I understand the reasons, given the struggles and the background against which they worked. They cut training almost as though it were a cost, and did not regard it as an investment.
Somehow, a combination of Government and companies must restore the fundamental principle that training is an investment, not a cost. Whether one likes it or not, companies in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Germany--western European companies and Asian companies--believe that training is an investment, not a cost. Until, between Government and companies, we turn the United Kingdom attitude around and decide that training is an investment, not a cost, we shall not achieve the targets and the levels of training and skills that I hope that we have a common cause to achieve. I must tell the Secretary of State that, given the figures, those surveys that have been produced--at least in Welsh terms, in the communities that I represent--demonstrate that we must do something more and different from that which has been offered to us by the Secretary of State's speech.
We have transferred the burden of costs from companies to the state. It is curious that the cost of state financing of training has continually increased. Responsibilities and costs that were borne by companies in the early days have been transferred through unemployment, and through state and training and enterprise council training schemes, and so on, to the state.
"training providers cannot actually create job opportunities but they can create training opportunities which are likely to improve a trainee's future employment potential."
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