Examination of Witnesses (Questions 66
- 79)
MONDAY 22 JUNE 1998
MR CARL
HADLEY, MR
ANDREW MASSEY,
MS RHIANWEN
EDWARDS AND
MS EINIR
BURROWS
Chairman
66. Good afternoon. We are here today, as you
know, looking at investment in industry in Wales. We are interested
in your role in it. What I have to say though, first of all, is
we have had a look at your memorandum and, to put it mildly, we
do not think it is a gem of conciseness, in fact it is a little
bit incomprehensible in places. I would just like to point out
one or two examples. On page eight you mention something called
"economic disengagement" and "economically disengaged",
we take that to mean unemployed, I am not sure whether that is
the case or not. On page nine there is a sentence: "For the
latter it means both greater expertise in individual competencies
and a broader range in these skills, including generic".
I am afraid I do not think that is particularly good English.
We are a little worried that if all your publications are written
like this you may have problems communicating with the people
to whom you wish to communicate. Having said all that, we thank
you for the memorandum. Certainly we thank you for being here
today. Could you introduce yourselves and explain the role of
the Council please?
(Mr Hadley) Shall I start then. I am
Carl Hadley, I am Chairman of the Council of Welsh TECs. I am
also Chairman of West Wales TEC and a recently retired businessman
from Swansea.
(Mr Massey) Andrew Massey. I am the Director of the
Council of Welsh TECs.
(Ms Edwards) Rhianwen Edwards, Director of Strategy
for CELTEC, North Wales TEC.
(Ms Burrows) I am Einir Burrows, Head of Planning
for Powys TEC.
Mr Paterson
67. Looking at your objectives and activities,
it would seem you give rather more attention to your training
than your enterprise function. Is that a fair statement?
(Mr Hadley) Yes, it is true. That has been the remit
of the TECs since it was started late 1980s early 1990s. It was
for training, particularly training unemployed, improving skills
in existing businesses and that has been where most of the money
and the Government emphasis has been. That is quite true, yes.
68. What sort of proportion would you put on
that?
(Mr Hadley) I would say probably—colleagues
may correct me—90 per cent of it would be training and other
things and the enterprise part of it would be 10 per cent. We
do not compete with the local enterprise companies, that has never
been our remit. We have always tried to work along with them so
we have allowed them to do their part of it. Of course, on inward
investment, on a large scale that is WDA. We have never, of course,
done anything there ourselves. We do support them, of course.
When you talk about any inward investment or any investment, any
enterprise, it comes down to people in the end anyway and it is
the people who have to be trained to make the enterprise work.
So that has always been our remit. In many ways it is training
for enterprise as much as it is supporting enterprises.
69. 90 per cent of your funds which you control
represent 90 per cent of your effort?
(Mr Hadley) It would be both. I will ask my colleagues
to give a more accurate answer but that would be my impression.
(Mr Massey) Yes, our funding is in the paper here.
Mr Hadley's assertion is broadly correct that roughly 90 per cent
of funding, 90 per cent of effort.
70. Okay.
(Mr Massey) What I would say is that there is a relationship,
if I may add, Chairman, intrinsically in adding to the skills
base of the individual and adding to the enterprise base of the
company. It is quite difficult to differentiate between them.
Training is related to enterprise. Skill, whatever it may be,
within a company, is related to its enterprise capability.
71. You see the overwhelming proportion of your
remit is to promote training, to improve skills?
(Mr Massey) It is but I would hesitate to get into
too much differentiation because the two are so intrinsically
related. The skills' capability of the company relates to its
enterprise capability.
72. If it is one of your objectives to support
new and growing businesses, make them more competitive, etc.,
how do you go about this? How successful do you think you have
been if 10 per cent of your effort is going into that?
(Ms Edwards) I think we see our efforts and our contribution
to economic development as being through development of people
within the workforce and the unemployed. I think when we talk
about enterprise we focus very much on developing the skills of
the small businesses, whether they are newly established or small
indigenous companies. At the end of the day I do not think you
can separate the skills' development aspect from the economic
development bigger picture, if you like. You can invest in structural
development and the development of infrastructure but without
the skills' aspect it is incomplete. I think we have a very valid
role to play in developing the skills aspect in its broadest sense.
73. We are not knocking your training efforts,
what we are trying to work out is how much you are involved in
helping businesses expand. Would you go into a very new business
and help them put together a cash flow forecast for example?
(Mr Hadley) We do with start up businesses as well
as existing businesses help them develop plans as others do as
well but usually through consultants. Then we will work out also
with them the training plan because again that is usually key.
When you have your equipment there, they know what they want,
they know the products usually, their equipment is then getting
people in and training the people and that is where we come in.
We know the training providers. We know the schemes that they
can go to. We can help them financially in a number of different
ways. We can bring people in that are unemployed through the various
unemployment schemes we have had over the years and give them
support that way. What we tend to do is because we are local—all
the TECs operate very much locally—we develop people on
the ground who can help local businesses. We try to be as flexible
as we can within the schemes that the Government, of course, gives
us.
74. Something like a marketing scheme which
was not so people orientated, that would not be part of your remit?
(Mr Hadley) We have funded some, yes. We would do
that but it would often be done as well through other routes.
75. Such as training someone about graphic design
or something like that?
(Ms Edwards) It would depend really. Our approach
is very much working with businesses to identify the best way
of meeting their needs. If it is a case of identifying that they
need to train up an individual member of staff in graphic design
or improve marketing skills of an individual within that organisation,
we would approach it in that way. Wherever possible, we tend not
to just go in with a portfolio of: "This is all we can do
for you", we try very much to work with employers to identify
what their needs are and to work as best we can to meet those
needs.
76. You tell us on page 14 that less than seven
per cent of your budget is business support. Would you like to
have a more active role in that direction? Do you think you have
a bigger role to play?
(Mr Hadley) If I can say one thing first. We have
spent a lot of effort working in partnership with other organisations
so yes, we do need money through there but we do not need a large
amount of money. 50:50 say, too much and we would be then competing
with enterprise companies or funding the enterprise companies
or even funding WDA and that is not what we are about. We are
working with them in partnership and that is the important thing.
(Ms Burrows) Coming back to your questions on marketing
or specific areas of business support, it is very important to
understand that the TECs' contribution is one that has to be looked
at in the context of the range or the economic development infrastructure
that exists. For example, if you extend your marketing question,
the TECs' role might be to identify a training need and it might
be to assist a company by getting consultants in or by finding
a mechanism for training an individual within the organisation.
This is then when the range of organisations involved or public
sector organisations would need to come together rather than overlapping
services.
77. Do you think there is some more mileage
to be made in bringing these various organisations together? Some
of the people we have seen on this investigation have said they
would like to see a one stop shop.
(Mr Hadley) We have a one stop shop in Business Connect,
slightly different from the English Business Link. We have that,
there is a one stop shop, we all subscribe to that. We are redeveloping
it at the moment with the intention of continuing as a partnership
to make it genuinely even more of a one stop shop than perhaps
it has been in the past. It is really a first stop shop. You cannot
have a group of people that are experts in everything. This is
the thing, we do quite a lot of enabling. We know where to go
in terms of expertise with consultants. With colleges, because
colleges have got tremendous expertise, you cannot put that into
a one stop shop, you have to keep it in the colleges and develop
it there and then we provide the links to it. So it is a first
stop shop where people can go whether they be small businesses
and new starters or existing large businesses and say: "I
want advice on this". They can phone up and they can get
the advice. As we do now with Learning Direct, for instance, we
have established that and you can phone up the TECs, you can find
out what training courses there are in almost any subject that
you like. We will tell you, pretty well—we have got a good
database—exactly what is going on. We will then direct you
somewhere else, we obviously cannot provide all those courses
because they are covered by community courses, right through to
higher education. You cannot really have a one stop shop.
(Mr Massey) I think one of the lessons we have learned
over the past few years with this concept of one stop shop is
it has to a point become a bit of a buzz word and the reality
is that the diversity of companies and their requirements, even
individual to the company, is so diverse out there that one can
never have an answer at any one point. In many respects it actually
becomes a first stop to which the solution of diversity as such
is that one cannot have a monolithic answer. It is a matter of
taking the company through provision, whether it is public sector
or private sector, in the most efficient and most economical way
possible because of that diversity.
Chairman
78. I think we would accept that Mr Massey and
Mr Hadley's point about first stop shop is perhaps a good way
of describing it. A lot of the people that we have seen so far
have suggested it is often one of many first stops that they get.
They are eventually shunted from one organisation to the next,
they are not getting any help or the help that they think they
want. They are often things which are not appropriate. Business
Connect, first of all what input does the TEC have into Business
Connect? Does Business Connect actually provide that kind of service
or are you looking to it to provide the kind of service where
they know where to send people?
(Mr Hadley) I think for the sake of Wales we do not
want to have lots of first stop shops. We have to make Business
Connect the one that everybody uses. All these things take time
to establish, in fact. We only really set it up about four or
five years ago. We provide the funding for it and we provide management
support to the various consortia. The idea now with the Welsh
Office though—I cannot tell you what they are doing because
I do not know, they have not finished yet—they are talking
to us about strengthening it. In some areas it is quite effective,
in other areas it is not, so if you phone up you will not get
the best quality advice. We have to set it up so it is the best
advice as to where to go for whatever you need in terms of business
support.
79. On the point you just made, Mr Hadley, we
were in Ireland a few weeks ago and they seem very clued up there
helping industry.
(Mr Hadley) I understand. I have had people say that
to me.
|
