Examination of Witnesses (Questions 680
- 699)
WEDNESDAY 27 OCTOBER 2004
SIR JOHN
EGAN
Q680 Chairman: I think I am getting
this. These one million homes that you are very keen to see built
are not only for foreign investment bankers and Australian barmaids,
but they are going to be for Bolivian civil engineers.
Sir John Egan: And waiters. Bolivians
will come too, I am quite sure. By the way, if you are the richest
country in Europe, you will find that there is no shortage of
any of these things. Everybody will come along. Also, as soon
as kids realise that planning leads to being the chief executive
of a local authority and that is one of the most exciting jobs
you could possibly be doing, everybody will want to be planners.
Q681 Joan Walley: Perhaps we could
start by having more graduates and apprentices inside local authorities
as newly qualified graduates because there are very few of them
at the moment. I think there are only one or two local authorities
that actually do that.
Sir John Egan: Again, let me bring
you back to one point. I think that the urgency of what we have
to do means that all of these million people will have come by
the time we have trained some of these people through universities.
We stressed in my report that much of what we are going to have
to do is teach people on the job. We are going to have to train
people who are in the jobs to do a better job. That is one of
the absolute fundaments.
Q682 Mr Chaytor: Your report, Sir
John, is called Skills for Sustainable Communities but
the conclusion you come to is that really the essential shortage
of skills are the high level management skills.
Sir John Egan: Yes, essentially.
We will not know about the shortages of the others until we can
straighten out the process that is going to be efficient.
Q683 Mr Chaytor: Someone coming to
the report to start with might have expected to get a set of numbers
of how many plumbers, architects, town planners and electricians
were needed and how they were going to be trained in the next
five or 10 years. Given you are taking the visionary long-term
approach and given you are focusing on the National Centre of
Excellence, it is going to be years and years and years and years
and decades before this cultural change that you argue for has
come about, by which time the million people will have come and
maybe gone back again?
Sir John Egan: They might. They
will be here by 2010.
Q684 Mr Chaytor: How do you reconcile
the urgency of the Government's building programme with the rather
relaxed long-term visionary approach to development of management
skills in your report? Do you think there is a mismatch in the
title?
Sir John Egan: No. We are going
to have to train the people who are currently doing the work.
For example, when I was running BAA, we looked at all of the people
working on the sites at Heathrow, all the construction people.
There were 6,000 people from various contractors working on various
jobs and, of the 6,000 workers doing all this construction, only
2,000 of them were trained to do what they were doing. The other
4,000 were not trained to do what they were doing. So, we put
in place a passport for the future system where every single skill
that was required in construction was a page in the passport and
you did not get your page stamped until you had passed the course
to do it and we arranged for all of the contractors to teach their
people on the job on our sites. Today, everybody on all the BAA
projects is fully trained and that is only five years later. You
can do this if you have the will to do it.
Q685 Mr Chaytor: But the National
Centre of Excellence is not going to be responsible for the on-the-job
training of plumbers, electricians and town planners in Thames
Gateway, is it?
Sir John Egan: I think the town
planners will be very much influenced by what is going on in the
centre, yes.
Q686 Mr Chaytor: What about the other
skill shortages? You are not making any recommendations.
Sir John Egan: I think they can
all be resolved by people simply doing on-the-job training for
their people. That is what they have to do and they can do it.
Q687 Mr Chaytor: So, you do not think
there is an overwhelming problem?
Sir John Egan: No. There are overwhelming
problems with people in the market doing these things but, if
we insisted on them being done, they would be done.
Q688 Mr Chaytor: Can I just shift
tack a little and ask about the north/south issue. You have quoted
some of the successes of the regional cities in the north in terms
of their urban regeneration but this has, as Joan Walley said,
been very much city centre based in Manchester and Leeds. There
is less evidence of success in regenerating the outer urban areas.
What do you think about the north/south divide because your focus
is that London is the key driver of the United Kingdom, one million
people are going to come to London, those who come have to work
in the centre of London and the transport network is not geared
up to that—
Sir John Egan: No, that was not
the focus of the report.
Q689 Mr Chaytor: No, but this was
the focus of your evidence this afternoon. You are putting a lot
of emphasis on this.
Sir John Egan: Because I am helping
the Deputy Prime Minister with his Thames Gateway project. So,
some of the examples I have raised are to do with the Thames Gateway.
Q690 Mr Chaytor: Do you think, as
a consequence of the Prime Minister's emphasis on Thames Gateway
and other parts of the south east, this is going to exacerbate
the general economic divisions between north and south?
Sir John Egan: No, I do not.
Q691 Mr Chaytor: And suck people
from the north, particularly the brightest young graduates from
the north, into the south east?
Sir John Egan: No, they are not
going to be sucked. They will want to come because of the wealth
and prosperity of the south east.
Q692 Joan Walley: Why do we need
to suck them away from their own communities?
Sir John Egan: We are not going
to suck them, they will go of their own volition. They will go
wherever the wealth takes them, I imagine, if they are bright
and smart.
Q693 Mr Chaytor: This is the thrust
of my question. Would it not be more sensible, in terms of national
policy, to have less emphasis on developing the existing strengths
of the south east and more emphasis on dispersing economic growth—?
Sir John Egan: I am longer in
the tooth than you are but I do remember governments' wish to
try to take work to where people were in the car industry and
they put factories in South Wales, Scotland, Liverpool and in
many other places. I think there is only one still around. They
have all closed down.
Q694 Mr Chaytor: Nissan is still
in Sunderland and Toyota is still in—
Sir John Egan: Our experience
of taking work to the people has not been very good. It killed
the British car industry. It actually killed it. One of the many
reasons it died was because it spent a whole decade of its investment
in places other than where it has normally been successful. You
are leading to something and I am not quite sure what it is, but
let me put you straight on this. There is no way that we can actually
suddenly invent some other purpose for single purpose mill towns
or mining towns. There is simply no way of conjuring this out
of thin air. Every time you do, you fail. What you can do however
is to build on places where you can be successful and put good
transport links into those. I think that what the major cities
have done is splendid. I would like to see a lot more done by
the university towns to also start planning the prosperity of
their region and it will not be simple and it will not be by manufacturing
special purpose vehicles—
Chairman: It will be even harder if all
the talented people have moved into London and the south east!
I think there is a moral issue to this as well as a spatial and
planning one.
Q695 Mr Francois: If I followed your
argument, you are saying that we are going to get another one
million people in the south east over 10 years.
Sir John Egan: The prosperity
of the south east will attract one million more people. That is
mostly what other people have said and I think it looks pretty
sensible that that is going to happen.
Q696 Mr Francois: I have some sympathy
with my northern colleagues here because we do not want to become
overburdened and they do not want to be denuded. If that happens
over ten years, presumably those trends will continue into the
next ten years and the next. So, where does this stop? There has
to be some physical capacity to how much the south east can take.
Sir John Egan: I think other world-class
things will occur in the United Kingdom and the trouble we have
is that, right now, we only have one big world-class thing which
is London. We have it and it is very successful and we should
rejoice in it. What I would be doing, if I had anything to do
with it, is to look for other world-class potential and I would
build those up as well. I think one is obvious and that is Cambridge;
they have £500 million worth of investment money to invest
with business into scientific facilities and that could be another
huge world-class activity. There will be others. I think Manchester
has every chance of being a world-class city; it has the drive
and the urge; it has the world-class university to go with it
and I have no doubt that it will be successful, and places like
Newcastle will be as well. Do not just assume that because you
have some dream that the people will actually stay where they
are when the prosperity is elsewhere. I went to a grammar school
up in the Pennines and, when I went back to give the prizes at
the grammar school, I asked the headmaster, "Does anybody
ever come back here?" and he said, "No, nobody ever
comes back here, they all go down to London, that is where they
go." With respect, you cannot invent a new world. The new
world we have is great prosperity here. If you want to do something
about it, then what you have to do is make other places very successful
as well.
Q697 Mr Francois: I can partly understand
that argument. You talked about people coming down from the Pennines
but it goes far further than that. We have already said anecdotally
this afternoon that we are going to have investment bankers coming
to the south east and we are going to have Australian barmaids—
Sir John Egan: And from Italy
and from Poland and all these places.
Q698 Mr Francois: And we are going
to have Bolivian chartered surveyors as well! Is there anybody
who is not coming to the south east, Sir John?
Sir John Egan: As long as the
prosperity is something like 50% above the average in the EU,
no, it will not stop for a very long time.
Q699 Chairman: Thank you. We will
end on that note. We are very grateful to you for your time and
particularly for the extension of your time and also for your
evidence which has been most helpful.
Sir John Egan: I have to remind
you that this is not my day job; I have to rush off to my day
job.
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