Examination of Witnesses (Questions 760-779)
MR IAN
FINNEY AND
MRS DIANE
JOHNSON
20 JUNE 2007
Q760 Chairman: In terms of the way
that you run training in your company, how do you keep abreast
of changing technologies? It seems to me that even if you have
a domestic boiler the kinds of systems and the electronics and
all that that are involved, even in a residential household, are
so much more sophisticated than they were, how do you keep your
training up to date?
Mrs Johnson: All of our electricians
will be trained to an NVQ Level 3 and then obviously each year
something changes. You have the 16th Edition so we would send
them on courses for 16th Edition. The new Edition has come out
now which is the 17th Edition so all of our operatives whether
they be female or male will have to go to college so that they
are up with the regs. Also if something new comes on the market
you often find that the manufacturers will also put a course on.
We are also part of the Electrical Contractors Association which
is a trade association and their education and training department,
whatever comes up new, if there needs to be a course and the employer
wants it they will work with them to give us that course to educate
our workforce.
Q761 Chairman: Who would supply those
new courses? Would it be the manufacturer through the private
sector directly, or would it be the local college?
Mrs Johnson: No, it would not
be the local college. The 17th Edition will go through the local
college but the manufacturers often put something on at their
own premises or the Education and Training Committee of the Electrical
Contractors Association will do something in-house or they will
use providers as well. It is the whole gambit, to be honest.
Q762 Chairman: What about the whole
Corgi thing?
Mrs Johnson: That is gas.
Q763 Chairman: That is only gas,
is it?
Mrs Johnson: Yes, that is the
whole gas area, not the electrotechnical.
Q764 Chairman: Is there not a Corgi
kind of equivalent?
Mrs Johnson: I wish there was.
Q765 Chairman: People do die because
of bad electrical fittings as well as gas fittings.
Mrs Johnson: If you want my honest
wish list, my honest wish list would be that everybody who wants
to be an electrician had to be licensed. For example, you today
could leave your position here—and I mean no disrespect—go
out and buy yourself a white van and a bag of tools and turn out
to Helen's house and say, "I can rewire your house".
That is outrageous.
Q766 Chairman: You will know that
the daughter of a parliamentary colleague of ours died as a result
of that sort of thing.
Mrs Johnson: Yes, Jenny Tonge's
daughter. There are people in the industry who are not qualified
and what we are fighting to get are qualified people in the industry.
We give very good training but the trouble is that at the moment
a lot of the children coming out of school at 16 are all being
told to go to university or to further education so a lot of A-
C students will go straight on to further education. We have to
take our entrants from what is left and it is not always what
we need.
Q767 Chairman: There are still 57%.
Mrs Johnson: Yes, but we are looking
for people who are quite happy to stay electricians but we also
want the people who are going to be the market leaders in the
future in the industry; we are looking for people who are going
to be the business managers who, through vocation, can still go
to university. We are not getting that kind of candidate coming
through. That is not the young person's fault, it is because at
16 you have to make a decision but no-one asks, "Do you know
what is open to you? Do you know what it takes to be a plumber,
an electrician, a bricklayer or whatever?" At 16 they are
making these choices but, to be honest, they are very ill informed.
Q768 Chairman: That is a very important
piece of information. Ian, you are part of the Society of the
Motor Manufacturers and Traders, are you not?
Mr Finney: Yes.
Q769 Chairman: Are you better organised
than the Electrical Contractors in terms of training?
Mr Finney: I think the automotive
sector gives you a discipline. I guess you can look at the automotive
industry as being leaders in what they do. We have gone through
a turbulent time in the automotive industry and we are very much
involved in niche volume manufacturing, technically difficult,
pedestrian safety, carbon emissions are all part of our focus
to meet EU legislation and you are in a changing environment within
the global automotive sector in that you have to meet the requirements
of TS16949, ISO9000, and ISO14001. As large manufacturing dies
and withers away and is replaced by SMEs I think these SMEs are
now agile and fit to innovate for the future. We do undertake
most of our training. Like I was saying earlier really, we need
people to sweep the floor, we need people who want to be production
operatives, we need people who then go on to become supervisors,
team leaders, engineers. Manufacturing is seen as being a dirty,
poor career choice early on and that perception has to change.
That mindset has to change in that the manufacturing business
is about opportunity; it is about proper business management tools
and there is a career path for whatever educational level you
choose to come into the system. Education can open doors but of
course opportunity / vision and purpose can really drive your
vocational requirements through the system. Agreeing a little
bit with Diane, the education system is very disjointed, we have
loads and loads of disjointed schemes around. I feel sorry for
my PA because when we are looking for a few new people, we are
looking for production operatives—there is this incentive
to try to encourage people to bring people on, we live in this
disadvantaged area obviously and these are systems that are open
to ourselves—she looks at me and goes, "Oh no Ian,
not again" and there is a mountain of paper work and there
is a load of cumbersome things that are necessary to undertake,
a lot of hurdles/barriers and ticking of the boxes, but actually
we just want to open the eyes of the young people and say, "Look
at the opportunities that are there for you". We need to
get to the 14-year-olds and we need to say to them, "Perhaps
your vocation at this point in time or your capabilities are not
really opening the doors for a university and a degree and trying
to meet a pre-requisite Level 3, but look at what other opportunities
are available for you". Let them go and experience them.
This is not some corporate social responsibility goal that we
are trying to put forward. This is because we need manufacturing
to be lean, fit and organised to meet the challenges of the 21st
century, the safety requirements that are coming in through the
system, the carbon emissions. There are a lot of engineering challenges
and the focus of attention is to bring the bulk of the people
from a zero to a Level 2. We need to focus quite a high concentration
on the expenditure onto Level 3 that can help these people and
guide these people up through zero to 2. At school they hid; from
zero to seven a child learns the basics; you get from seven to
14 and you may have a clearer understanding of the real world
around you than actually these educational skills have given you
to date. It is a case of opening their eyes. If you wait until
they are 16 to open their eyes, they come through our door and
we have a relatively simple task for them to undertake. We will
pay them £250 a week to undertake this simple task. They
look at you and sort of go, "Well, what are my options? I
can work here for 40 hours a week and somebody will pay me £250
a week or I can go to a job on the corner and earn £200 a
day." You are saying to yourself that they are missing such
an opportunity. We find it necessary to sit them down and say,
"Look, that is a bad choice. We can't stop you, there is
the door, but actually if you look and see what we can offer as
a manufacturing unit, we can offer you whatever skill path or
whatever crafted path that you want to take we can try to offer
you that, but you have to want it." So for three or six months
they may choose to fight it a little bit until they open their
eyes and say, "Actually, it's not bad, this" and they
drive themselves. It is up to us to craft and drive that path
for them because unfortunately that is what you need within 21st
century manufacturing; it is not seen as a nice place to be and
everybody looks at it as though it is the black hole of Calcutta,
but it is not the black hole of Calcutta any longer. These SMEs
are nice, well-organised business units and to open somebody's
eyes to that opportunity that actually presents itself in front
of them is an important thing. There is a need for somebody to
sweep the floor, there is a need for the production operative.
If they feel challenged within that particular role they will
stick to it; if they find it very easy then they will get bored
with it. There is a role for the team leader; there is a role
for the supervisor. Then you look at project management, developing
new projects and it does not matter whether they are 16 or just
coming out of university, as we get more and more into R&D
and innovation and trying to move the debate forward to meet European
legislative requirements we start to take university students
who suffer with exactly the same problems. They come through the
door, they have spent five years at university; great, no problem
at all, they have learned how to press the buttons. Now we have
to teach them how to start off with nothing and come out the other
end with something, so start off with the raw material and bring
it all the way to fruition, to the finished product. Again this
university student says, "I've spend five years at university,
I've got this degree and I want to earn £40,000 a year."
So we say, "Well actually, we're an SME". Within a very
competitive automotive sector we are trying to balance all this
with the need for revenue streams and actually we want to teach
it because that is what we need you to understand to give our
business longevity. We do not have the pick of the crop, the best,
because they go onto these large organisations. There is a lot
of focus on the global car industry and how the press see it but
actually the UK has lots of manufacturing businesses that actually
utilise the skills of manufacturing. We have a very good car industry;
we have a niche volume car industry which is very successful even
down to your Morgans and your luxury sports cars. Let us not focus
on this global industry; let us focus on what we are good at and
we are good at innovation. It is time that we helped the people
see that.
Q770 Fiona Mactaggart: Since we are
focussing on skills—you both spoke about skills, but one
of the things I am interested in is how relatively important are
skills in terms of the success of your business? How important
is it compared to access to capital? You, Diane, mentioned issues
about regulation; I think you were arguing for more which was
interesting and rare for small businesses. You mentioned the burden
of bureaucracy, Ian, when you were doing things. I am just wondering,
in terms of the things which prevent your business success, how
important are skills in the kind of hierarchy of challenges that
you face?
Mrs Johnson: For me skills are
the most important thing. My business is not a business without
skills because my business is not a business without a decent
workforce who can carry out the domestic, the industrial, the
commercial. What we are finding is that employers are reluctant
to take 16-year-olds on. Why? Because they are very expensive
now. That sounds an awful thing to say but when they come out
school a lot of them are not fit for work, they do not have responsibility
in them any more. If you come to work you turn up on time; not
only do you turn up on time you do a good day's work for a good
day's pay. You are treated properly, because of legislation of
course they are treated properly now. That does not happen. They
come along; they turn up late. It is basically like having a child
again; you have to nurture them and bring them up and teach them
how to deal with things socially. They go into people's houses
and you say to them, "Please do not spend half an hour on
your mobile phone because somehow I have to charge you out to
that customer". Of course the customer will say, "Don't
charge me for that electrician" (they do not realise he is
an apprentice) "because he spent half an hour on his mobile
phone." So you have to start with their social skills and
also how they deal with the people they are working with. When
a young person comes to work with us they are basically in `a
sit by Nellie' situation because you have to have someone supervising
them all the time, so your productivity has to go down, that is
understandable. What we are finding now is that it has to go down
because the people who are teaching the young people have basically
to teach them even social skills, that when you go in you are
not abusive to people. Respect has gone basically and that is
the problem we are coming across. This is not with all young people,
I am talking a very broad brush here, but when we take young people
on at 16 it takes us 12 months to get them into shape just to
be able to put them with electricians out on the workforce. Employers
are saying to me, "When I can get highly skilled, highly
motivated operatives from Eastern Europe, why do I want to take
an apprentice on at 16 who is going to cost me X, Y, Z, I have
to train him in social skills, they do not always come out with
the qualifications that are necessary, they do not turn up at
college; it really is an HR problem and it is costing us money?"
I struggle to tell them why they should. Why do we do it? Because
if we do not we will not have a business. I also get very annoyed
because of the poaching situation. It is far easier to wait until
somebody has trained someone else and then poach them for your
business by offering them more money. For me skills are the main
thing in my business and I am passionate about trying to change
things so that young people when they come in are fit for purpose
for work. That does not mean that they know the craft but they
know what is expected in the workforce and I am not sure that
is being taught in school.
Q771 Fiona Mactaggart: So you are
saying that those kind of soft skills are very important—not
just a bit important, very important—how would you change
what happens in education to make those young people better at
those things?
Mrs Johnson: I would in a way
do a backward step. If you remember years ago there was work experience—what
I call proper work experience—so people could go into manufacturing
areas, into building services et cetera. For a fortnight
they could come in and see how a business works. They cannot do
that any more for a start because most of our clients will not
let them on site because of the insurance, the health and safety
issues. These young people have never been into a business. It
is like saying to someone, "Right, you have left school today,
next week you are going to do a little test to see if you want
to be an apprentice, you want to be a plumber, whatever."
They want to be a plumber because some daft person has told then
they can earn £90,000 a year and all that sort of rubbish.
They think that coming to do an apprenticeship after three weeks
they can fit a toilet, they can put lights up, but it is a long
process and they have to go to college. I think we have to go
into schools earlier with employers, have what I suppose I would
call a careers convention, something that would last a couple
of days where you could get young people to come along regardless
of what the business is and say, "Look, if you want to be
a motor mechanic, if you want to be whatever, this is what you
have to do". Also we have to inform parents because again,
I agree with Ian, somehow if you do not go to university any more
you are seen as not as good as the rest. That is a real big problem
for the skills agenda because, looking at the 14-19 Diploma which
actually could be brilliant, because that is how you could really
let people know that this could be their introduction to industry.
What we have to do is make sure the parents understand and make
sure that the 14-19 Diploma fits in by saying that if someone
does the 14-19 Diploma and does want to go to university, the
university will accept how good it is, that it is useful but also
that the 14-19 Diploma in whatever skill you are looking at in
whatever area, fits into what the employer wants as well. That
could be very, very useful.
Q772 Fiona Mactaggart: When people
talk about Diplomas we often hear that they could be good but
I can hear in their voices the fact that they could also be bad.
I suppose what I would like to hear from both of you is what would
be the critical qualities that you would expect in that kind of
a Diploma that would deal with some of your problems that you
both described very vividly to us?
Mrs Johnson: I do not know enough
about what is in the diploma so I am not going to sit here and
say anything about it.
Q773 Fiona Mactaggart: They do not
exist yet, but what I am asking you is to say that if they included
X and Y and Z the problems that you currently experience would
be reduced. That is really what I am asking you.
Mrs Johnson: In the Diploma, to
me, you would have fit for purpose for work. Teach someone what
they need to be able to work in whatever industry. Also, depending
on what discipline they were going to, to give them background
information for that. The biggest thing is that we have to sell
it to the parents. You are all parents. If your child comes home
and says, "They've asked us at school to do the 14-19 Diploma",
regardless of what is in it and how good it is, if we have not
sold it to the parents that this Diploma is as good as a GCSE
and A level—as it stands at the moment—it is dead
in the water because the people who are going to use it are the
ones who are going to sit with their parents and say, "Should
I do this, Mum?"
Q774 Fiona Mactaggart: Ian, do you
have the same problem with work experience?
Mr Finney: I agree with Diane
in a lot of areas. I think to capture them young is very important.
Without reiterating what I have said, we are not really talking
about the people that want to go to university. What we are talking
about is the 57% that you rightly talked about earlier on and
within that group of people there are differing skills and capabilities.
Some are at the very bottom of the social skill level and some
just do not quite make the grade. What is fundamentally wrong
in the system at the moment is that educationally we stream them
but there is a lot of focus on those people going to university
and trying to find them the right career path. There is the disillusionment
of the 57% who are all of a sudden told, "Well, you ain't
going to make it lads; you're destined to work at Sainsbury, you're
destined to work at McDonald's" (with the greatest of respect).
You can take a career path very quickly through the retail sector;
you can take a career path very quickly in other sectors because
once you have learned to deal with somebody on a consumer-facing
product I am seen to be pretty good and the group of people I
am embraced with are people around 16- years-old. To fight my
way to the top of a group of 16-year-olds is far simpler than
to fight my way through a group that covers lots of age groups,
offering lots of different disciplines. You can have all the key
performance indicators you want—do not get me wrong, they
are important boxes to tick—but unfortunately we are trying
to tick too many boxes. If you go into a bank or you ring up a
bank and they go, "Yes, Mr Finney, this, this and this",
if I ask a question that is outside the box they cannot cope with
that. Unfortunately that is what the real world is really about,
coping with a little bit of adversity over here. What manufacturing
in essence does is teach you the "what-ifs". What if
we undertake this as a problem and we have to craft a solution
to problem? That is a much longer, more maturing life time skill,
regardless of whatever sector you are in. I am sat here, talking
about the automotive sector and because it is a global industry
it does lead the debate on skills, it leads the debate on climate
change. Whatever issue you want to talk about automotive industry
is there because it is big business. It requires a high discipline
of understanding to be able to even compete within that area.
They make some mistakes. Ask them about China. China is a very
unwieldy animal and the difference between buying this brake pedal
from here and buying this brake pedal from over here, when you
really need to put your foot on that brake it does not break and
it works, it saves your life; if you buy one from over here and
this one breaks, to the uneducated it is the same product. If
you look on the Internet and you type in the product that you
are looking for you will buy by brand or by price—
Q775 Chairman: I am sorry. I am fascinated
by your answers but I have all these hungry Members who want to
get to their turn to ask a question.
Mr Finney: The answer to the question
is that it is not all about ticking the box. What it is about
is educating the people to actually fulfil a task and to drive
them onto the next task, by putting the efforts into some higher
level learning at, say Level 3, and it is the school's job to
open their eyes. Bring them into industry, take away the fact
of having to insure them and all this, we will put them with somebody
and open their eyes. That is the answer to your question.
Q776 Jeff Ennis: I would just like
to ask a supplementary question on the issue of work experience.
I accept that you are both from fairly specialised companies and
because of health and safety et cetera it is difficult
to take on work experience pupils. Having said that, in my experience
and from the secondary school governing body I am on, whenever
I have spoken to the kids who have done work experience which
is for a two week period, if it had been a good placement they
wish it would have lasted longer, for four weeks or something
like that. I accept that you are probably not delivering in terms
of taking students on work experience placements at the present
time, but do you think that is something that we ought to be looking
at, possibly extending the work experience placements for the
kids at school?
Mrs Johnson: I would welcome it.
Our company has been going 61 years and I have been in the industry
nearly 20 years so I remember us taking work experience kids in.
To be honest, some of them come along and it is like, "I've
been in my bedroom and I've made this and it does this" and
you have an enlightened child who comes along. It could be that
he is so enlightened that he will come into the industry but you
need to do something a bit more with him. Or he is just somebody
who is very, very interested. Or you get someone who comes in
and says, "This is not quite what I thought". So for
the child who does want to go in that job should not be taken
by somebody else who has got there and says, "This isn't
what I wanted". To be honest, in our industry I would say
we have a 60% success rate which I think is quite high in the
apprenticeship fulfilment, that is with the leading training provider
which is Joint Training Limited.
Q777 Chairman: So 60% of the ones
you have taken on stay with you.
Mrs Johnson: Stay with the industry,
yes. I think that could be more because those that do not stay
it is often because it is not what they thought or it is because,
in our industry, maybe they have to go back to college. I take
on board what Ian said before but to me I do not just want the
57% that are left behind. I want trade and skills to be open to
everyone so that whether you are an A grade student or an E grade
student this could be for you. That is what we are trying to get.
Instead of saying, "Sorry, but the disenfranchised are the
ones that go to vocational; everybody else goes to something higher".
That is what is what is wrong with the skills in this country.
Mr Finney: In our industry we
are not just interested in the 50%; we believe that we have an
all important contribution to make to that 57%. We see the graduates
that are obviously out there but from an engineering background
I think the traditional apprenticeship is one of the places to
start. We have a lot of disillusioned children at 16 and maybe
the place to start it is at school and to say, "Let us open
your eyes to what is available. Let's use some of the technical
colleges with the capabilities that they have." Of course
most of the educational system and the people within it are educated
people; they have taken an academic path. Have they actually seen
what manufacturing is really like today or can they only relate
to what they knew from 20 or 30 years ago? What I am saying is
it is only the child's own choice for them to go down that route.
You will never pick them up and drag them down that route. They
need to see the vision; they need to see the profession in order
to actually feel it, believe it and want to go down that path.
I think it has to start at 14 with some sort of traditional apprenticeship.
Let us not just say, "I'm sorry, you're in the 57%; we're
just going to chuck you to one side and give you some sort of
mediocre qualification that means nothing to nobody." We
have to embrace these people as much as we embrace the top end
of the scale. By embracing these people, giving them vision, giving
them their apprenticeship, showing them the world it will have
an effect over all market sectors (retail, engineering, manufacturing).
Q778 Jeff Ennis: The Leitch Review
wants employers to sign up to "The Skills Pledge", whereby
by 2010 all adult workers without a first Level 2 qualification
or basic skills receive help towards obtaining these. Can you
see your firm signing up to the Pledge? If I understand correctly,
there are 150 firms like McDonald's, for example, who have already
signed up to the Pledge.
Mr Finney: That is a corporate
and social responsibility, "I'm going to do this to tick
a box". We do it because we need to do it. It is the education
system that should do it. We want to focus on Level 3 and above.
We want you to put resource at 14-16 and above, for 3 and above.
Do not palm your problems off on us. We have a corporate and social
responsibility anyway.
Q779 Jeff Ennis: You are not telling
me all your workers have Level 3 qualifications?
Mr Finney: No I am not. It is
our job to open their eyes. Because somebody is 60 and sweeps
my floor and he makes a really good job of sweeping my floor and
he does not desire any more than that (he used to work in a foundry,
he works really hard), but he cannot read and write. Why should
I distinguish? Why is he a bad person? If you took a 16-year-old
he would be leant on that brush most of the time, not sweeping
up. I can craft a path for anybody at any educational level but
it needs the education system to open their eyes. It is our job
to craft a path once you have opened their eyes. The failure to
open their eyes is not good enough.
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