Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120
- 132)
WEDNESDAY 30 APRIL 2008
LORD BROWNE
OF MADINGLEY,
MR NORMAN
HASTE AND
PROFESSOR MICHAEL
KELLY
Q120 Chairman: One of David King's
big criticisms—and it is a report which our predecessor
Committee did—was that Government is not an intelligent
customer. Would you agree that it is not an intelligent customer
in terms of engineering?
Professor Kelly: For a number
of things, I think that is perfectly correct. There is an argument
that I face as to whether a department such as ours should be
in the marketplace or above it; that the job is solely to have
economic levers to push and pull them, to which my counter argument
is that Winston Churchill did not win the second world war pushing
and pulling economic levers in the Cabinet rooms, he was out there
making sure enough Spitfires were coming off the production line.
Should we be sitting there thinking and arguing what might happen,
and second and third order consequences, as opposed to getting
out and doing something? I believe that if our department can
be seen as the midwife of the public sector body that says, here
is our building stock and we are going to be responsible leaders
in the retro-fit agenda, we will do something for the country.
It is a perfectly valid thing for the public sector to do but
which does not fall at the moment within its normal mindset—with
more engineers and you would have more of that.
Q121 Mr Cawsey: It strikes me that
there are a number of issues on the agenda for the United Kingdom
for which the role of engineers is going to be crucial. Dr Gibson
has just referred to the Olympics; and there is CrossRail; building
schools for the future; housing; transport; infrastructure; possible
new nuclear power plants; the challenge of climate change; defence
solutions. For all of that challenge for you sector, is it now
a given fact that we have got a chronic shortage of engineers
across all engineering sectors?
Lord Browne of Madingley: This
is always a vexed question of do we have a shortage of engineers,
because supply and demand tend, by definition, to match over a
run of years. We are making some headway in making sure the market
does not fail, in other words, people understand engineering better.
Much more needs to be done at the school level, that has already
been discussed, and evident from the feedback from the younger
people previously. However, I also think that in the end people
put their money where their mouth is and reasonably large numbers
of engineers go into the financial sector at very salaries because
they are worth it to their employer. Other employers cannot complain
and say that they cannot get hold of them; they just have to bid
for people.
Q122 Mr Cawsey: So, you think the
market will correct that?
Lord Browne of Madingley: The
market will eventually correct that, it is evident. For example,
in my old field of oil field engineering, the salaries for petroleum
engineers who are in incredibly short supply -people have not
been going through school to do that—have gone up to approaching
the level of MBAs from top-rate business schools. So that has
equilibrated as a result of the demand. In the end, in order to
get all these things done to get top-quality people the cost of
an engineer has to rise, and it will rise.
Q123 Mr Cawsey: Professor Kelly,
do you agree with that?
Professor Kelly: I think that
is perfectly fair.
Q124 Mr Cawsey: Is that the same
for you, Mr Haste?
Mr Haste: I do not support my
colleagues—not very strongly, anyway—in saying that
engineers should be better recognised because the laws of supply
and demand come into play naturally and I support the views of
Lord Browne on this issue. We cannot lose sight of the fact that
in this day and age, young people struggle. Young people who have
to live in London really struggle. We find in recruiting people,
particularly to go and work overseas, we have to recruit two people
rather than one and it is not man and wife, but it is partner
and partner. When I went into full-time engineering education,
it was about the top 5% of students in the country who went to
university. Now we are looking at something over 55% of the youth
of today go to university and study one thing or the other. Clearly,
the Government cannot afford to pay for that, but I feel quite
strongly that one area where Government can make a significant
contribution is in the cost of educating engineers; the cost of
making it possible for students to live, particularly around the
major engineering universities, such as Imperial, Manchester and
Cambridge, etc. Perhaps we should look again at contributing towards
that cost as a Government, if we are really passionate about training
engineers. You may think it is creating an elitist group and I
would not be worried about that because I think it would inspire
many people to go forward.
Q125 Mr Cawsey: That is very interesting.
Inevitably, today, particularly because we had the young people
earlier on, we are talking about the future of engineering and
the need from the engineering sector, about young people leaving
universities and what skills they have. Is that the only challenge?
Is there also a challenge about ensuring that people who are already
in the sector being upskilled and keeping up to date with changes
in trends?
Mr Haste: Yes, very often.
Q126 Mr Cawsey: Is there something
that the Government should be doing to address that, or is that
for the sector itself?
Mr Haste: I do not want to get
bogged down in history, but I think we have seen over the years
where we have created for ourselves in this country an engineering
skill base and then have allowed it to dissipate and disappear
almost completely. In the 1980s, when there was a decision to
go ahead and build four nuclear power stations, we had a pretty
strong nuclear engineering capability here. But when the decision
was taken for environmental reasons, or whatever, not to proceed
with that programme, after Sizewell B, then that entire skill
base disappeared. One can accept the reasons for not going ahead
with that programme but not to retain and try and develop along
with the rest of the world that nuclear capability, I think was
a mistake. We see it in other areas, too, and I think it is something
that we all need to think about very carefully.
Q127 Mr Cawsey: So, are we facing—and
to go back to Lord Browne's point about the market corrects itself
in the end and if you do these things the people come along to
do it—a skills shortage for some of the ambitious projects
that the Government has, like nuclear programmes?
Mr Haste: I think we are, but
when we talk about correction, the way we would correct it is
by going to recruit those people internationally.
Lord Browne of Madingley: I agree
with that. Everyone recruits internationally; the pool is bigger
and that is what will happen. The real question always is quality.
Inevitably, in great projects, in my experience, or great new
pieces of business and I am going to talk about business, it is
the few people who lead it well with insight and they are probably
some of the best engineers in the world. It is recruiting those
people that really gets the difference between something that
the world looks at and something which is ok, it is fine. It is
that set of people you need to go after. We, in this country,
have produced many of those people; we need to continue to produce
those people. As I said previously, those people are those who
get educated, not only in one discipline in engineering, but across
the board and also capable of looking at science and commerce
simultaneously.
Q128 Mr Cawsey: Are you confident
that the Government's strategy for turning out engineers in the
future is both the right one and adequate?
Lord Browne of Madingley: These
strategies are never proved until they are done. That is an engineer's
approach to the question. But there are good signs so far; more
is being done at the school level. When I became President of
the Royal Academy of Engineering, I have forgotten how many thousands
of programmes there were—all of which were well-meaning.
They have now been reduced to about 500 at the school level. That
is good; the diploma in engineering is good. I think we should
look at the way in which degree programmes are taught; that needs
to be done. These are things that are building in the right direction.
We will see how it works.
Q129 Dr Iddon: Just following up
on that comment, Lord Browne. Do you think that engineering should
be taught as a discrete subject in schools?
Lord Browne of Madingley: I am
probably in a minority; I have always believed it should be. I
know that there are arguments against it. When I was a schoolboy,
no one studied economics at school because people said it was
really bad for young people; it is a derivative subject and you
had to do the fundamentals and you could only do it at university.
Those arguments are often levelled to engineering. I think engineering
is a very valid subject to be taught at school.
Q130 Dr Iddon: May I ask you all
about the diploma in engineering. Is it a good advance or do you
think it has been introduced simply because there has been a lack
of focus on hard mathematics and science teaching in schools?
Professor Kelly: I confess that
I have not made a specific study of that particular issue.
Mr Haste: I think it is good.
I take tremendous encouragement from what is going on generally
in terms of focusing on engineering and if I can play my part
in it, I will and I would encourage everybody else to do so because
we are the ones who have to help take this forward.
Lord Browne of Madingley: The
Royal Academy spends a lot of time being involved in the diploma
in engineering and I think it is a valid approach and can produce
something which will add to the skill base of the nation.
Q131 Dr Iddon: I once taught in Salford
University with three very large engineering departments—civils,
electricals and mechanicals. I suppose the courses those departments
were teaching then are completely out of date today, but I get
the feeling that some universities are still teaching engineering
in that old traditional way. We have heard both from the young
people this morning and from you, the specialists, that we are
looking for qualities such as leadership and we are looking for
young people who can inspire others to create the projects like
you, Mr Haste, have created all over the world. What is wrong
with university courses and how do we get them right?
Lord Browne of Madingley: If I
can add just a structural point. Mr David Sainsbury, in his latest
piece of work indicated that a valid area of investigation would
be to do just that; to investigate the way in which degree courses
are taught in the United Kingdom and to make recommendations on
what is the modern 21st century approach to doing just that. The
Royal Academy fully supports that; we are in the process of trying
to find funding to do this study; it is not a lot of money but
it needs to be found from Government sources.
Professor Kelly: I would like
to reinforce the fact that if you take mobile telephony, the only
bit of mobile telephony that predates my undergraduate education
is Maxwell's equations. The entire chip set, the entire display
technology and the entire system's approach all post-dates 1970.
There is a debate among academics of how much of this is engineering
in principle and how much is follow-through.[2]
The question I have asked when sitting on panels appointing chairs
is, if 80% of engineering has been discovered since you were an
undergraduate, at that stage since about 1980, and you make the
assumption that the ratio of rubbish to substance in those publications
is not rising exponentially, then we should be making much more
room for what happens more recently—how would you do it?
The come-back from some of my colleagues—and it is an acute
debate—is the extent to which it is the examples that we
use to illustrate the principles that
2 Note from the witness: "ie. technology"
should be updated on an annual basis. There is a
big debate about the range of skill sets, for example, my own
university has a common engineering degree; a number of other
universities choose to separate them and specialise more, early
on. The other point is that if we come with one size fits all,
that would be the worse solution of all, because we are looking
for a range of outputs and it may well be that we have more recognised
diversity in the formation of engineering at university.
Q132 Dr Iddon: Mr Haste, as a well-known
practitioner of the subject, what would you tell your academic
colleagues? What are Laing O'Rourke looking for?
Mr Haste: I believe that the structure
of undergraduate courses needs to be investigated in line with
the way the world is moving. I would not advocate that an engineering
course at university should consist of the traditional subjects—some
of them, yes—but engineers have to make business decisions;
they have to understand where they interrelate with Government;
they have to understand where they interrelate with other branches
of the engineering profession. I have floated the idea to many
people that if I were designing an undergraduate course, I would
include art, business management subjects, strategic planning,
and possibly also something on politics.
Professor Kelly: One of the differences
in the United States is that from the IEEE, as the institution,
insists that 20% of the engineering credits of an undergraduate
are taken outside the engineering faculty. This is an entirely
healthy feature because it means that other departments in the
university are seeking these engineers for certain parts of their
undergraduate degrees, so that an engineer goes into music or
advanced mathematics. Something along those lines should be considered
here: a freeing up to allow people to decide if they want to spend
part of their time in a business school. I come back to the project
to which I referred earlier namely that MIT have got a foundation
funding and a very handsome sum to try and look at what it is
to produce engineering leaders. MIT say they have turned out people
who are superb technically for the next two or three years of
their life but, of course, education does not stop at the university
stage, it is experience that is built on. They are asking themselves
the hard question, is there something more we could do for these
people to turn them out to be more gifted leaders in the future
than they at the moment?
Chairman: That is a very positive note
on which to finish. Could I thank very much indeed, Lord Browne
of Madingley, Mr Norman Haste and Professor Michael Kelly. Thank
you very much indeed for being our witnesses this morning.
2 Note from the witness: "ie. technology" Back
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