Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380
- 399)
WEDNESDAY 21 MAY 2008
MR CHRIS
ALLAN, MS
LEE HOPLEY
AND MR
IAIN COUCHER
Q380 Dr Gibson: What is the feedback
when you do that?
Mr Allam: The feedback is actually
positive in terms of, yes, it is well received, but when you measure
the output, we are just not getting any change in that, and it
is very concerning to us. We have just undertaken a review. Are
we doing something wrong? We must be.
Q381 Dr Gibson: Do you have any women
working on them?
Mr Allam: Absolutely.
Q382 Dr Gibson: Do you have people
from the ethnic minorities?
Mr Allam: Absolutely.
Q383 Dr Gibson: I think you are smart
enough.
Mr Allam: All those kind of obvious
things that are fundamental to what we are doing wrong we have
kind of been through and we are still sat there questioning: "This
actually is not working. Is it a bigger issue that we need to
tackle?"
Q384 Dr Gibson: How do you pick the
areas to go into?
Mr Allam: We do target areas whereby
we think we will get a response in terms of people close to our
footprint. Having said that, our footprint is massive. We are
in all areas, so we do end up hitting pretty much all areas of
the country, and if you spread a net widely around our sites you
do hit all areas.
Q385 Dr Gibson: Are you aware that
there are certain secondary schools which are engineering schools?
Mr Allam: Yes.
Q386 Dr Gibson: Do you go to them
particularly?
Mr Allam: I believe we do. I do
not see you offering me a list where are we targeting those schools,
but we have been through and got support in terms where should
we go, where should we target, particularly looking for areas
that have got an engineering bias. What we do tend to do though
is make the work we do as widely applicable as possible, so make
it as broad as we can, provide Internet services to teachers to
give them information.
Q387 Dr Gibson: I would hope you
would look into it, because if you want to maximise your success,
as you obviously do, with the groups I mention, you really have
to find the schools where you have got an audience which is at
least prepared to listen or is halfway there anyway.
Mr Allam: Yes.
Q388 Dr Gibson: When we asked the
group that were before us the last time they did not know how
many schools there were in engineering in this country. I find
that astonishing. If you are trying to get young people into the
profession, that is where you start. Did you read the previous
section?
Mr Allam: Yes.
Q389 Dr Gibson: You saw that?
Mr Allam: Yes.
Q390 Dr Gibson: What did you think
of that?
Mr Allam: Obviously it is concerning
about the level of knowledge, and I think, as I walk in, I am
absolutely sure of our level of awareness. I will go back and
check that point, but it is of concern if we have already got
engineering colleges and schools set up and that we are not making
full use of that. One of the points we are making is the system
we have got here is not quite joined up; there are some bits missing
in this jigsaw.
Q391 Dr Gibson: Iain, do you have
a view about that at all? Do you have road shows at Network Rail?
Mr Coucher: We do.
Q392 Dr Gibson: Do you take the train
to get there?
Mr Coucher: Of course.
Q393 Dr Gibson: Do you make it?
Mr Coucher: Because it is a lot
more successful, reliable and a better experience than going by
car.
Q394 Dr Gibson: Touché.
Mr Coucher: We have nine full-time
education officers that spend their time going round talking to
schools. They have two purposes. One is to highlight the dangers
of playing on the railways to children in schools, so it is targeted
largely around the railway environment anyway, but they have also
got a secondary role promoting engineering. We do a lot of engineering
road shows, we do a lot with local communities, but we do still
have a diversity and ethnicity problem. On the apprenticeship
side, the people that we are taking through our apprenticeship
scheme tend to end up doing physical maintenance of the railway
asset. It is anti-social, it is hard work, it can be physical
and is not particularly attractive to everybody. We take onto
our scheme roughly the ratio of people that apply to us, and that
is probably fair, but I would like to see more. Elsewhere in our
schemes we get a good balance, not as much as I would like, but
on the graduate schemes, again, it is representative of the engineers
that we have at universities.
Q395 Dr Gibson: You can understand
why we asked that. It is not just to put a few fingers up, it
is quite important in this society that that is seen to happen,
and that might help your recruitment, yes, but it makes a contribution
to the society we live in.
Mr Coucher: That is true. On the
ethnicity side, what we tend to do is target areas where there
is an obvious disparity between our organisation and the indigenous
society. So in places like Leicester we are very, very unrepresentative.
In part, whilst we do talk to the communities as to why the railways
is not attractive to certain groups of people, we also have to
look at the way in which people are attracted to the rail industry
in the first instance, and there are lots of personal recommendations
in the industry, and that causes you a problem in terms of perpetuating
a diversity problem. So I think you will see us doing a lot more
to try and attract people, because in our work places all over
the country we want to try and get representative in the local
communities, and it can be quite difficult. If you are looking
somewhere you might live, or where you might live, we do have
populations there, but they are in groups of 200, and it is sometimes
difficult, in a group of 200 people, to get traction in terms
of attractiveness for certain groups of people. So if diversity
in Harrogate is—
Chairman: That is the point I was making
earlier.
Q396 Dr Gibson: Even in counties
like Norfolk there are 108 languages spoken, which astonished
me, and they do travel on trains!
Mr Coucher: Yes, and that causes
us problems as well because it is all about signs and level crossing
which they have to use as well, and it is all in English.
Dr Gibson: Your loudspeakers are not
all they might be in some of the stations. Anyhow.
Chairman: We will move on at that interesting
point.
Mr Cawsey: Some very brief questions
about research and innovation. The Government puts support into
R&D through tax credits and research councils and HEFCE and
all that kind of thing, yet it strikes me from your industry's
point of view, it is crucial to your future that you have good
R&D for yourselves. Should it not be more about the industry
getting involved in R&D work with universities and partnerships
rather than relying on the Government to fund a lot of these things?
Q397 Chairman: Could I ask Lee to
start on that.
Ms Hopley: I think when you think
about innovation in engineering, new product development and scientific
R&D is a very narrow definition of what goes on in the industry.
A lot of it is about new or improved industrial processes, increasingly
it is about innovation in marketing and distribution as companies
are penetrating markets that are further away, selling into niche
markets. Those aspects are increasingly important for engineering
as well and probably should not be overlooked. Clearly things
like the R&D tax credit are welcome in the industry and can
make a difference, particularly for smaller and medium-sized companies.
Industry is doing a lot. It is the point I made earlier about
pulling together what is going on in higher education, institutions
and research institutions with what is going on in business better
and enabling them to speak to each other better as well.
Q398 Mr Cawsey: Chris, at BAE you
have an on-going relationship with universities. What have you
gained from those partnerships? Are there any examples you can
give us of successes?
Mr Allam: Absolutely. Firstly,
I do not think we do rely on governments to be the funder and
drive research. We take very seriously pulling research through
into our business and it is fundamental to what we do, we are
absolutely reliant on it, hence a lot of partnerships. We have
got a number of relationships set up. To take an example of that,
let me give you the example of autonomous systems. The one we
are working through at the moment is pulling research very quickly
from universities through small, medium enterprises into our business
and then getting it in the hands of the war fighter out in Afghanistan
at the moment in a short period of time. I think there was a quote
before that it takes ten years to build an aeroplane. That is
very interesting. Within two years we got brand new technology
to the war fighter from blank sheets of paper to result. That
is the kind of thing we are doing with our university partnerships
and pulling through, effectively, the innovation in the business.
There are some real positives there, if you like a small model,
of what it can be like if you go about things in a different way.
Q399 Mr Cawsey: This might be more
for Lee. You spoke about the difficulties that SMEs can appear
to the bigger guys. Is it possible to set up schemes where SMEs
can become involved in universities as well?
Ms Hopley: There is activity going
on. Some businesses can do it, some universities are very business
focused and there are relationships with SMEs and higher education
that work well, but then it seems quite polarised. There are a
lot of companies who do not really know what to do or where to
get information or really how to go about starting a relationship,
who they should contact, and universities do not always think
about talking to a medium-sized business if they have got a relationship
with a big player, for example. Some of the initiatives in the
pipeline that I mentioned earlier could actually really make a
difference in that respect, just helping kick-start that relationship
from an SME point of view.
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