UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 648-ivHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREEnergy AND climate change COMMITTEE
LOW carbon technologies IN A GREEN economy
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Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament: W B Gurney & Sons LLP, Hope House, Telephone Number: 020 7233 1935 |
Oral Evidence
Taken before the Energy and Climate Change Committee
on
Members present
Dr Alan Whitehead, in the Chair
Colin Challen
Charles Hendry
Miss Julie Kirkbride
Sir Robert Smith
Dr Desmond Turner
Mr Mike Weir
________________
Memorandum submitted by Energy and Utility Skills
Examination of Witness
Witness: Mr Frank Corrigan, Director of Strategy and Development, Energy and Utility Skills, gave evidence.
Q204 Chairman: Good morning Mr Corrigan. Welcome to our evidence session this morning on skills in a green economy. Your area of expertise relates to the skills and the development of the infrastructure of training and skills in an emerging green economy. We are very grateful to you for providing evidence to us this morning. Would you identify yourself for the record please?
Mr Corrigan: I am Frank Corrigan. I am the Director of Strategy for Energy and Utility Skills. Energy and Utility Skills is a sector skills council with a responsibility for gas, power, water and waste management.
Q205 Chairman: Thank you. Do you think we have in the UK a sufficient skills base to actually implement any green stimulus that is forthcoming?
Mr Corrigan: No. If you talk to employers and if you look at the research, the challenges in front of us are actually immense. If you look at the ageing workforce that already exists in the power industry and if you look at the needs that they are going to have increasingly over the next three sets of five year periods, the needs for skills grows in each of those periods. That is against the backdrop of a poor sector attractiveness; it is against the backdrop of demographic change. That is going to have a significant impact on our ability to deliver the low carbon economy opportunity. If we do not look at those in a combined way we will not be able to deliver the skills that are needed for both sectors. At this point in time there is not the coordination in the country to pull these things together in a planned fashion to make them work effectively. This is a concern to employers, which is why they are putting so much time, effort and their own money into trying to find solutions for this mounting problem.
Q206 Chairman: Do you think that the lack of skills that you have identified is something that cannot be made up by people transferring existing skills fairly seamlessly from present technologies and applying them to new emerging green technologies and therefore, as it were, making up the skills gap as they go? Or do you think there are specific areas where that is not possible to envisage and if you think that is the case, what are the specific areas?
Mr Corrigan: I think your analysis is exactly right. The skills that are going to be needed here are going to be in large measure a re-mixing of existing capabilities into a different structure to be able to deliver what we need. My concern is that the places that are going to provide the easily transferable skills are already facing major challenges in replacing their own skills infrastructure and therefore if we do not work in a coordinated fashion then the places that the low carbon economy might pinch them from are already suffering and therefore the existing power structure and its networks and the newer areas will hurt if we do not work in a coordinated fashion to deliver those skills.
Q207 Chairman: Is it your view that if we do not undertake further developments in specific green skills that particular areas of green technology and green energy development will simply not happen, or will they perhaps be undertaken by other means by, for example, importing skills from abroad or exporting the processes?
Mr Corrigan: Where there is a will there is a way and we will always find a way through it. We have undertaken some research as part of our preparation of a business plan for a national skills academy for power. The evidence that comes from that indicates that a lot of the training in this area is done overseas because the facilities do not exist in this country or they are arranged locally rather than put together in a sensible fashion. The risk is that that will continue so you will find a way through to make this happen but you will not make the most of it for either the industry itself or for the country as a whole. There is an opportunity here that could easily go begging.
Q208 Chairman: Would it be your view that in terms of what has been termed the green stimulus greater emphasis perhaps needs to be placed on skills training as part of that stimulus package itself as opposed to the stimulus on technology itself or its implementation?
Mr Corrigan: I believe that what you say is exactly what needs to happen. Let me give you an example. You know probably as much as I do about smart metering and you know that the government has announced that smart metering is a programme that we are going to implement in this country. What it means is that every day we are going to have to install 20,000 meters for a ten year period. If you go and talk to other parts of government their targets and their priorities are focussed in different ways. The ways of getting those skills in large measure is by upskilling people who already have a number of those skills to give the complete set of skills. If you go and say to the Learning and Skills Council, for example, that we think that would be something very suitable for Train to Gain to deliver they will say, "Does it deliver my objectives, which is a level two or a level three?" It does not because what you are doing is adding a little bit of skills to make that possible. Therefore as a sector we get caught with the priorities of other organisations that do not fit this agenda. In an ideal world we would upskill those people and then create new jobs behind them by bringing the replacement people in in an organised fashion, but those things have got to be looked at from the priorities of this sector and not always from the priorities that other departments have set.
Q209 Colin Challen: We have just completed a report on the oil and gas industry and I think it is a common assumption that the engineering skills and so on in those sectors that we have already might be applicable to renewable technologies. Who is actually going to make the decision to retrain those people? The oil and gas sector may not feel any responsibility at all to start training people in renewable technologies so how will that transition, if it does take place, actually happen?
Mr Corrigan: It is definitely an opportunity.
The research that I referred to earlier indicated that in fact the
returns to individuals working in the oil and gas industry were more lucrative
than were likely to appear in the renewables industry in the first instance and
therefore the attractiveness was going to be difficult. To my mind if you are willing to make these
things happen then you will pull together the training provision in a
coordinated fashion so that people can find the right level of skills that are
available across the country for them to make those personal choices. At the moment things tend to be done in too
fragmented a fashion so that if you are part of a north of
Q210 Chairman: You have particularly highlighted in your written evidence to the Committee the low priority that you claim that government departments have given to developing a collaborative approach to skills. What do you think is needed to overcome this?
Mr Corrigan: In an ideal world a little bit of help. I work for a lowly skills council; I get
direct funding of £1.7 million a year so I do not have any money, I do not have
any economic influence, I do not have any political power to make things
happen. If you look at our submission
you will see that we have worked very hard to pull together a collaboration amongst
sector skills councils to move this forward.
With the
Chairman: Let us look at skills strategy in a little more depth. Charles Hendry?
Q211 Charles Hendry: Can you tell us how you think the National Skills Academy for Power would work because it does look an incredibly fragmented, complicated picture at the moment? We have a whole range of organisations; we have the Power Sector Skills Strategy Group, the Renewable Energy Skills Group, AssetSkills, Cogent, ConstructionSkills, EU Skills (I suggest you change your name because a lot of people might not want to follow you just because you have "EU" in there), SEMTA, SummitSkills and a whole range of others. How do you feel that those can be brought together into a cohesive organisation? How then would you work alongside the National Skills Academy for Nuclear which is clearly in that same low carbon space?
Mr Corrigan: It seems to me that you have a number of sector skills councils who
have an interest in this. We have a
significant part of that but we do not own the total responsibility for
it. We have pulled together a
collaboration amongst all those groups to pool our research information first
and we have funding from DECC to allow us to do that. However, research is not where we want to be;
what we actually want to do is move the process forward. For those groups the renewable activity is a
small part on the side of their business and that needs some financial support
to take it from the research phase into the doing phase. That is really quite important. The national skills academies are a network
for taking the kind of planning and the qualifications work and the employer
engagement work and delivering it on the ground through colleges, through
universities and through employers' training facilities. The
Q212 Charles Hendry: You talked about having a little bit of support and you said some financial support; can you quantify that for us? My sense at the moment is that government is looking at how it gives less support into different organisations rather than how it gives more financial support. What would be the consequence on the work that you are trying to do if there were to be reductions in budgets and would that make it much more difficult for the UK to achieve its potential in these areas?
Mr Corrigan: We are already seeing that.
In putting together a business plan for the
Q213 Charles Hendry: Does it then mean that you might be in a situation of having to try and pick winners in the different technologies and the different skills base which will be required, for example carbon capture and storage, some renewables, some energy efficiencies and smart metering? Would you have to say, "Right, smart metering we know has to happen; it has to happen by 2020 and therefore that is a given" and you put more emphasis on that? Then some of the other technologies which are emerging and are perhaps slightly further away you do not do so much in those areas. Would you be forced to make those sorts of strategic decisions?
Mr Corrigan: I would be very reluctant to say that because from my point of view, where I sit you should be planning today for the skills needs that you are going to want to implement in two or three years' time because otherwise you will always be chasing your tail and never delivering effectively. If you focus the funding that is available on encouraging the early adopters to drive forward change then you will get a far better success rate from that early implementation, drawing other people through. In many ways it is really important that you look to the future and not look to yesterday's problems.
Q214 Sir Robert Smith: I have two questions on the funding. There are four nations involved in providing a pot of funding, how do you rank the four nations at the moment in terms of their awareness of the problem and interest in being part of the solution?
Mr Corrigan: We try to work with four nations and nine regions. The industry looks at itself as a national
one and if you are not careful you end up cutting it down to such small bits
that our employers scratch their heads and say, "I don't know how to handle
this; it does not make any sense". We
have worked very successfully with the Scottish Government who have done a lot
of work already in the research. They
are taking on secondment one of our senior people from
Q215 Sir Robert Smith: Earlier on Collin Challen raised the point about the skills in the oil and gas industry and obviously hope for some transfer there, but also have you had any dealings with OPITO, the oil and gas university, where of course the funding there has come from the industry itself? Is there any cross-over where the industry collectively in the power sector could actually see some benefit in mutual funding?
Mr Corrigan: If you look at the list of people who are in that renewable collaboration it includes Cogent and Cogent and OPITO are very close together. That collaboration is specifically on renewables because it covers a broad range of skills. What you will find is that there is behind that an energy alliance between Cogent, ECITB and ourselves and that collaboration is both to try to make sure that government hears one voice from employers but also that employers hear one voice from government. It is very easy, if you have multiple bodies, for them to use slightly different language and it confuses employers immensely. Those collaborations are there and are getting stronger month by month. As we drive forward into doing real things it will get stronger again.
Q216 Sir Robert Smith: I suppose the advantage OPITO has is that it is a very focussed industry and the players in there are tightly enough bound together already that it was easier to get industry funding perhaps. For what you are trying to achieve there is a need for a government role because of the long term strategic benefits of the country.
Mr Corrigan: Let me not leave you with the impression that our employers are
mean with their own contributions to this.
I said earlier that as a sector skills council we get £1.7 billion core
funding. That is matched by income that
comes from our employers so employers are very definitely up for the challenge
and want to take it forward. The
increase in scope of work that I mentioned earlier insofar as the
Q217 Dr Turner: How are you getting around the obvious problem of matching the timing of producing people with the right skills - it does not happen overnight - with the availability of jobs? Are you convinced that there is sufficient pull out there to attract people to go into training knowing that there are attractive jobs in the industry for them to go to? Are all those things in place and, if not, how are you going to get them in place?
Mr Corrigan: They are definitely not all in place, that is for certain. The thrust of what you are saying is absolutely critical to us. There is no point in putting together programmes that do not deliver real jobs for real people. What we have done in the power sector - which is our part of the collaboration - is that we have worked with our power companies to say to them that if they look at the people they employ, they will know what their wastage factors are on a year by year basis, and they know when those people are going to retire. Therefore they have an idea over a 15 year period of where their manpower needs are going to be. We have invested quite heavily in quite sophisticate workforce planning models which helps them do that thinking. If you think you are going to lose Fred in two years' time and he has ten years' experience you are already too late to replace him, so you are going to need to upskill internally and begin to do the planning over a long period of time that tells companies where their issues are. The strength of that is that if you then add them all up you get a far better research base of knowledge about what the skills needs actually are. Also you begin to identify some of the issues that at a company level are not quite understood. When you ask employers where they are going to get these people from they will say that they will upskill a certain number from within, they will take a number of apprentices or graduates on and develop them and they will buy a certain number from the open market. However, when you add each company's assumption as to what they will buy from the open market and add them up, you end up with a huge black hole that is not understood at a company by company level but on a country level is a very real issue. By doing that work in a practical sense you begin to get the knowledge about where the jobs are and where replacements are needed and that allows you to talk intelligently to the economic regulator. It also means that you begin to have the modelling information to say that if we are going to go for this aspect of smart networking, where are the skills and what needs to be upskilled and you begin to have the modelling capability to actually identify where those skills are. From that solid base you can begin to do what you were challenging; you can begin to put together real knowledge about real jobs and make sure they get delivered. If the demand does not come through you know that the problem is just building up for next year and the year after and you can begin to make an influence and an impact on that.
Q218 Dr Turner: How are you going to deal with the SMEs in this picture? You referred to the fact, quite correctly, that most of the innovative stuff is being done by small to very small companies which might suddenly grow. How are you going to fit them into the picture?
Mr Corrigan: They are the hardest group because they are very time intensive and they require special care. In many ways the easiest way is by using something like a national skills academy because if you can put together industry standard training packages and then tweak that national availability of training capacity to the needs of SMEs and use both the supply chain and Train to Gain and any other facility you have to get out to those SMEs you will make life easier for them because what you offer them are a series of solutions on a plate. When they are not right - which they will not be the first time around - if you listen and modify and tinker them and get them right then gradually you will meet their needs directly. In all these things success breed success.
Chairman: Can we move now to the specific policies that may be required as far as plugging the skills gap is concerned. Colin?
Q219 Colin Challen: You state to us that "Skills shortages are already apparent" and I wonder if it is possible to put into numerical terms what is the current shortfall of these skilled workers is and what are the reasons for those particular shortages.
Mr Corrigan: You have put me on the spot and I would not be able to give you a decent answer. However, I will give you what I have easily to hand. We have put together a consortium; we have got some funding from DECC; we are going to do that research and we will get you an answer. However, if you look at just the traditional power side of the business, if you look at the needs of distribution, generation and metering in the power industry in the next five years the industry is going to need to bring on board 13,000 new people. In the five year regulatory period after that they are going to have to bring on 16,000 new people. In the regulatory period following that we are going to need to bring on 18,000 new people. What that means is that over the 15 year period we are likely to have to replace 90 per cent of the existing workforce because it is an ageing workforce. The problem that we have now is only going to get more and more difficult as the time goes on. It is not answering your question which is a bit unfortunate, but it sets the scene because if that industry is not able to deliver those skills then the drift into the renewable sector will be a good deal harder to achieve.
Q220 Colin Challen: Today we have the Renewable Energy Strategy launched; are you hopeful that there will be any significant announcements related to that which addresses the skills problem?
Mr Corrigan: I would love to see that naturally.
Q221 Colin Challen: Have you been consulted in the preparation or did you make a submission during the consultation period?
Mr Corrigan: We are talking regularly to the department yes, but we shall have to see what comes out of it.
Q222 Colin Challen: Do they recognise the problems that you have told them about?
Mr Corrigan: I do believe they do, yes. However, it is interesting that what I am saying to you is not unusual. The Council for Science and Technology reported last month on a national infrastructure for the 21st century and it said in its Summary, "The national infrastructure needs a skilled workforce and the responsibility for championing and developing a skilled workforce must be shared by business and Government." In its Recommendation seven the chapter on skills says, "The Sector Skills Councils, working with business, BIS and professional bodies urgently need to address the short-term gaps in the skills market and provide clear forecasts of the skills needed in the longer-term, and how these can be met." I think that what I am saying to you is beginning to be a commonly held view. The question is really how we can make it happen.
Q223 Colin Challen: I have to say that I am not really an expert in these matters, but with the mess surrounding colleges, Capital Programme, the LSC being disbanded or some of its functions being given back to local authorities and so on, I just cannot see how this national infrastructure is going to emerge. We just seem to be in this quagmire of changing priorities all the time.
Mr Corrigan: That is a subject that the employers in the industries I serve have difficulty in understanding. What they see is a national issue and they wish to address it on a national scale but as often as not, when it comes to implementing it, they get pushed away from national solutions down to more regional solutions and that national imperative gets weakened.
Q224 Colin Challen: Is it something that the industry looks to government to lead or does the industry itself believe it should lead in the creation of this national infrastructure? As you know, the government has tended in the past to allow the market to decide where the skills are required and it seems to me that that is always going to be a bit of a catch up process.
Mr Corrigan: I believe that where the employers are now they understand the gravity of what faces them over the next ten to 15 years and expect to be able to collaborate with government on making it happen. That is why what I just quoted fits exactly with what I hear from employers. They are willing to put their time, they are willing to put their enthusiasm, they are willing to put their money into this, they are willing to put their facilities into this, but to make it work it needs collaboration from government at a national and devolved nations level.
Q225 Colin Challen: Are there some international lessons that can be learned from our competitors abroad? Germany has a declared industrial strategy, for example, developing photovoltaic electricity and has created something like 300,000 jobs in the renewables sector. What lessons could we learn from people like that or others in the European Union?
Mr Corrigan: What you are talking about is the way that technologies have been supported in their implementation. They have a head start on us therefore have more training facilities in place and the evidence says that that is where our British employers are going to train their people.
Q226 Colin Challen: When you say training facilities, are these paid for by companies or jointly between companies and government or largely by the government?
Mr Corrigan: Within other countries I cannot comment, I do not know the details. However, the evidence from our research says that renewable companies, when they want to train people specifically in the renewable area, tend to send their people overseas because the training facilities have a head start on us, are focussed and deliver what the employers want. We have to catch up with that.
Q227 Mike Weir: Just to come back to a point Des was making about the SMEs, when we had evidence from the Energy Saving Trust we heard that there was a difficulty at a local level, particularly in micro-renewables, in getting qualified local electricians and other people to fit these. Given that the government's Renewables Strategy is almost certain to look to more micro-renewables, feed-in tariffs and things of that nature, how do we get skills down to a very local level to enable people to have these? A national skills academy may not be of great benefit to the one or two man operations all tied into the north of Scotland?
Mr Corrigan: I understand the problem because within our footprint we have the gas utilisation sector so therefore one of the groups we work with are the people who are on what is now called the Gas Safe register (which used to be called Corgi). We have worked and delivered welfare to work programmes, for example, with micro-businesses from that sector. We believe that in fact there is a huge opportunity there because you have on those sort of registers knowledge about who the employers are, who they employ, what skills they have already and therefore it provides you with a solid base for encouraging those small companies, if you put the right sort of funding behind it, to upskill to be able to meet those requirements. If you do it in a planned fashion you will find out from those 120,000 people who the early adopters are from the skills development side and you can encourage and work with them to strengthen their capability and make them the stronger part of that network of micro-businesses. I believe it is eminently do-able and in fact I believe it is really important that we do do it, but it does take more time, more energy and more effort to deliver than to persuade a larger company to take an equivalent number of people on.
Q228 Mike Weir: You talked about the difficulties in the college sector. At least in Scotland many apprentices do part of their time at a local college. I just wonder how you see the interface, if you like, between the local colleges providing that apprenticeship training and national skills academies and the possibility of using local colleges to provide that training to apprenticeships and established small businesses.
Mr Corrigan: The
Q229 Chairman: Turning to the question of investment in the skilled workforce we have been talking about and investing in the changes in available skills, do you think it is a valid criticism of perhaps the renewable and new green technologies industry that there are calls for government to invest in all this skills training and development? Should we not just say that you are going to benefit greatly, apparently, from the developments in green technologies and renewable energy technologies, stump up the investment yourselves.
Mr Corrigan: Let me step back and give you a bit of personal information. I lived overseas for three years working on a power project in another part of the world. I lived in a society where the water supply was not available 24 hours a day and where the electricity supply was not secure. The challenge that faces us as a country is to make sure that the lights stay on, clean water is there and the dirty water is taken away. If we do not invest in that infrastructure it will have a major debilitating impact on the way our society develops in the future. That is the downside. The upside is that there is a huge opportunity here for us as a country to take a lead in this area and to develop the skills of what is going to be a very large industry around the world. Instead of following, if we are in a position to lead there is a huge opportunity for this country. Looking at my own family, that is an opportunity I would like to see us take up. The real answer to your question is that there are times when, in bringing in change, government can pump prime and help things happen and there are times when large employers will quite happily pay for what they need. When you talk about the SMEs their job is considerably harder and they do not have the resources, ability, training departments or knowledge to make these things happen. A little bit of support goes a long way.
Q230 Chairman: Do you think there are particular effects and impacts currently even on a wider basis for the larger companies of the downturn in demand and therefore a knock-on effect so far as considerations of longer term investment are concerned? How might that affect your view, as you have said, of priming the pump of investment for the future?
Mr Corrigan: I think there are whole parts of the industry that are feeling that pinch and are taking a deep breath before making decisions and they are finding some of those investment decisions not easy to make and I understand that. However, what I have seen of the power industry over the last three or four years says that there is an industry here that knows just how steep the challenge ahead is and knows that they cannot delay because the issues are too big.
Q231 Chairman: Are there particular areas within that overall picture that you have identified or can identify which should particularly be prioritised in terms of that kind of pump priming investment? If you had to say here are three or four areas that particularly need that investment right now in order to move us forward and seize those opportunities you have mentioned, which sort of areas would they be?
Mr Corrigan: It depends which purpose you are after. If what you want to do is to make sure that skills are developing the long term need then for me where you would focus your investment is in making the collaboration among sector skills councils work, giving them a little bit of resource to develop a mixture of qualifications, working out the problem of how you use two or three different awarding bodies to deliver a different mix of qualifications and consulting with the various training providers around the country to build solutions and processes that will deliver in the medium term. What I would do is open up to some representative from the sector skills side into the longer term thinking because I would put the infrastructure in place and I would make the network of national skills academies deliver for you. If, however, what you are actually talking about are how you improve the employment capability in this area, then I would say to you that my understanding of the industry at the moment is that if you ask employers to take new people on at this point in time it is more difficult, but if you wish to plan for an improvement in the economy and the recovery you would plan now for the training programmes that will meet their needs as the economy begins to improve. I have to tell you that when we ran Ambition Energy we ran a 26 week training programme because we wanted people that had a reasonable level of skills. This industry needs higher level skills than people in JobcentrePlus. If you wish to move volumes of people you train people to go into shops and into low level jobs. In this sector you have to train and invest more heavily in higher level skills for people who are going to take on careers.
Q232 Sir Robert Smith: Do you think the market has maybe been slow to respond in a way because they have not had clear enough signals from the government that there will be a low carbon demand in this country? Until they can be confident of the roll out of low carbon technologies they are not going to invest in the UK supplier.
Mr Corrigan: There is bound to be some of that, but in reality what is needed is something that takes the aspirations into something which will be delivered and seen on the ground. It is creating that sort of infrastructure that will allow us to move forward more quickly. At this point in time, for many employers, it just looks too difficult a job to do and I do not believe that is the case.
Q233 Sir Robert Smith: In your answers you have mentioned that quite a few of the organisations you work with are working in an area of regulated business.
Mr Corrigan: Yes.
Q234 Sir Robert Smith: How alive or effective are the regulators in ensuring that that regulated environment is not holding back or, even more so, is driving forward the reality that those industries need to invest in their skills?
Mr Corrigan: If you think about where I am coming from, I need to persuade people; the regulator just needs to look in an area and people jump. The power of the regulator is quite significant. Having said that, the workforce planning modelling work that I was telling you about before was largely done so that the industry was in a position to say to the regulator, "We have a problem and investment in skills is something that you should allow". As they worked through the numbers they were quite shocked at both the magnitude of the problem but also how it grows over not the next five year regulatory period but beyond. Individually as companies they have gone to the regulator and the regulator has listened to them. I believe that the regulator is doing some useful work in this area without a shadow of a doubt because it is on the agenda; it is what the distribution companies are talking to the economic regulator about. As I say, I need to cajole people; the regulator can just look and things can happen, so I recognise the power that the regulator has.
Q235 Sir Robert Smith: As long as the regulator is looking.
Mr Corrigan: Yes.
Chairman: Can we now move to the question of attracting and retaining a diverse workforce in the low carbon technologies sector? Mike?
Q236 Mike Weir: In your memorandum you say that no renewables specific apprenticeships currently exist. Can you tell us what actions are required to encourage a larger intake of young people in the low carbon technologies industry? Is there sufficient work for specific low carbon apprenticeships at the moment?
Mr Corrigan: It often sounds to me a bit like the chicken and egg. If there are apprenticeships available that have been designed by employers for employers then if that is available employers will take people from there. The people looking at careers in the industry will say that that has industry backing and therefore if they go and do that apprenticeship they can get a job locally but also anywhere else in the country because it is recognised. To a certain extent making those things happen actually encourages employers meeting up with aspirant employees and developing and pushing forward this whole training issue.
Q237 Mike Weir: How do you see your focus? Do you see yourself as upskilling the existing workforce to work in the new technologies or do you yourself providing skills for new entrants into these technologies?
Mr Corrigan: Without a shadow of a doubt we need to do both. The nature of the problem is so extensive that one solution will not fit all and the demographics say that there will be fewer people coming out of school in the future so therefore you are going to have to be much cleverer in the way you attract people into the industry and you will take them from a variety of sources. It is creating those pathways and making sure that you look after the interests of the individuals because they are not just a locally agreed arrangement between an employer and a college but have a national standing. To do that effectively I have to pull together eight bodies. It is by no means impossible; in fact it is absolutely essential. The power industry is traditionally a white male bastion of employment and the tremendous thing about the renewables sector is that it is very attractive to women in particular and that allows us to change the demographics not only over the renewable sector but over the broader power sector because, as a bunch of employers, they need to attract from the whole of the population of the country and not just the traditional areas that they have in the past. There is a huge opportunity there.
Q238 Mike Weir: That is very interesting because speaking to one power country they were talking about graduates and the number of graduates coming forward and the bulk of them wanted to go to the renewables sector rather than the traditional sector because it was seen as sexy. Is that something you find fairly widespread?
Mr Corrigan: Our research says that that is a common perception and therefore something to be used because there is a benefit to be had by it.
Q239 Mike Weir: Is there a mirror image to that of an emerging workforce within the power industry that may lead to problems down the line in existing power generation rather than renewables? Do you not have to get the balance right?
Mr Corrigan: Absolutely. What the
employers have done is to come together and researched how the public, how the
career advisors, how the parents perceive the power industry. From that they have decided that that is an
issue that they need to address.
Therefore one of the increases in scope that they have put into the
Q240 Mike Weir: The industry is very diverse. There is a big difference perhaps between wind generation for power, coal or whatever. There is clearly a difference in the way people perceive the various types of energy generation. Is the industry being successful in promoting energy generation as opposed to specific parts of it?
Mr Corrigan: At this point in time it is clear that the industry is not successful at all in promoting the whole sector. You can do that in part by developing the renewables side or if you can do it simply by explaining to people what opportunities there are because the industry that the research says people see and the industry that I see are two totally different career opportunities.
Q241 Mike Weir: You have talked about diversity of workforce and I was very encouraged to hear what you said about that. Do you think there is anything government can do to promote increasing diversity, perhaps through public procurement or from industries that demonstrate a greater diversity in working practice?
Mr Corrigan: The answer is always yes.
Let me give you an anecdote. Four
or five years ago we ran the welfare to work programme called Ambition Energy
and one of the things we tested was the idea of training lone parents to go and
work as gas installers. You may say that
is common sense because the majority of people who open the door that they
knock on is the lady of the house but the person who is on the other side is
usually a man. We developed a programme
and we needed to be sure that they would be employed. We chose an area of
Chairman: You have mentioned one very interesting training delivery mechanism, shall we say. Perhaps we can turn to the wider aspect of delivery mechanisms and particularly thinking about the small and medium enterprises that we have been talking about a little earlier. Robert?
Q242 Sir Robert Smith: You have mentioned the difficulties for the SMEs and in your submission you talked about learning from the successful Scottish construction skills model and the problems of the Train to Gain initiative.
Mr Corrigan: I very carefully did not say the "problems"; I said the more "problematic". If I can explain the difference in approach which is where devolved nations and working with them can be tremendous, what the Scottish Government said was that they wanted to encourage the development of construction skills within their area and they were willing to set some funds aside. We will give you some ground rules as to how to apply them but you go out to your employers, identify what the skills needs are, prioritise them and if we are comfortable with them you then go and make them happen. What we were in a position to do was to go to employers, understand their skills needs and work with them and local training providers to meet those needs to their priorities. They were not targeted on the fact that it has to be so many level twos and so many level threes; it was what employers wanted. My example is smart metering. Installing 20,000 meters a day for the next ten years requires a whole range of upskilling of people. If Train to Gain could take that as a remit you could go out to the 120,000 individuals who are on the Gas Safe register and say, "There is this big job opportunity coming up; there is some funding to help you upskill it and these are the programmes you can go and take" and that would give that whole process a main momentum. If, in the process, you were able to actually work behind the scenes to deliver the back filling opportunity you have created not only the skills to do the new bit but you have supported the skills that are needed, providing employment, et cetera, et cetera. Interestingly enough you have also identified who the early adopters are so next time there is a major technology change you go to them first. There is a structure that can be built. Train to Gain is delivered through intermediaries therefore we cannot be in that position; because it is focussed on delivering level twos or level threes we were told that smart metering would not be a priority. I understand where the government department is coming from because it has a set of targets, but I have the difficulty of then going back to the employers and saying, "Can't do it" and they say, "Why?" The intermediary tries to make that dialogue work.
Q243 Sir Robert Smith: In the rules of Train to Gain they tick boxes to make sure that public money is being carefully used. Would there be a way of getting a level two or level three on the incremental training or should they try and alter the bureaucracy?
Mr Corrigan: At the end of the day for me, if you give the employer the skills they want to do the job they will come back and they will do more of it therefore I am less worried about whether it hits a qualification and more whether it does the job. Employers are not interested in qualifications; they are interested in skills. It is not how many GCSEs or how many PhDs have you got, it is can you do the job that I have in front of me. I am more inclined to that end then necessarily ticking the boxes.
Q244 Sir Robert Smith: If you do not have a bit of paper with a specific qualification, do you have some kind of authentication that you have the skills?
Mr Corrigan: I do not wish to throw money at training for the sake of training either. I want somebody who comes out with a set of skills that are recognised across the industry. I do not want to send somebody on a three week course because that does not help man nor beast. That individual I also need to look after so that when they have been through that training, if that employer does not suit them they are in a position to go and work for another employer but still deploy those skills. You have to look after both needs. It is a matter of policy priorities. If you really wanted to drive forward in this agenda one of the things I would suggest you might consider is having a small group - a small task force - that met periodically just to understand the difficulties of different priorities of different departments and help overcome them. Those sorts of things have been really quite successful in the past in driving change so that would be another of my suggestions.
Q245 Colin Challen: A lot of the new technologies, renewables and low carbon technologies will be developed by small companies and perhaps coming out of a cottage industry. SMEs sometimes puts a bit of a corporate gloss on the idea, but a lot of these companies are cottage insurance. How can we deliver the best training for them that meets their needs? Some of the larger companies can meet their own training needs probably from within their own resource, but do our mechanisms at the moment in delivering training actually deliver for the cottage industry end of the scale?
Mr Corrigan: No, not in a coordinated fashion. The evidence says that the smaller company will develop people on the job so they will learn by doing rather than learn in any systemic fashion. For most of us that is how we learn many of our life skills. However, it does not get you there in the quickest fashion. The problem with SMEs is that you have to have people who can listen to them attentively, put things in place and revise them as they work or they do not work. You have to do it with a bunch of people who do not have the time to deliver training; they do not have the time to talk to their local FE college; they do not have the time to really spend the amount of effort that a training department for a larger company can operate. One of the successes that we had with the Ambition Energy welfare to work plan was because we set ourselves out as the project manager to provide the glue for employers that would not look after the things that the larger company has a training department for. We had a project manager who ran those projects and did those things for the SMEs, but that makes it an expensive programme. We would argue that the evidence from that programme says it delivered tremendous value and delivered a good return for the financial purse, but dealing with SMEs effectively is a more labour intensive and more expensive option. However, I do not believe it is something you can ignore because, as you say, for a whole number of industries they are some of the growth companies of the future.
Q246 Colin Challen: Is Train to Gain of value to the smallest companies, do you think, or is it not bespoke enough to deliver value?
Mr Corrigan: Our experience within our sector is that the penetration of Train to Gain is very poor. That is true of the large companies; it is especially true of the smaller companies. There are ways of making these things work, it just needs the will. It does need the time and effort to listen to what employers want and develop the capabilities to meet those needs. The importance of listening is that you have to listen to a large number of SMEs before you understand properly the patterns that are evolving because one company's need will sound very different from another company's needs. You have to spend the time talking to these people to understand what their real needs are and how best to support them. I believe that that is part of our future in this area.
Q247 Chairman: Mr Corrigan, you have given us an hour of your time and a wide ranging and useful series of contributions and answers to questions on what is clearly going to be a very important element of consideration in the future low carbon technology economy. We are very grateful for your time this morning. Thank you.
Mr Corrigan: Thank you for the opportunity; it has been more enjoyable than I feared!