Engineering Skills (Perkins Review)

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Tuesday 10th December 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Iain Wright]

Absolutely. I was about to mention how important Airbus was as well. However, there are other sectors; we are not just wings and wheels. We have food and drink manufacturing—the biggest manufacturing sector in the country—as well as construction, life sciences, chemicals and great engineering in the energy sector. There is also a real ambition to have 10% of the global space industry by 2030. Those are all things that we will be using for our competitive advantage in the future.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

In JCB, there is also one of the major construction equipment manufacturers in the world. Just last week, it announced 2,500 extra new jobs in Staffordshire, bringing some of its supply chain back to the UK. It is a privately owned company —a world-beating one at that—investing right here in the UK.

[Mr Iain Wright]

That is certainly something to be encouraged. I want to see how the supply chain of manufacturing can be enhanced to ensure that we can have that reshoring back to the UK as much as possible. We have the need for an economic, competitive edge, but we will also be trying to solve big social issues in the 21st century such as climate change, the transition to a low carbon economy, an ageing population and tackling resource scarcity for food, clean water and energy. All that requires engineering skills, so the ambition must be nothing short of making 21st-century Britain an engineering nation.

However, that enormous opportunity is not being matched with a commensurate supply of engineers coming on stream. As the hon. Member for Mid Worcestershire said—I want to reiterate the figures, because they are striking—EngineeringUK states that the UK will need 87,000 people a year at level 4 over the next decade to meet demand, let alone to make sure that we can have expansion. However, the country has seen only about 51,000 and the number of level 3 engineering-related apprenticeships has actually dropped. We have an annual demand of about 69,000 but, as the hon. Gentleman said, the numbers are about a third of that and are falling.

Research by Matchtech in the past couple of weeks showed that three quarters of engineers lacked confidence in the Government’s action to encourage innovation in the UK—that is up from last year—and more than half said that they were willing to leave the UK and find work abroad. Despite the welcome news about economic statistics, 54% of engineers believe that the state of the British economy is negatively affecting the industry—up a full 10 percentage points on the previous year. There is an immediate and urgent need to do something about the issue.

There have been four broad themes today and I want to touch on those. Every speaker has mentioned the perception, image and culture of engineering, and they have been right to do so. Britain is the nation of James Watt, Richard Arkwright, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Frank Whittle, but I fear that this country does not value the status of engineers. It is deeply dispiriting that, when people are asked to name an engineer, the most recognisable in our country is Kevin Webster from “Coronation Street”. That sort of view reinforces stereotypes and prejudices that engineering and manufacturing are often literally backstreet, low skilled and low paid, rather than highly skilled, well paid and innovative.