Consensus but not action: the debate around skills
Surprising absolutely no one, City A.M came out in favour of the Conservatives yesterday morning. The Tories have been running a business-heavy campaign, from senior business leaders through SMEs to small startups. Our own research shows that UK Captains of Industry would prefer today’s polls to return a Conservative majority rather than any other outcome, by a ratio of 3:1. But even with the Tories in charge, the majority of business leaders don’t feel that politicians understand business and our final poll is showing that today is unlikely to bring the results that business leaders crave. Instead, they may end up presenting their demands to Chuka Umunna and a Labour government. Our Captains of Industry survey gives a hint towards what those demands might look like: Captains say that the biggest issues facing their businesses are the impact of regulation and finding and retaining the right staff.
I wrote about MPs’ opinions on regulation last year and certainly it is an area which has always concerned Conservatives more than Labour. This time, I want to focus on the skills shortage.
Much has been made of the shortage of workers with skills in key areas, especially technical expertise. From the old giants like Shell and IBM to the upstarts whose companies were inconceivable ten years ago, the key will be bridging the gap between the skills we have now and the skills we will need in the future. But do MPs and candidates grasp the issue?
Encouragingly for business leaders, when we asked both current MPs and prospective parliamentary candidates (PPCs) what they felt was the most important issue facing British business, they overwhelmingly highlighted the skills shortage. Concern has been growing among MPs for some time; after five years of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, it has overtaken overregulation and the general economic condition as the most pressing issue. Perhaps more noteworthy, there is a cross-party consensus on this issue and both current and potential future MPs are in agreement. As one Labour MP put it, “For British industry to be competitive in international markets, if we haven’t got the requisite skills, it is going to be a significant problem for us.”
In the election campaign, where politicians have talked about upskilling the British workforce, the focus has been on efforts to increase apprenticeships and accompanying trade qualifications. Unfortunately, this won’t help businesses which need to plug gaps in all areas of technical expertise. However, there are also signs of encouraging investment in STEM and digital skills from both UK parties and the European Commission. Labour have promised a long-term funding policy framework for science and innovation, while the Tories and Lib Dems have both said they would ringfence the science budget. Conservatives have also promised an extra £2.9 billion for their Great Challenges Fund, which hopes to benefit both public and private sector. Meanwhile, the European Commission is leading the bombastically named Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs to tackle the lack of digital skills in Europe.
Less has been said about so-called ‘soft skills’ like time management, personal communication and commercial acumen. It is here that Westminster feels that business has a role to play: one Liberal Democrat MP claimed that too many businesses prefer a “parasite mode where they simply live on the training that others have done”. It is also the only way for business to ensure that it is getting the skills it really needs. Addressing the skills shortage will take work from both government and industry, with the government investing in technical training and industry moulding commercial skills. Whichever party forms a government this week, business leaders should feel reassured that it will work with them to solve this problem.
Ipsos’s MPs survey runs twice annually. Ipsos’s Captains of Industry survey runs annually.
