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Pat McFadden MP, Minister for Business, Innovation and Skills
1 Victoria Street, 20 July 2009
Why have we brought these two departments together? It’s not about having a sort of grandiose empire for our Secretary of State. It’s not about that at all. It’s about understanding the role of knowledge in the economy and about an activist approach built around that.
And, while there is an immense job for us to do what we can on the real help front – on making the sure that banks are lending, on the aid scheme that we’ve got for business, on the work we’re doing on the transitional loan fund and the enterprise finance guarantee, all things of immense importance in the short term – there is also a job in the longer term which is about having a view of our economic future.
And, when I think about that, what it’s really about is not individual companies but capability. It’s about where we want to see our capabilities. Take this morning’s announcement from Nissan, for example, that they are going to locate their battery plant in the North East. This is about us having a national capability in terms of the next generation of low carbon vehicles.
So our rationale for bringing together the Department in this way was that we would try to shape the economic future in a way that would enhance Britain’s capability in certain key areas. That’s what New Industries, New Jobs is about. It sets out where we believe some of those capabilities should be, be that in digital low carbon, life sciences, or advanced manufacturing – the kinds of thing we have been publishing policy statements on since we published New Industry, New Jobs two or three months ago.
Then, on the other side of that, there’s who gets to take part. We can create a lot of national capability but if our own workforce can’t take part in it we will be letting down the public. You know when I think about the digital strategy, for example, Stephen Carter summed it up very well when he said, “if we don’t do this there will be a quarter to a third of the country that will simply miss out on how Britain is run these days”.
And believe me, when you represent a constituency like mine in the heart of the industrial black country, that feeling of being left out of the economic future is very tangible for a lot of people. So a critical part of our job description as a Department – and all the organisations represented here that we work with – is to make sure we give people the maximum opportunity to take part in the economic future that we’re trying to create.
So when it comes to the skills strategy, when it comes to participation in higher education, when it comes to the future of Further Education, apprenticeships – that whole side of what we do – all of that is about opportunity and it’s absolutely critical to what we do.
And then there’s our role as government. We all know that the public expenditure picture in the future is going to look different in its trajectory to what we’ve seen in recent years. The public get this.
Firstly we, as a government, are borrowing more money because of the recession. You can have a political argument about how much that borrowing should be – whether we’re borrowing the right things and all the rest of it – but we are borrowing more money as a result of the recession. And we know that there’s a bill to be paid. And again you can have a political argument about the timescale over which you pay that bill and your priorities within it and so on. I don’t intend to rehearse that here but I think the public know both of those things.
And so, as government organisations, this means that, to one degree or another, with one set of priorities or another, government and universities, colleges and government agencies, Companies House, the Insolvency Service, all the people represented here, are going to be asked to be more efficient and going to be asked to rethink processes.
And that’s where I think some of the work on transformational government is important. Let me give you a small example from an area where I’ve been involved a lot over the past two years – on the employment rights front.
For no particular rhyme nor reason, but because of the historical chapter-by-chapter way that legislation grows, we’ve got five different phone numbers you can ring if you’ve got an employment rights problem. You ring one number if it’s the minimum wage, you ring another number if you work in the agriculture sector, you ring another number if it’s a health and safety problem and so on and so forth.
So we said that is ridiculous. We’re going to transfer the burden of navigating the system from the person to the Government. And, in future, there will be one number and the government will take on itself the burden of working out how to help that person once they’ve rung that number. And we will, to take a phrase that I’ve learned from the skills agenda, “hide the wiring” so that they don’t have to worry about that. And we will do that for them. That’s already live and it will officially launch in September.
And I think that this is very, very important in terms of the Government’s interaction with the public here. We live in a world where quite rightly expectations rise. Where people expect more from us. Where the concept of opening hours is becoming somewhat obsolete.
So when I phoned this employment relations helpline the other day this fellow answered. He said “hi can I help you? I said: “My name is Pat. I’m the minister. I just phoned to see if you were really there.” He was quite pleased. He said: “Yes” and I said: “Well, what are your opening hours?” He said: “We’re open 8 to 8 and 9 till 1 Saturday.” And that is good. We are there when people really need us, not just when we want to be.
So I am glad that we’ve set it up – not only as one number but as one that’s available in a time when we really need it.
My concluding point is we can’t do all this from this building. We have to have the enthusiasm, the buy-in and the real shared ownership of all the organisations represented in this room. I do think we have an exciting agenda here because we are being more active, we are saying that we’re unembarrassed about having a view about our national economic capability. It’s not a dirty word. We can say it.
But we can only achieve this more active economic future and this agenda about opportunity with the buy-in from everybody here. I think it is tremendously exciting. I think it is permeating through the rest of government. When I look at the announcements from elsewhere, be it in the Department of Transport, Department of Energy and Climate Change and so on, we’ve got a real opportunity to have the philosophy of this Department really take hold elsewhere in Government too. We will need everyone here to help make this work.
