Jobs and the workforce
In the latest episode of Committee Corridor we continue our look at the cost-of-living crisis and its effect on the workforce.
The Care Quality Commission has warned that understaffing in the NHS poses a serious risk to staff and patient safety. There are around 300,000 vacancies across the health and social care system, and school leaders say they're having to rip up their budgets and rewrite them, as they grapple with rising costs and energy bills, and the prospect of further cuts.
To examine the situation further, host Darren Jones spoke to Christina McAnea, the head of UNISON, one of the UK’s largest trade unions with over a million members in the private and public sector. In the second half of the episode he's joined by Ian Mearns, Labour MP for Gateshead and a longtime member of the education committee, and Greg Smith, the Conservative MP for Buckingham who sits on the transport committee.
Transcript
Darren: A tight labour market with high vacancy levels and low levels of unemployment, pay which isn't keeping pace with inflation, and significant unrest, as employees and employers try to find a way forward. Welcome to Committee Corridor.
In this series, we're looking at the cost-of-living crisis, and in this episode, we're looking at jobs and the workforce. I'm Darren Jones, and I chair the Commons Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee.
Here on Committee Corridor, we bring the unique point of view of select committees, to bear on the biggest issue of the day. We work across political party lines, calling for evidence, questioning the key people, and making recommendations to ministers who must respond.
Later, I'll be talking to two members of Parliament from the Education and Transport Select Committees. Ian Mearns is the Labour MP for Gateshead. And Greg Smith is the Conservative MP for Buckingham.
But first, the Care Quality Commission has been warning that understaffing in the NHS, poses a serious risk to staff and patient safety. There are around 300,000 vacancies across the health and social care system. School leaders say they're having to rip up their budgets and rewrite them, as they grapple with rising costs and energy builds, and the prospect of further cuts.
Unison is the largest trade union in the UK. Its General Secretary is Christina McAnea.
Darren: So Christina, I know there's always a bit of competition between the trade unions but I think I'm right in saying that UNISON is the largest trade union in the UK. Is that right?
Christina: We are, yes. And we have been for a few years. So we've got about 1.3 million members in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Darren: So tell me about those members, Christina. Who are they and what do they do?
Christina: So we are predominantly a public sector union. Our big areas are local government, education and health. We're the main union in local government. We're the main union in the health service, the NHS. But we also have members that cover a range of different public services, so that would include food hygiene, the Environment Agency, we have members who work in the voluntary sector, we have some members who work in the private sector, and we have members who work in energy, transport, oh and water, we have members who work in the water sector as well.
Darren: So you're in touch with millions of workers across a whole swathe of different sectors, and we've been talking about the cost of living crisis as the theme for this series of Committee Corridor. And we've already been discussing how inflation is around 10% more than has been for the past 20 years, where it's been around 2%. So the cost of living crisis must be affecting all of your members.
Christina: All of them. And in the past we would normally expect to get calls from members who were perhaps at the lower paid end, so the cleaners, catering staff, porters in hospitals, classroom support staff, usually low paid and they find it difficult to manage on the wages they're already earning. But now I'd say we're getting calls and we are getting in feedback from social workers, from library staff, from our environment agency workers, from a whole range of staff who are in that kind of £30,000 to £40,000 bracket, who we wouldn’t normally have had that feedback from.
And just to give you an example, in the NHS, almost 30% of NHS employers now provide food banks for their staff, and another 20% are planning to set them up. And this came not from the union, this came from NHS Providers, which is the main employers organisation. And if you'd asked me five years ago if that was likely to happen, I wouldn't have believed it, but that's the reality.
Darren: And if you're a higher earner, you might not go out for dinner as much, or you might not go on holiday as often in the year because you've got to pay for these core essential items with the higher prices that are coming through because of inflation. But if you're not a higher earner, you just don't have that flexibility in your budget to pay the bills. The money has to come from somewhere, and that's presumably why you are asking for pay rises for your members.
Christina: Yes, so that's what I was saying. Even for those members who earn between the kind of £30k to £40k bracket, they're now saying to us, not only will it mean no holidays, they're actually worrying about things like food. They're worrying about school uniforms for their children, they're worrying about Christmas coming up, but for the lower paid, it was always a stretch. There's no money left over. It's very much a hand to mouth existence, and even that now is pushing.
So we are getting feedback from people telling us about a quarter of the people who responded to the survey we did recently, said they'd all skipped meals and were planning to do so in the future. They were going to food banks, they were prioritising their children over themselves, as you would, in terms of where they were spending their money, and they were just cutting back on absolutely everything. They weren't putting heating on, they were keeping it on for a very short period of time, they were looking at how they cooked food and whether there was ways that they could save energy in the way that we cook food.
We're also hearing from employers about things like, when it comes to the end of the pay-month as they approach a payday, absence levels going up because people just can't afford to pay either the transport costs or the petrol to fill up their car if they use a car.
I was up in Blackpool recently, meeting some members who were on strike in the Blackpool South Cumbria and Lancashire Hospital Trust. And these were catering workers who work for a privatised company called OCS. So they work alongside NHS workers but they don't get the same pay and conditions as that the NHS workers get. They get statutory minimum sick leave, statutory minimum annual leave, that sort of thing.
And one of the women was telling me, so I was on the picket line, and I said to her, "How did you get here so early?" It was like half six in the morning. And she said, "Oh, I walk to work," she said, "I always walk to work." She lives an hour away so an hour walk there and an hour's walk back every day when she's working and she said "I just can't afford the bus fare." And that's the day-to-day reality for people who are on low incomes. That's a huge percentage of people... In-work poverty affects a huge percentage of people who are still actually still working and earning a living.
Darren: And these stories are heartbreaking for everybody to hear. I'm convinced that the vast majority of the British public don't want our nurses and our teachers and our social care workers and all the others to be living in these circumstances. But it also affects everybody, because if your teachers and your nurses and others are not in circumstances in which they can care for our relatives, or teach our children or help us in the best possible circumstances, that affects everybody, doesn't it?
Christina: It affects everybody because of the quality of the work that they probably feel they're able to give. But the fact that there is no money to pay public sector workers, and these are essential workers, these are the people who worked all through the pandemic. These are the people who turned up to work before we even knew we would have a vaccine, they were still turning up to their work every day, face to face contact with people.
Christina: If you think of care workers, for example… we've got about 180,000 care workers in membership. And if you think about what they went through -- most of them are still on the minimum wage. And it affects their ability to do the job, therefore that affects the service users who depend on them. But it's an indication of the fact that these services aren't being funded properly.
Just now we are talking to our NHS workers. So when we talk to our nurses, paramedics, healthcare assistants, the admin staff, and the people who sterilise equipment, there's a whole range of different jobs. This is a big issue for them, if they vote for strike action, it's not something you do often or want to do.
But they also feel they're doing it for the service, because it's got so bad, that actually taking that kind of action is not just about pay for them, it's also about highlighting the problems within those particular services. And if the services are rundown, that's not good for the British public and that's a message we put out all the time.
There's lots of evidence as well, that shows public services actually help revive the economy.
Businesses can't run without effective public services. And the workers in them are more likely to spend their money in the local economy. They're more likely to go to the local shop, they're more likely to buy shoes for their children in the local shop, they're more likely to go to the local leisure centre or the local cafe. And that's what keeps the local economy going. If people can't afford to spend their money in local shops and businesses, they're the ones that go out of business. They go bust.
Darren: One of the things that we're looking at on the select committee at the moment is around the levels of unemployment, which are very low. If you look at the statistics at the moment, there's some interesting dynamics around lots of people leaving the labour market, especially those over 50. But when the government talks about wanting to hire more nurses or police officers, I often question, "Well, where are they? Where are people available to do that work?"
At a constituency level, I've heard that nurses who have been offered jobs choose to go elsewhere because as you've mentioned, they might not be able to afford to live in a particular area or to pay for the transport to get there or for parking during the day because we still don't give free parking to staff on NHS sites and so on and so forth. This must also have an impact on those working in public services because the amount of work they're being asked to do is presumably higher because they can't hire the additional people to help them out.
Christina: I mean there's huge vacancies. So there's over 130,000 vacancies in the NHS. There's over 160,000 vacancies in the Care service. And I'll just mention those two in particular because that has a huge impact on people's lives if you can't get access to these services. There's not banks and banks of nurses just waiting to pick up a job. If they want to work in nursing, there's a job for them and if they've chosen to go elsewhere, they're unlikely to come back to a job like nursing which is incredibly stressful for relatively low levels of pay.
I was on a TV programme recently with the chairman of Tesco and he was actually apologising for the fact that his company, his shops are taking on ex-NHS workers because people are leaving the NHS to go and work there because they can get more money. And that's a dreadful situation to be in where people can leave what is a stressful job as a healthcare assistant or a nurse and go and get more money because you can go and work in a supermarket. It's not that it's an easy job to work in a supermarket. It's a different level of stress, and you can get more money for it.
That just can't be good for society, that we've got people leaving our essential services to go and work in retail because they can get more money. Tesco have paid their staff two pay increases this year to reflect the fact that there's a huge cost of living crisis. In fact, most of the big retailers have given their staff two pay increases this year, and that's how they're holding on to them. And that's how Amazon is holding onto their warehouse staff. When you're in the private sector, you've got an element of leverage with the employers. As in if you're still making profits, please give some to the workforce. There's an economic argument there.
If you're in the public sector, you rely on the government to fund them and therefore, government has to release funds to enable money to be paid to the workforce. And if that doesn't happen, then you will see an exodus of staff.
And one of our big groups in UNISON are paramedics. Huge shortages of paramedics, trained and qualified paramedics. I mean I know of ambulance trusts that have gone out to Australia and New Zealand to try and recruit people to come over here and work in the ambulance service. It's incredibly stressful, incredibly draining, they hardly ever take their breaks. They work their normal break days because they're asked to come in to cover. There isn't enough staff to work the shifts that are required. They feel they're working at absolute breaking point at the moment. So where will these trained staff come from? I haven't the faintest idea unless there's a huge investment in actually bringing people through.
Darren: And I can see how competitive pay that allows people to pay their bills is going to be one way of getting people into the workforce. What else should the government be doing to kind of incentivise or to help people come in and help us in our public services?
Christina: Well, in some services, it is about money. It's about making sure there's enough investment, so the NHS for example.
In other services like the care service, it's also about the value you place on that. So at the moment, the majority of staff who work in the care service are on £9.50 an hour. And they don't feel that it's seen as a proper career, or one that people want to get into because for most organisations, there is no career structure.So if you're a care worker who's started two weeks ago, and you're doing relatively simple tasks, and you're a care worker who's worked there five years and you're working with the difficult patients or care users, you're expected to go in and work with people with complex codependency needs, et cetera, and you need really good skills to do that.
You'll be on virtually the same pay if not exactly the same pay as the person who started two weeks ago because there is no career structure. There's no grade structure. There's no recognition of the different levels of jobs within things like care and that's a huge disincentive for people to get into that sector. So that's why you get turnover rates of 40% and that can't be good economically for the employers in that sector, let alone what it does to the service users.
Christina: But even for employers, if you're constantly having to replenish your staffing, you're constantly having to get them induction training and basic training, that has a drain on your finances. And wouldn't it be better to pay them more money in order to encourage them to stay in that sector? It's a win-win if you can get that organised and you can get that working but it needs an incentive.
Darren: And we've talked about nurses and care workers and paramedics, but UNISON also represents a lot of education staff helping out in our schools across the country. Are there any particular dynamics in the school setting that we need to be thinking about?
Christina: Yes. So our members tend to be the school support staff and the same in universities and colleges. So a lot of our members will work as teaching assistants or classroom assistants and they work specifically with, usually children with special needs or additional educational needs. Not only with them, but that's a big part of the job. And that brings its own pressures. Many of them are doing jobs which are very skilled and there is a grading structure in schools or they're working with early years children, where they've been specifically trained for it.
Without their contribution, teachers would also agree with this, the education of children, especially those children with additional needs, would not happen. And their pay levels are incredibly low, but there is a grading structure, so you'll get different levels of teaching assistants, for example. But they get very little recognition for it and there's not a lot spent on training for them. But they're often the first to be cut when a school looks at its budgets. So because there's a legal requirement about how many teachers you need per children, if a school needs to cut back, they'll either cut back hours or they'll make these staff redundant.
And it's very shortsighted because the quality of the education then that the children get is definitely diminished by this. It doesn't get that kind of level of coverage as it would if you were cutting back on teachers' jobs. So there has to be more done to recognise their role.
Darren: And we've seen a fair amount of strike actions across the country recently, especially in the transport sector. I know there's ballots happening across different sectors now. The press keep talking about a potential winter of discontent. Do you think that's likely or do you think it's just media hype?
Christina: Well, it's definitely likely that there will be more strikes between now and Christmas and certainly into the new year. But I have to say, it's not inevitable and the government needs to talk to us about this, I'm sure we can find a way through it. If Tesco and Sainsbury's and Lidl and Aldi can find a way to pay their staff two pay increases this year in recognition of the fact that the cost of living's gone mad - the £1,400 that's been offered to NHS workers, a flat rate across the board, is just not enough.
For that group of nurses, paramedics, there's a sort of band in the NHS called the Band Five, which is where professionally qualified clinical staff go into that band. It's worth about 4% to them. They just can't live on that. It's just not enough when everything else is going through the roof at this time. So I would urge the government to talk to the trade unions about it before damage is done.
Darren: We've seen ministers putting in quite a bit of time on draft legislation to regulate strike action more than it's already regulated. Do you feel like they're putting in an equal amount of time in talking to you?
Christina: They're putting absolutely no time into talking to me or my colleagues in the other unions. And that's what's sad about it is we keep saying, "Talk to us about this". We already have the toughest legislation, industrial action legislation, in Western Europe. It's very difficult to take legal strike action in this country. We have to ballot using a paper ballot. We have to go over 50% of the workforce in order to take strike action, 50% turnout. That doesn't apply just about anywhere else. Councillors, MPs, that doesn't apply to anyone in those positions.
No union wants to take their members out on strike. We don't do this for political reasons. We do it because we've come to the end of the road in terms of negotiations. And in the public sector, that means: even if the employers are sympathetic, we need government funding to make it happen. And therefore, we need the government involved in these discussions.
This kind of focus that some in government seem to have on making it not just difficult, but virtually impossible to take strike action, I think goes against everything that the British public believe in, which is they believe in democracy, but we also believe in the right that people have to remove their labour, to say, "We're not going to work for that money". And if that's taken away, I think the British public will not be happy about it and that's the case we'll be making.
Darren: And I think at the very least the British public would expect ministers to be talking to you about the issues and trying to find some resolution and no doubt we'll want to ask those questions of ministers in the select committees as well, when they come and talk to us. But thank you so much for joining us, Christina.
Christina: Thank you very much.
[Bell]
Darren: I'm now joined by select committee members, Ian Mearns and Greg Smith. Ian is the Labour MP for Gateshead, and a longtime member of the education committee. They've been looking at education and the future of post-16 qualifications.
The committee published their big report on special educational needs and disabilities in 2019, which took more than 500 pieces of written evidence into account.
Greg is the Conservative MP for Buckingham, and sits on the transport committee. They recently published a report on another sector coping with the shortage of workers; HGV drivers, who we rely on to deliver essential goods like fuel and food around the UK. Welcome, both.
Greg, you are on the Transport Select Committee, and I understand that you've recently been talking to road freight sector workers, face-to-face. What did you hear from them?
Greg: Yeah, it's a really stark situation that we've got across the road haulage and logistics sectors in the UK at the moment. And I should say that I'm also the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on Road Haulage and Logistics as well. So, I do a lot with the sector but the Transport Select Committee got out on the road earlier this year. We went to a number of service stations and truck stops and spoke directly to drivers. And one of the biggest problems are roadside facilities.
We didn't just talk to drivers, we went to see the shower facilities. The guys that were showering at the time weren't particularly happy about that. But we saw the tiles falling off the walls. We saw mould , we saw taps that just didn't work. Changing areas that yeah, you really just wouldn't want to get changed in.
And I think the first thing that needs to happen for both recruitment and retention in the road haulage sector, is we've got to up our game as a country on those roadside facilities; the changing areas, the showering areas, the food offering.
It was really stark, as we looked at what the drivers that are out on the road, often for days on end, have to choose to eat from. And it's either fast food or 12 quid for a sandwich and a bag of crisps.
We've just got to up the entire game across the sector. And the number one thing that drivers themselves were saying to us, is that they just don't want to do the long-haul jobs anymore. They don't want to do the overnighters. They don't want to be away from home, away from their own bed for more than a day at a time.
So, the short-haul trips are largely still well-staffed and we've got the drivers. The long-haul stuff, the stuff around the entire of the United Kingdom and indeed going onto the continents of Europe, we just don't have the drivers right now. And that is a huge problem for the sector.
Darren: And this issue of working conditions, as well as pay has come up in other parts of the transport industry, hasn't it?
I think we heard recently on select committees, about the issues at airports and the delays that many people have been suffering over the summer, and some of that seems to be the same issue where people that work in airports are saying, well, actually the working conditions aren't right for them.
Greg: Yeah, we see it in airports. I'd say that probably the most striking example, which we've got legislation going through parliament at the moment on, is seafarers. Clearly, we saw as a really extreme example what happened with P&O Ferries. But that isn't unique to P&O Ferries — seafarers across the board have particularly poor conditions.
And actually, as we looked into it more widely, in our inquiry on maritime as a select committee, there are some really stark problems. For example, the unequal split of the workforce when it comes to gender can actually be explained away from things like most operators not even having PPE that is suitable and can fit female staff.
And if they're not even getting the basics right like that, it is no surprise that the sector has some pretty serious challenges that they need to get over.
Darren: And Ian, moving to the education sector, we heard from Christina from UNISON, that care workers and school teaching assistants have also been highlighting some working conditions issues, the value that's placed on their work, as well as their salary. How do we address all of these issues to keep people in those important jobs?
Ian: Well, I'm afraid to say that pay is obviously the biggest concern. And recruitment and retention is obviously important from the respect of job satisfaction.
And staff that I speak to in the education sector, quite often love their jobs, but literally are really struggling with the cost-of-living. And at the rates of pay that they're receiving, are finding it very, very difficult to stay in those roles.
And I think we also see that in the health sector as well. And that's well-documented recently.
Darren: And this is not just a question for head teachers, is it? Because we've been hearing that schools are having a real cash crisis coming into the next financial year. If there's going to be a pay increase for teachers and teaching staff, that's going to have to come from government.
Ian: Well, there has to be an uplift in school budgets, there is no doubt about that. One thing which has been happening is school budgets are bigger now than they were, but not given the number of children in the system. So, the amount of money per child in the system hasn't sort of kept match with inflationary pressure.
And schools in my own area in Gateshead, I'm still a chair of a primary school governing body in Gateshead. And there is no doubt about it, there are significant additional cost pressures for head teachers to cope with, energy being not the least of those.
Darren: And this seems to be a particular problem in the special educational needs sector in schools. You've recently done a report, I think in 2019, on the Education Select Committee, which had quite a lot of written evidence from people who are highlighting their concerns.
Ian: Absolutely, and special educational needs, I think ourselves and a lot of the people giving evidence to the inquiry, were suggesting that the block of funding for special educational needs within the education budget, needed to be uplifted by about four billion. And that would be sort of enough, in order to cope with a whole range of things which are feeding through the system.
And I think that there has been an uplift, but in the scale of about 1.2 billion, I believe, Darren. So, the committee report that we did in 2019, I think was very, very well-received by the people in the sector, in terms of the recommendations that we were making then.
And I'm afraid to say that it seems to me, that the government in the aftermath of that, then producing a green paper of their own, which hasn't really taken on board by any significant measure, the recommendations of the Education Select Committee, seems to me like kicking the can down the road, I'm afraid.
Darren: And Greg, there's other things that can be done to help people with the cost-of-living crisis. The transport department has recently introduced a two-pound fare cap on buses. Presumably, you support this — should this become a permanent feature, do you think?
Greg: Yeah, I think anything that encourages people to get on the bus, instead of perhaps using private cars, which have become incredibly expensive, we all see that at the pumps — is to be encouraged. And the longer that the two-pound fare can carry on, if not forever, the better.
But there are many, many other areas that we need to look at, because there are many professions, there are many jobs where you do need to be in your own car, going between… people that care workers, for example, are supporting and helping.
And something that I think does need to be looked at quite seriously, given the price of petrol and diesel at the pumps, given the cost of buying a car in the first place, for people that absolutely have to have their own transport, is that 45p a mile rate, where that full rate is offered back to care workers and NHS staff and so on, because it doesn't cut it anymore. It doesn't actually cover the costs of peoples’ expenses.
So, I think we've got to have that debate as a country to see if that's sat the right point at the moment. And in a constituency like mine that's 335 square miles, people traveling across from village to village throughout their day, they're burning a lot of petrol or diesel. And it's just becoming uneconomical for them to do their job, where they're just not getting anything like the return for what they're spending.
Darren: And the ability to hire drivers, whether it's for buses or trains or trucks or anywhere else in the transport sector has been an ongoing problem.
We've heard that bus drivers moved to be HGV drivers during the pandemic, and the bus companies have struggled to hire bus drivers. We've obviously had quite a lot of strike action in the rail sector, recently.
How do we resolve these issues, so that we can get people onto our buses and trains and trucks, to help everybody keep moving?
Greg: Well, we need to stabilise the whole economy. So, there has been a lot of shift. I've seen coach operators in my constituency, for example, have lost a lot of drivers to the HGV sector that have been able to offer higher pay in desperation to get drivers.
To be honest, we need to stabilise out the whole market, so that there isn't a massive differential between driving a coach, driving a bus, driving a train or going into the HGV and logistics sector. That's the most fundamental first port of call.
But we've also got to send a message out that these are good skilled jobs that are worth doing, because I think there is a little bit of stigma attached to some of these jobs. Where people look at them and think, “That's not a job for me. That's not a job that I want to do, where I'll get looked down upon for doing it.”
Not at all. These are vital jobs that quite literally keep the country moving, that keep goods going around and onto the shelves that we all want to buy, whether it's food or clothes or luxury goods or whatever it might be. These are good jobs, they are valuable jobs that we've got to send a signal to the whole country to say, they need to be respected a lot more.
Darren: Ian, your committee has been looking at post-16 qualifications and considering whether young people are getting the right careers advice. Are we doing enough to make sure that young people know about the jobs and the opportunities available to them?
Ian: Well, Darren, the committee is only sort of halfway through our current inquiry in careers’ education information, advice and guidance. But it's becoming quite clear that, unfortunately, since 2010, when the Connexion service was basically done away with, it's become a little too laissez-faire.
And I think one of the problems is that when we look at youngsters from poorer backgrounds, who don't have the same sort of social capital as some other youngsters in this system, they struggle.
And I think it's quite clear that we do need an ongoing, independent, and impartial careers’ education information, advice, and guidance system, so that youngsters are actually getting advice, which is for them to really live up to their own aptitudes and abilities, and get the best results that they can for themselves.
And so, we've got to have people who can guide them through the system and make sure that they're going into a next phase, which is most appropriate to their needs. And by doing that, we then also reduce things like dropout rates on courses, across the board.
And the other big thing about this as well, is about actually opening up the world of apprenticeships to young people. Because quite often, that isn't even an option which is presented to young people, before they do this post-16 transition.
Darren: And this is an issue across the economy and our business select committee inquiry we've been looking at the numbers that shows that we have an ageing population, people over 50. There's been a lot of people leaving the labour market over the last couple of years. There are not enough people with the right skills in the right places to do all the right jobs.
And we think this is something that's really challenging our abilities to grow the economy and to improve our productivity. So, it'll be a win-win for workers and for the economy, as well as for our public services if we can get this right.
So, here's the million-dollar question to both of you; you're in a lift in the House of Commons with the new Prime Minister, and you get to pitch one idea. What would be your priority for the new Prime Minister, Greg Smith?
Greg:Well, clearly, the financial problems facing the country are enormous right now. We all wait with bated breath for the 17th of November to see just how bad it's going to be in terms of spending and taxation.
But I'm very clear, and it comes from the transport sector, that somewhere between 40 and 147 billion pounds could be saved by scrapping HS2. If we get rid of that, then I think a lot of the Treasury’s headaches can be gone overnight.
And we can reprioritize spending on the things that we all want to see, whether it be on schools and hospitals or policing or defence. Or indeed, and I very much agree with the skills agenda points that were being made just now — ensuring that we have a skilled workforce across the entire economy for the future of our economy.
Darren: Thanks. And Ian Mearns?
Ian: Well, having listened to Greg's response there, I'm not surprised that a Buckinghamshire MP would be talking about HS2, having sat on the hybrid bill committee for 15 months and visited Buckinghamshire and taken evidence from constituents there, I'm not at all surprised at that.
But if I had the Prime Minister in a lift, I'd be wanting to talk to the Prime Minister about trying to engender a culture shift amongst businesses. The employment base has changed dramatically over the last 20/30 years, with many more people being employed in small and medium sized enterprises.
And it's a question of how do we get small and medium sized enterprises who do form a huge swathe of the employment base to think about training their own future workforce and helping them to think about getting their heads around their own staff development.
The great days of the large engineering combines in places like Tyneside are of the past. We used to employ hundreds and hundreds of apprenticeships in each company. And I think we've got to think about how we can get small and medium sized enterprises engaged in training, per se.
Darren: Well, I certainly agree with that. Ian and Greg, thanks so much for joining me.
Many thanks to all my guests today. If you want to feedback on what you've heard, please leave us a review or spread the word about our podcast, Committee Corridor.
In our next podcast, two weeks from now, we'll be talking about the UK's energy security.
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I'm Darren Jones, Chair of the House of Commons' Business Committee, and you've been listening to Committee Corridor. Thank you for listening.
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