As a former miner, I was proud to be recently elected as Chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Coalfield Communities. Part of our work is to help these communities to recover from the whole scale deindustrialisation of huge areas of our country in the last three decades.
Within that context we are urging my government to come to grips with the fact that many people living in these communities have lower skills than they need to face the challenges of a global jobs market.
Too many have been left behind with high levels of sickness, people going on invalidity and incapacity benefits and not being encouraged to come off them and of serious mental health and social problems such as drugs. This country has at least 6 million unskilled workers. The geography of low skills shows strong similarities with the geography of deprivation.
This hampers economic development. Employers in high value-added industries generally look elsewhere. Few are keen to train workers from the start. They want to hire skilled and experienced people, and certainly do not want to confront shortfalls in basic literacy, numeracy or computing.
The only answer is to give people the skills they need and encourage more employment opportunities in these areas. Although many individuals want to improve their skills, their previous experience of education often deters them from engaging with learning, and those types of learners are the hardest to reach. Many people's experience of school and education involved being told that they were doomed to failure. It is little wonder that many of these folk don't want to go back into education.
Professionals who work with adult learners agree that intensive one-to-one mentoring is vital. People who would like to cross a school or college threshold can be persuaded back into education through more informal channels. However, once an individual has engaged with the learning process, there is a need for ongoing support.
There is a huge opportunity in the North-East to develop new jobs based on the potential of carbon capture and storage, developing electric cars and offshore wind power, but many will not be able to take advantage of those jobs without increasing their skills.
I raised these points in detail in a Commons debate last week and am pleased to report that the Minister will meet me and campaigners to discuss how to assist low-skilled workers who are being left behind. They are a special case and one of my top priorities in Parliament.
| Promoted by Paul Foy on behalf of Dave Anderson, both of St Cuthbert's Church Hall, Shibdon Road, Blaydon, NE21 5PT |