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Meeting of the Parliament 14 June 2012

14 Jun 2012 · S4 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

Youth Employment

Park, John Lab Mid Scotland and Fife Watch on SPTV

Like many members who have spoken today, I am going to focus on the reality of apprenticeships for a number of people, particularly in the area that I represent. We all agree that the employed status of apprenticeships in Scotland, which the rest of the UK is now moving towards, is something that we can be proud of. It means that the decisions that we have taken on apprenticeships have always been relevant to the needs of employers and have always been closely tied to employment—that is the most important issue in today’s debate, and we should not lose sight of it.

Chic Brodie is not here, but I want to respond to a couple of the points that he made. I sit next to Chic Brodie in the Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee, so I actually quite like him, but he cast some doubt over my experience in this area. However, as someone who, as I might have mentioned before, is a former apprentice, who was head of employee relations at Babcock and ran its apprenticeship scheme, who, as a trade union official, worked with a number of companies on apprenticeship programmes, who has taken an interest in apprenticeships since being elected in 2007, and who has worked with a range of sector skills councils and other bodies on the issue, I think that I am a wee bit qualified to have a view on the issue and to say something about it.

Also in response to Chic Brodie, I say that, yes, the balance has tipped. In the past, people who had been in work for a while would have got the opportunity of taking up certain apprenticeships. However, the headlines about companies such as Arnold Clark, CR Smith and Scottish Gas suggest that there are thousands of apprentices who are not in work who are applying for jobs, and the people who get those jobs are people who are not in work. The perception that a lot of people have is that apprenticeship opportunities go to people who are not in work through the normal selection and recruitment process that there would be for any job. We have to get that point clearly on the record today.

That is at the heart of the problem that the Scottish Government has on this issue. It has created a certain perception with its provision of 25,000 apprenticeships. No one mentioned that someone might have been in employment for six months or longer before they took up the apprenticeship. The perception that has been created is that the 25,000 apprenticeships are there for people who want them, and that the apprenticeships last for three or four years and are in traditional trade jobs such as plumbers, joiners and electricians. I know that apprenticeships go right across the board and that there are 130 different types of apprenticeships. I support that kind of vocational training and believe that it is right that we have the ethos of apprenticeships right across our workplaces in Scotland. However, the reality is that, of the 26,000 apprenticeships in 2010-11, only 3,789 were what we would describe as traditional apprenticeships. The gap between the reality and the public’s perception is a huge issue. As politicians, we have a duty to address that.

I do not know about other MSPs, but people regularly come to speak to me about their sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters not getting the opportunity to take up an apprenticeship and get started in a career. We have to recognise that problem. We should support in-work training and recognise those opportunities for what they are, but we should also recognise that there is a desire for traditional apprenticeships and that we need to think about how we support them, not only in terms of Government support but in terms of the local economies.

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Meeting of the Parliament 14 June 2012

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