Evening Standard

We need whole of UK to address talent crisis

Skills shortage widespread, warns Chris Blackhurst

- Chris Blackhurst

BY common consent, one of the smartest moves George Osborne has made in his tenure as Chancellor is to hire my pal Jim O’Neill. It’s widely thought that the popular, selfeffaci­ng, outspoken new Commercial Secretary will cut through the Treasury flimflam and teach those upstart mandarins what’s what. He’s nobody’s fool is Lord Jim — or, to give him his full moniker, Baron O’Neill of Gatley.

A Manc (the United diehard should have become Baron O’Neill of Old Trafford) who went to Sheffield University and ended up at Goldman Sachs, O’Neill is the inventor of the Brics and Mint acronyms for countries in the emerging markets. Now, on his desk in Whitehall, this wealthy brain (he’s taking no salary) has another buzz-label to contend with: the “Northern Powerhouse”.

For once, it was not a title of his making — it was Osborne’s. O’Neill was asked to look at how the North could be rev it a l i s e d an d c a me u p wi t h “Manpool”, linking Manchester and Liverpool. Not only does it sound like a sex-obsessed show on Channel 5 involving barely clad female contestant­s and hunks in swim-shorts but also it did not do full justice to what he was proposing.

The North is bigger than Manpool or “Liverchest­er”. O’Neill rightly identified a lack of infrastruc­ture linking the cities of Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield as being a key weakness. Travel bet ween London and those places is fine and much-improved (HS2 will make a bit of difference to travel times but not much, and certainly not £50 billion worth). Cross- country, however, is a different story. It’s truly dreadful.

But the Northern Powerhouse project, as it’s now become, needs to be about much more than rails and Tarmac and elected mayors managing extended councils. No manner of spanking new lines and roads or loc al authorit y reform will disguise an underlying problem: the people there do not have the skills that employers want.

O’Neill needs to heed the warning from James Hick, managing director of ManpowerGr­oup, that the Northern Powerhouse “will be more like a Northern power cut if we don’t see more talent coming into the market”.

Manpower’s quarterly employment outlook survey for June found that “for the fourth successive quarter, employers remain keen to hire, even as the UK jobs market faces a critical lack of candidates. Whilst on the surface employment stands at a 40-year record high and unemployme­nt continues to fall, the official statistics fail to show the struggle many employers are having filling vac ancies, especially in the North of England. We see skills shortages as the single biggest barrier to the North’s growth across all sectors”.

This is the challenge facing O’Neill: to go beyond trains and automobile­s and mayoral parlours and get stuck into education — in particular, the lack of vocational skills. Most alarming of all is that we’re used to firms complainin­g about a lack of recruits with the right technologi­cal know-how, but Hick went on to say the shortage even comprised “entry-level roles in customer service roles such as call centres”. That’s the ability to speak lucidly and do basic maths, in other words. And that has to be truly shaming.

While Hick has cited the North, I would submit that the issue goes much wider. I would argue it’s the biggest obstacle facing businesses all over Britain. It’s certainly the one they raise time and again regardless of where they’re from — be it South-West, South-East, North-East or North-West. Thank God, they say, for the EU. Without it they would not be able to recruit the talent they need. Leaving it now, at a time when our schools and universiti­es are not producing people with the correct expertise in sufficient numbers, would be a disaster — not only for the North, where Hick claims the crisis is most acute, but for the entire UK Plc.

The challenge is to get stuck into education, and in particular the lack of vocational skills

PLENT Y of other business stars have made the switch from commerce to government. Without exception the ones I’ve ever spoken to have said how fascinatin­g it is, and how frustratin­g. O’Neill somehow has to break the mould. The Chancellor, though, should scrap his Northern Powerhouse remit and put O’Neill in charge of raising our national game (and I don’t mean football, sorry Jim), of ensuring employers are getting the school-leavers and graduates they seek.

He should be told he can roam across department­s, from the Treasury into Business, Innovation and Skills, and Education. His power should be allencompa­ssing. He needs to listen to industry leaders, and to knock heads together, as a matter of urgency.

I’m confident that if anyone can do it, O’Neill can. Jim, leave the maps and plans to others, and address what really matters — not just to the North but also to all of us, London included.

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