Message from the Minister for Skills

Keeping up-to-date is a permanent struggle for most small and medium size businesses. Customers are a very demanding bunch, always looking for something innovative, a lower price or an improvement in service levels. Suppliers offer new products and services and if you don’t find out about them, competitors will. And inevitably, there are changes in industry standards and regulations seeking to make the world a safer place to live and work.

I think the pace of change is speeding up. Any technological improvement, any new way of making a product or delivering a service is available to businesses worldwide at the click of a mouse.

To cope with the pressure, business people have to keep their equipment in good repair. It has to be regularly inspected and maintained and from time to time replaced. But is the same process carried through with the same rigour with the management and staff of the business? Is it reasonable to expect that what we learn at school, college or university will be sufficient to carry us through the next 40 years of our working lives?

The Government views the improvement of the skills of the national workforce as one of the main priorities in improving our international competitiveness. Our overall level of productivity is 28.5% less than businesses in the USA, and 13.5% lower than all the other G8 nations. Not to put to fine a point on it, China and India together produce 5.5 million new graduates respectively every year – that’s equivalent to nearly 20% of our entire working population.

In Greater Merseyside, I am aware that you face as large a challenge as anywhere in the country. However I am very encouraged by the success of the LSC Greater Merseyside’s EU co-financed SkillWorks programme. The launch next month of the LSC’s Train to Gain service in Greater Merseyside will provide additional impetus. The key goals of the service are to ensure that both the training and the skills advice are responsive to the needs of every business and are impartial, flexible, responsive, and offered at a time and place to suit businesses.

It is a real pleasure to salute the achievements of the finalists for the inaugural SkillWorks awards and the training partners that supported them. Together they are the best recommendation to other Greater Merseyside businesses that building workforce skills helps to meet the challenge of the future.

Phil Hope M.P.
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State For Skills
25 th July 2006

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