Yorkshire’s universities hold the key to good quality employment opportunities - Andy Brown

What is really needed from the government is help for good quality employers to locate here and find or train up the skilled workforce they need so we get sustainable long term employment. That means providing a critical mass of support to make an area an attractive place to locate and develop a new enterprise or to expand a successful one.

It is necessary to align the availability of land with good transport links, flexible training providers who can respond rapidly to changing needs, financial support for capital investment in design and marketing, access to research and development networks and help to become a modern low energy use environmentally sensitive supplier.

Some of the most successful employment employers in the country have built up their business around fast flowing ideas coming out of our universities. A lot of great work has gone into trying to commercialise new thinking both in some of the expected areas such as science and technology and in other highly successful areas such as the creative industries. On the back of that there are parts of Cambridgeshire that look and feel like a mini Silicone Valley.

One of the first places to start if we wish to build the next generation of good quality employment opportunities for our young people is therefore the ideas coming out of our great network of Yorkshire Universities.

A lot less thought and action has gone into doing the same for smaller communities and for technician level employment by focusing on our local colleges. Rather the reverse. There has been an astonishing and shameful level of neglect for this aspect of our education system for decades.

Britain has had a strong network of providers of technical, commercial and artistic skills for over 150 years with many local colleges having their roots in Mechanics Institutes set up at the height of Britain’s industrial success. Those colleges also provide training in a wide range of other much needed skills that range from bricklaying to social work.

Yet instead of helping to build and strengthen that college network, Minister of Education after Minister has come into the job without any realistic understanding of what those colleges do or any plan to do anything other than let them decline through a lack of funding and a lack of prestige. There have even been politicians in power and in opposition who told us that they wished to bring back apprenticeships.

They actually never went away. There is a strong network of apprenticeship providers across our region either as part of a local further education college or in the form of a private operator. Both seek to strongly focus on employer needs. What is lacking is serious investment funding to ensure that they are able to train people on the latest industry standard equipment, pay rates that are attractive enough to encourage those with up to date skills to pass them on, and the availability of a range of qualifications that reflects changing needs.

To give one example, there are currently hundreds of new job opportunities emerging across Yorkshire in fitting solar panels, installing heat exchange units and rewiring homes to enable them to take advantage of cheap night time power for an electric car. Finding a qualification that recognises new skills and obtaining training that will equip people to take up the jobs and learn more is desperately difficult.

If there is one thing that genuinely would help with levelling up it would be the launching of a decade long drive to help connect local colleges, local employers, and people who want good quality skilled work. Most market towns and most parts of our inner cities have land that could provide a real focus for a nexus of bright creative enterprises provided some of the crucial facilities such as fast network connections are attractively available.

Done right Yorkshire could be on the cusp of a new era of success as it creates jobs in knowledge industries that are light in their consumption of carbon, generate little or no pollution and increase the flexibility and the talent levels of their employees.

Done wrong we could get landed with a network of low regulation so called freeports where we pull in the low status employers who only want to take advantage of a low skilled workforce.

When I first worked in a further education college there were over 100 new students every year studying to operate a lathe in just one town. Now there are almost none in the country. Times change. Gaming provides more Yorkshire jobs than welding.

We need to equip our people with the skills and opportunities of the future and we need to help our employers and our colleges to help them.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.