Lord Leong (Lab)

As usual, my noble friend makes a brilliant observation; she is spot-on. We have to focus on skills. This is another thing that is brought to my attention every time I meet with businesses in the UK, and with international businesses. They say, “You need to close the skills gap”. Skills are missing in certain places, and this strategy addresses that. We are investing in technical excellence colleges through the further education scheme. As far as higher education goes, noble Lords know that four of the top universities are in this country. Businesses work with them and fund their research as well. We attract international business because of the higher education expertise and professionalism in this country. Let me say more about skills. We have just announced £275 million of skills investment over three years, which forms a wider skills package made up of £75 million of government resource investment and £200 million of capital funding, made available from our new skills mission fund. We committed in the industrial strategy to investing over £100 million to boost engineering skills. That is made up of £75 million of resource funding and £25 million of capital funding from the skills mission board. The Department for Business and Trade and the Department for Education have contributed funding for these engineering skills. We are also investing a further £187 million to support the digital skills package, which the Prime Minister announced at London Tech Week a few weeks ago. More details on defence skills will be set out in the forthcoming defence industrial strategy.