If anything, that short excursus from our debate reminds us of the importance of the subject. The ability to provide the necessary level of local government services for our people, and the ability to influence the world in ways that this House likes to influence the affairs of the world, both ultimately rest on our industrial and economic strength. That brings us directly back to the subject of the debate.

I have two, perhaps three, interests to declare with regard to this matter. The first is that for five years I have worked, and still work part-time, for the largest independent engineering company in the country. I am probably correct when I say that it is a company that employs more engineers than any other company in the private sector. Secondly, I am liaison officer of the West of England Engineering Employers' Federation. Thirdly, Bristol university is situated in my constituency. That has a distinguished engineering department, to which I shall refer in a moment.

There is an important dichotomy in the debate, in that it falls into two halves. First, we have our opinions on the many detailed recommendations of the excellent and intellectually distinguished report. Many hon. Members will be putting forward individual views about specific recommendations. Secondly, at the heart of the debate lies a different question. Do we accept the underlying analysis of the report, and the single central recommendation that goes with it? Do we accept the analysis which says that at the heart of our 100 to 150 years of relative economic decline, compared with our most powerful industrial competitors, lies the undervaluing of the engineering and productive culture in our wider education and social system?

As has already been said by my hon. Friend the Member for Ripon (Dr. Hampson) the analysis is not new. It is also widely accepted. I do not think that many in the country would disagree with it. All the papers and submissions given to the Government or to individual hon. Members endorse it. I should be surprised if we found anyone putting forward a very different opinion in this House today. We must admit that it lies at the heart of our problems, and has done so for too long. In a complex variety of ways we have undervalued production and overvalued the generalists, the administrators, and those produced by the great administrative schools and universities, which were related to a world imperial position. I shall not go further, as that speech has been made for the past 150 years both in the House and outside.

If we accept that analysis, we must turn our minds to a difficult problem. How can Governments change the underlying temper or direction of the culture of a country? We cannot do that only by making sensible speeches on the matter. One unsatisfactory aspect of government is that when a report is commissioned—as with the Finneston report—a distinguished team carefully balances submissions from all interested bodies. But when the Government receive the report it goes back to the people who made submissions to the commission and whose evidence has been carefully weighed by the expert reporting team. The Government then try to put together their own pattern of balance. If there is to be any point in such reports and Royal Commissions, the Government must delegate the balancing and the assessment to those distinguished people who were initially chosen to do the job. Of course there may from time to time be controversial recommendations on which the Government would take a view, but I hope that we shall not go around the same circuit again of trying to balance all the views—that is exactly what the House asked Sir Monty Finneston to do, and that is exactly what he has done in a decisive and successful way.

At the heart of his recommendations lies the engineering authority, and at the heart of that recommendation is the argument that could be summarised as being the "engine for change" argument. We must pay the greatest attention to that. The Engineering Employers' Federation welcomes the idea of an engineering authority. It makes some sensible and detailed recommendations about the form in which any such authority should be established; for example, it should be small, and it should not be a delegated body whose members speak as delegates of various other interests. The federation is involved in industrial production, and it is right to say that the authority should be at least half industrial-based in its membership. It must not turn out to be another institution dedicated to the provision of non-customer based engineering. It must have its roots firmly established in production. In effect, that means that the biggest representation must come from industry.

Large engineering firms, such as the firm for which I work, take a rather distant view of the matter. That will have come through in their submissions to Ministers. They are big enough to look after themselves. They carry out most of their own engineering training. They often operate as trainers for a large part of industry. One company within my group, Marconi, feels that it is virtually operating as a university. There is practically no electronic engineer in Britain who has not been trained by Marconi at some time or other. I hope that Ministers will not be over-influenced by the slightly distant view taken by some of the large companies. They are in a position to take care of themselves.

The big companies do not present the problems. It is the quality of the whole range of medium and smaller-sized companies, carrying out subcontracting and specialist precision engineering, that is crucial to the overall quality of our engineering sector. I hope that we all agree that if we establish an authority, as I hope we shall, it should be firmly based in engineering.

The Engineering Employers' Federation makes various other points. It does not care for the word "authority ", preferring" council". We should not attach too much importance to that. I prefer the word "authority" because it is decisive and powerful.

Do we accept the engine for change argument?

There is a spirit abroad in the land, not only in my party but in others, which is suspicious of institutions established by the House and which do not have a clear remit to which we can call them to account. The new phrase for such institutions is "quangos ". We fear that institutions may be established whose accountability will be limited because the remit is not clear.

The engine for change argument implies that the Departments responsible to the House are not the best institutions to engage in negotiations with education authorities, firms and so on to produce the right detailed recommendations. It implies that we must establish a new body with delegated powers, but that we are not quite sure about its functions. We know the general line and ultimate objective—namely, to raise the general status of engineering production in the community—but we are not quite sure about the list of recommendations that will emerge over a period.

That makes people uncomfortable. It is right that that sort of body should make people feel uncomfortable, because it involves a measure of delegated power. Perhaps the right phrase would be "delegated persuasive ability "—that depends on the effectiveness with which it works—but my view is that we should swallow those reasonable and genuine qualms because such a body should have been in being for 100 years. If it had been, not many would now say "That dreadful quango should be abolished ", any more than many of us say—except from time to time Ministers for Health—that the BMA should be abolished or, indeed, the BBC.

If I may wander into political philosophy, such an authority should be one of the great central institutions or pillars of what Disraeli would have called the multi-pillar State. It should work under a general remit from the Government, but not under direct departmental control.

We should not be too bemused by the word "engineer ". One of the best reasons to be wary of the reservation of jobs argument is that, when talking about raising the productive culture of the country, we tend to talk only about engineers in the traditional sense. As technology is fast moving, we may decreasingly find this appropriate. We may have to talk as much about chemists, physicists and so on. Unless we use a very wide definition of "engineer ", we may find ourselves having invented or allowed a power which would be a block to necessary change because it would try to reserve jobs for men trained in older engineering disciplines when some new discipline would be just as good.

I think that employers will find themselves opposed to any system which prevents them from employing the Freeman Dyson, or whoever is the genius of the day, who may have odd and unpredictable qualifications, but may be just the man for a particular job. We should not set up yet another closed shop.

The education points take us wider than that. The objective should be to introduce into our culture a new generalist. That may sound paradoxical. We should be saying that the generalists who will find themselves in administrative jobs should often come from a generalised engineering background. This is the great difference between this country and other countries. As a classicist, I should be averse to having fewer classicists. The right hon Member for Leeds, East (Mr. Healey), the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, and I, and, to keep in with the Whips, my hon. Friend the Member for the City of London and Westminster, South (Mr. Brooke) and other classicists feel that there is an important role for properly educated generalists, and of course there is. However, as a classicist I am afraid I should be willing to swap most of the people with a PPE degree for those with degrees in engineering or science-based disciplines in the widest sense.

There are very few engineers in the House, in the upper reaches of the Civil Service, the Armed Forces, the law and in all the other professions attached to the great pillars of State which make up a pluralist society. We are talking not only about increasing and improving the specialised education of engineers; we are trying to feed into our university system the understanding that an engineering education at its first undergraduate level can be just as good a generalised training as in any of the other disciplines. That does not mean that we do not want highly trained, elite, specialised engineers with further degrees. That is a different point. However, we must not let the message go out that we are talking only about the training of engineers, because we are not.

I should like to refer to a letter from Professor Andrew, of the university of Bristol, which has one of our most distinguished engineering faculties. I am astonished to find that he says that the average level of intake is better than three Bs, which I think means at least one A. That is a great deal higher as an average level of intake than any Oxbridge college known to me can boast, yet Professor Andrew says that there are too many engineering graduates who are dull, unreceptive and unadaptable, and he is right.

I say that with respect to my own friends and relations, including my brother, who is trained as an engineer. This is part of the problem. It is because we have separated out the engineers. One of the problems of any great engineering firm is to find engineers—I dare say that I shall get into trouble for this—who can string two words together on paper, can make a proper submission and talk properly. In this place we have people who can do nothing but string words together. Of course, that is the other extreme and we do not want to go that way. But we must get engineers well trained in communicating and getting their arguments across so that they can inject into our society the kind of expertise, mental disciplines, and understanding of production and engineering problems that is necessary. They must be able to do that to stand up against the traditionally trained generalists for any jobs, boards or Civil Service competitions that may be going.

I hope that we shall take the risk of fully endorsing the engineering authority in its proper sense—not as a committee to advise and consult, but as a powerful body with enough delegated powers to be able to tackle the underlying problems. We want it to be able to knock together the heads of the universities and the polytechnics with the heads of industry. It must be able to recommend changes and be sufficiently powerful and prestigious so that when it knocks on Ministers' doors it will be regarded as very serious not to accept its recommendations.

There is one point on which I disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for Ripon. I do not agree that the only way to give the authority teeth is to go further down the job reservation path. There are other ways of giving it teeth. In Britain, we tend to treat some institutions seriously and others not so seriously. This authority should be on the A list. This should be the one that the private secretary lets in to see the Minister and does not say that the Minister is very busy and cannot see it until three weeks next Tuesday.

The primary role of the authority must be to try to go back to before that period in our history when the dictates of empire swung the objectives of our education system towards administration. It should go back to that more productive eighteenth century culture most dramatically to be found in Scottish universities at that time when it was not thought that an educated man had to be innumerate and to know nothing about the physical sciences, and when the word "philosopher" included natural philosophy as much as an understanding of the Nicho-machean ethics. It should comfort those of us who are conservative and traditionalist in some sense to know that this is going back to an older tune, not venturing on a new one.

I commend the Finniston report to my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench. I hope that they will take the opportunity of being the first Government for 150 years, following their predecessors who appointed the committee, to grasp the opportunity and seriously set about making the omelette, which will need the breaking of a few eggs in the process.