Labour will meet industry demand by creating more engineers by 2020

Ed Miliband has pledged that a next Labour government would train more people as engineers.

In a Facebook post today, Miliband has said that under Labour there would be 400,00 more engineers by 2020.

Miliband notes that research shows “the country needs  approximately 780,000 more engineers between now and 2020 to meet industry demand – 156,000 per year.” But that at the moment “we are training less than half that – leaving Britain with a shortfall of more than 400,000 engineers by 2020” – this policy is therefore designed to address this problem head on.

Significantly, Miliband also highlighted the low number of female engineers in the UK – we have the lowest proportion of female engineers of anywhere in Europe – saying that this should be a “matter of national embarrassment.”

In line with this, he writes that Labour will encourage young people, girls as well as boys, to do STEM subjects.