What on Earth are The City firms doing here?

This sounds like an excellent manner of making things worse:

Chancellor Rachel Reeves is to announce a new City “skills compact” that will commit firms such as Barclays and Lloyds to retraining thousands of financial sector workers for the AI revolution.

Working out how to usefully use a new technology we really do think is something that can safely be left to profit maximising firms. But rather more than that:

In the coming weeks, nearly 20 initial signatories, including the London Stock Exchange, Nationwide building society and the asset manager Fidelity, will start drafting rolling three-year plans aimed at training and certifying their UK staff in up to five critical skills – including AI – that they believe are essential to future-proofing their jobs.

Their progress will then be reported to the Treasury and Financial Services Skills Commission each year, with at least one senior executive at each firm overseeing their internal programmes.

The compact is intended to help the UK’s lucrative financial sector, which is an important part of the government’s industrial strategy, stay competitive amid rapid development in key technologies that could otherwise threaten swathes of the financial and professional services workforce.

The whole point of a productivity enhancing technology - which we all rather hope AI will be - is that it threatens jobs. That’s what productivity enhancement means, the same output with less input of human labour. So preserving jobs isn’t the point at all.

And yea, even more. We’ve had a recent intervention by government into training of the workforce issues. As we’ve pointed out a number of times, the effective nationalisation of the apprenticeship system has meant more costs for firms, fewer apprenticeships and the general destruction of the system. Nationalisation does that, d’ye see?

This is one of those times when the correct advice to government is don’t do something, just stand there.