Education and Skills Bill

moved Amendment No. 60: 60: After Clause 10, insert the following new Clause— ““Certificates of appropriate training or education (1) A local education authority may designate any educational institution or other person as a provider of education or training for the purposes of this section. (2) An institution or person so designated may issue a young person with a certificate in a prescribed form to the effect that the young person has made appropriate arrangements for training or education within the meaning of section 21(1) which shall include a telephone number and other contact details to enable an employer to ascertain the currency and veracity of the certificate.”” The noble Lord said: The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, should be grateful that the Government are not intending to create the second Bill by means of a Henry VIII clause in this Bill. The Pensions Bill, which we shall consider tomorrow, contains a second Bill in just that fashion. Amendment No. 60 is intended to be helpful, particularly to employers, who have a duty under Clause 21 to take all reasonable steps to ascertain that a prospective employee is undertaking the required amount of training. However, the clause is entirely silent on how they should ascertain that and it does not provide any helpful mechanisms to enable them to do so. I spent a good deal of my life trying to get information out of educational establishments, which in many cases is extremely difficult. They are not set up to answer questions from people outside. They often tend to be neither efficient nor helpful and, when you do get through and ask them a relevant question—particularly if you ask them whether so and so is indeed attending the college and whether they are following the course that they say they are—you will be told that they cannot disclose the information under data protection legislation because there is no duty on them to do so. In a rather roundabout way, therefore, the amendment is intended to provide such a duty, together with a mechanism for making it easy for an employer. It would produce no disincentive to employing 16 and 17 year-olds because the said prospective employee would arrive bearing a certificate, which would make it extremely easy for the duty in Clause 21 to be satisfied. I suspect that the Minister will say that he has a better way of doing these things but I shall enjoy listening to him. I beg to move.