Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

As ever, my right hon. Friend is bang on the button. Talking of quangocracy will inevitably draw the attention of many hon. Members to the fountain of quangos created in the Bill, which I shall shortly turn to. First, I shall say a few words about apprenticeships. I welcome the Government's commitment to increasing the number of apprenticeships. Again, that idea was pushed first by the Opposition, most vigorously and eloquently by my hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts), and also by my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes). My hon. Friend the Member for Havant has been arguing that we should refocus the Train to Gain budget in order to generate an extra 100,000 apprenticeships. I noticed that the Secretary of State said that the Bill was the first legislation on apprenticeships for 200 years overall, but in 1994 Lord Hunt of Wirral, who was then the Secretary of State for Employment, created the very idea of the modern apprenticeship—an idea that was derided at the time, when the Labour party was in opposition, only subsequently to be adopted by it. I am glad that the Government have seen the merits of Lord Hunt's proposal. It is only a pity that there is a gap between the rhetorical claims that they make for their apprenticeship scheme and the achievements on the ground. In 2003 the Prime Minister, as he then was not, said that there would be 320,000 apprenticeships by 2006. The reality was that there were only 239,000. Nothing abashed, in 2007 he said that he would double the number to 500,000, but the next year the total fell by 13,000. Figures from August to October in 2008 apparently showed an increase, but if we dig below the figures, we see that the increase is entirely due to an increase in the number of apprenticeships for people over 25. The number of apprenticeships open to those who were 16 to 18 or 19 to 24 fell. Overall in the past year we have seen a fall in the number pursuing level 2 apprenticeships, from 56,000 to 49,000, and a fall in the number pursuing level 3 apprenticeships—those that would be understood as full apprenticeships in European countries—from 27,000 to 24,000. Overall the fall is between 7 and 12 per cent. in the number pursuing apprenticeships. In construction, one of the areas where industry has been most engaged with the apprenticeship programme, the fall has been more than 30 per cent. in the past year—more than 6,000 apprenticeships gone. I note that the Secretary of State said that there would be a new requirement on Building Schools for the Future's contractors to help fill that gap, but that provokes the question to what extent those contractors were falling down on the job beforehand. I suspect that many of those contractors were those who were shouldering their responsibilities to take on apprenticeships. It would be interesting to know the precise estimate of the additional number of new apprenticeships that will be created by the requirement that the Secretary of State is placing.