Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I am grateful to the Secretary of State, but that still leaves us 5,000 down on the number of apprenticeships in construction. The fall in the number of apprenticeships at level 3 is particularly worrying. We are training fewer people at level 3 than we were a decade ago. As the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee—an independent Committee—pointed out, most of the increase in apprenticeship numbers"““has been as a result of converting government-supported programmes of work-based learning into apprenticeships.””" I have nothing against Government-supported programmes of work-based learning, but I have everything against a Government who attempt to massage figures and manipulate names in order to try to paint their record in rosier colours than it deserves. We broadly support the principle of creating an entitlement to apprenticeships and the way in which the Government are going about encouraging schools to offer a wider range of options to students, but the Government are using the Bill and the declaration of an entitlement as a way of covering up their failure to deliver over time. It is a similar approach to the one that they are taking over the child poverty Bill. They are attempting to enshrine in statute a commitment to eliminate child poverty by 2020, as a way of distracting from the fact that this year we will see that progress towards the interim goal in 2012 has moved backwards. It would be better if the Government were honest about their failures, because then all of us could work with them, as we sincerely wish to do, in order to achieve the noble goals that they occasionally articulate.