Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. I am not against the additional provision of apprenticeship places as a result of placing the requirement on Building Schools for the Future contractors. I do say, however, that given the drop in the number of apprenticeships in the construction sector, the numbers do not begin to match the scale of what we need. My hon. Friend made that point very effectively. One of our other problems with apprenticeships overall is that we inevitably rely on the private sector to generate apprenticeship places. However, over the years it has become increasingly difficult for private sector concerns to supply those places. In the Green Paper on skills that my hon. Friend the Member for Havant produced just a few months ago, he helpfully listed every private sector provider's nine barriers to hiring apprentices. They included the complexity of the inspection regime, of the quality assurance scheme, of the registration scheme, of the certification scheme, of the funding structure, of the paperwork and of the self-assessment process. More and more people who wanted to provide apprenticeships were failing to do so, and that is one of the reasons why there has been the sad diminution of numbers that I mentioned earlier. We Conservatives do not want to add unnecessarily to that bureaucratic burden. As we scrutinise the Bill, our central aim will be to make sure that we do not add to the bureaucracy in such a way as to make it more difficult to do the right thing.