Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

It is a great pleasure to take part in this debate. Nearly all the speeches so far have been thoughtful and constructive. However, I feel that most Members have been rather too kind to the Bill. It is a portmanteau Bill bringing together a number of issues, which causes problems in terms of parliamentary scrutiny. To me, it represents an extended exercise in wish fulfilment dressed up as legislation. It is the product of people who, perhaps, like to confuse and mislead others, but in this instance they may have confused only themselves. The Bill's title gives a clue to the confusion of its contents. Throughout the years of the present Government, the Secretary of State has been the Prime Minister's chief confidant and lieutenant, part of a machine that sought policy headlines but did not consider sufficiently how to make the outcomes a reality. Cynicism by design, the distortion of statistics, the politicisation of the civil service and the neutering of dissent and debate have performed a short-term service, but have undermined the Government's ability to deliver any real reform. That is why in this twelfth year of this Government, the Secretary of State will not meet the promise to halve child poverty by 2010, and why, with one in five children leaving primary school without basic literacy and numeracy skills, one in 10 ends up on the NEETs scrapheap just a few years later.