Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

We have had a very useful debate. One of the pleasures of this debate has been that the two Departments that focus on schools and skills, which came out of the single Department for Education, have come together to debate and scrutinise the legislation. In fact, I do not think that we have yet had any legislation since the departmental split that has not been joint legislation shared by the two Departments. We share not only an interest in the legislation, but a regard for Lord Dearing, who sadly died on Thursday. His work straddled the world of education and had a big impact both on higher education and skills and on schools. I echo what the Secretary of State said about Lord Dearing earlier in the debate. Of course, we welcome some of the measures in the Bill, which is why we shall not divide the House this evening. We welcome the recognition of the need for a genuinely independent regulator in Ofqual. We welcome the new advice on and encouragement of apprenticeships, and the principle of entitlement to apprenticeships. We also welcome some of the rhetoric in the Bill. It speaks of a slimmed and streamlined system, although my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) was right to be sceptical about whether the reality would live up to the weight-watcher pledge in the legislation. We also like the rhetoric of a demand-driven system, but the question is whether that can be delivered in practice. So, those are the reasons why we will not vote against the Bill this evening. The trouble with the Bill, however, is that it is an incoherent clutter of a miscellany of measures. It does not provide a sustained argument, or a clear vision of how the standards of schools and skills in this country can be raised. In fact, it reveals the besetting problem of a decaying Government coming to the end of their term: when in doubt, reorganise. When they have lost their ideas and their intellectual momentum, they just reorganise. Even worse than that, they are now reorganising their own reorganisations, and changing the institutions that they themselves created earlier. A good example of a Government running out of steam and having to reorganise their own reforms is that of this Government's skills agenda. They inherited the Further Education Funding Council, which they abolished in 2001 in order to create the Learning and Skills Council. In 2008, the 47 local learning and skills councils were abolished and replaced by nine regional bodies and 150 local partnerships. In 2010, the Learning and Skills Council that this Government created is to be abolished and replaced by the Skills Funding Agency, the Young People's Learning Agency and the National Apprenticeship Service. This is an example of endless reorganisation. It was said of the French revolution that it finally came to an end when it started to devour its own children, and we now see this Government engaging in a process of devouring their own reforms. I do not know which Secretary of State is the more likely Robespierre, introducing the guillotine only to find himself being sent to the guillotine himself, but this is a Government who are running out of ideas and running out of steam. As a result of these changes, the same office block in Coventry that houses the Learning and Skills Council will presumably house three different quangos and, in the coming months, every official and officer sitting in that office block will be busy applying for new posts and wondering which of the multiple new organisations that are being created they will be working for. The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman), who chairs the Children, Schools and Families Committee, is no longer in his place, but he made this point well. Such a reorganisation would be of doubtful value at the best of times, but we are now, in the words of the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, in the most serious global recession for more than 100 years. Is this really the time for the key agency that is supposed to be focusing on skills and training during the recession to face yet another reorganisation? That is why, although we have no particular brief for the Learning and Skills Council, we have asked the Government at least to suspend the proposed changes for a year, so that the LSC can focus on the task in hand while the economy is in such a mess. We have already seen the consequences of the disorientation and confusion that has been caused, with the crisis in capital funding that is affecting further education colleges. I was surprised by something the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills said in an earlier intervention, when he appeared to deny the existence of a moratorium on FE capital projects. Perhaps I can remind him of what we understand to be the facts of the case. If any of this is incorrect, I would be happy to take an intervention from him. On 17 December 2008, at a national council committee meeting, the Learning and Skills Council suddenly, without prior warning or explanation, cancelled all the national council committee meetings planned until 4 March. Those meetings normally take place monthly. It cancelled the meetings because there was no basis on which it could agree the funding for the capital projects in the pipeline. That is why Members across the House are so aware of the plight of FE colleges, whose representatives are coming to us to express their extreme concern that the capital projects that they had been working towards will not now take place. The hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh), who is no longer in her place, made an extraordinarily loyal speech in which she raised a question about her own FE college, which seems to be facing a capital funding crisis, despite the fact that the Secretary of State has already told the House that there is no such thing. If even the ultimate loyalist has had to accept that there is a crisis, I was surprised that the Secretary of State could not bring himself to do so. All this is part of the wider problem with the Bill. The biggest single group of losers from it is, I am afraid, FE colleges. Those crucial colleges are, as we all say, the Cinderellas of the education system, but they do an enormous amount and have special qualities: they educate people across the entire age range; they educate people across a wider range of social classes than any other educational institution; and they link academic and vocational study. We believe that they should be set free as community colleges—free to serve their communities in the way they think best. Instead, the great achievement of 1992, when those colleges were given freedom from local authority control, is to be reversed in respect of 16 to 18-year-olds and those colleges will face a multiplicity of quangos financing and supervising them on the education they provide to over-18s. That is not what FE colleges want and I do not believe that local authorities understand the range of responsibilities of those colleges or how they work.