Employee Study and Training (Qualifying Period of Employment) Regulations 2010

My Lords, I thank the Minister for explaining the draft regulations and I agree with him that training is vital, as is the involvement of employers. But it is all very well for the Government to lay regulations such as these. This is fiddling while Rome burns. Training provision in the UK is not fit for purpose—it is bureaucratic and inflexible, it fails to meet the needs of people who want to improve their skills and it fails to meet the needs of employers’ requirements for skilled workers. We need to re-engineer the highly bureaucratic and ineffective Train to Gain scheme, strip out the burdens from FE funding and inspection and refocus the currently ineffective careers advice services provided by Connexions and the adult careers service. We need to reduce bureaucracy dramatically and, as we on these Benches have proposed, redirect the funding into substantial numbers of apprenticeships and training places at FE colleges. The number of young people not in education, employment or training is now more than 1 million, and 950,000 young people are unemployed. Our figures are among the worst in Europe. We cannot and must not go on like this. In 2006, the Government commissioned the Leitch report, which recommended that the UK should aim to be a world leader in skills by 2020. However, 16 per cent of young people in the UK still leave school without any qualifications. How do the Government think that the Leitch ambitions can be achieved? The Institute of Directors—I declare and interest as a member—claims that one-third of members' businesses are affected by a shortage of graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and that the situation is worsening. More than half anticipate being affected by a shortage of STEM subject graduates in the next 10 years. Again, will the Minister say how the Government will address this?