My Lords, as we move on to this session on apprenticeships, I want to reassure the noble Baroness the Minister that we are very supportive of what is being planned here generally. We will make a few points and ask some questions of a probing nature, but we do not intend to do anything that would in any sense be too aggressive, and I hope that our comments will be taken in the spirit in which they are intended.
I am slightly short-handed today because, unfortunately, my noble friend Lord Mendelsohn is unable to be here—although I hope he will join us later—so I am largely on my own. I shall be slightly scrabbling to make some of the points that I had thought that others might be making, so your Lordships may find that today has a slightly surreal feel to it, as I gloss over some of the more difficult and trenchant issues. However, I shall be heavily reliant on others who put their names down against the amendments and who, I am sure, will be equally testing and trying for the Minister.
On the group of amendments starting with Amendment 49DA, in which we have a number of amendments and which is on the generality of the new approach to apprenticeships that the Government say that they wish to take—which, as I said, we are broadly in favour of—I wish to make three main points.
First, Amendment 49DA, which is a probing amendment, picks up on an issue that has been raised with us by a number of local government bodies and other agencies. They feel that the powers being taken to set targets for public bodies on the number of apprentices that the Government would wish them to have appointed by the end of the Parliament, in pursuit of this very ambitious target of 3 million new apprentices
within that period, will cause real problems. Could the Minister therefore explain what negotiations and discussions she has had with local government and other agencies on these points?
For example, one issue that has been raised with us is that there is quite a range of development in the sector in terms of who is ready to take on an increased number of apprentices and who is not—and we are talking about a very significant increase if we do the calculations. What figure do the Government have in mind overall for the sectors concerned, and would they be receptive to having further negotiations and discussions with those bodies in order to try to arrive at an equitable basis on which this could operate? We are not against the proposal—it is a good thing that everybody should be set stretching targets—but we slightly regret that there is not more in the Bill tying the increase to contracts, procurement issues and other activities in which, in previous Bills, we have discussed how one could lever up the numbers of apprenticeships. Specifically on the target for public bodies, we would like to have a bit more information about how it will work in practice.
Secondly, it is glaringly obvious that the Government feel strongly that apprenticeships will flow only if targets are applied to the public sector—we did not know that targets had come back into fashion, but that is obviously a nice thing to see in a Bill of this nature—but it has been pointed out that there is no target for the private sector. Why is this? Is there some other force here that we are not aware of that is preventing the Government taking what seems to be the logical step? If we are to get to the 3 million target, there surely has to be an obligation—we would perhaps put it no stronger than that—on the private sector, which will carry a large proportion of this. Of course, money will flow in support of those, so there should be no net cost to them in relation to how the targets will be reached. I am sure that it would be to the benefit of the country as a whole if both the public sector and the private sector were jointly engaged in this process.
Thirdly, on Amendment 49EB, there has been a lot of concern, expressed very often by my noble friend Lord Young, about the quality of apprenticeships. Indeed, he mentioned it in the debate in this Room only a few days ago in relation to a statutory instrument that had been put forward. The numbers are one thing but the quality is very much another. Obviously, the quality will be tackled, through the Bill and the Act, by creating the term “statutory apprenticeship”, and that is a good thing. However, the amendment suggests that there may be more return if the restriction on statutory apprenticeships could focus on the higher-quality and the higher-skilled elements. In other words, they should be at levels 4 and 5 in the training schemes and not at levels 1 and 2.
I am sure there are other points that others will wish to make on that, but that gives the flavour of the way in which we want these amendments to be considered. I beg to move.