Before the Minister sits down, perhaps I could interject briefly. I wondered whether the noble Lord, Lord Young, had actually looked through the list of amendments and noticed that we had the following one, as was rightly said, on public procurement, and the subsequent one, which is on small and medium-sized enterprises. However, I put it to the noble Baroness that she says there is a lot going on with apprenticeships at the moment. I think a very real problem has arisen, which is that the Government are constantly changing the goal posts in relation to apprenticeships and this poses a real problem for a lot of companies.
As is very clear indeed from the Ofsted report that came out last week, what has been happening is not satisfactory and needs to be changed. One of the problems facing the whole sector is constant instability. We have a situation in which the employer ownership
pilots were going on, and we have the trailblazer pilots going on, and then suddenly the Government intervene with the apprenticeship levy, which changes the whole game once again. The whole thing is thrown up in the air and a lot of companies are very uncertain as to quite where they are going to be going. Take the construction industry: there is already a construction industry levy—is the other levy to be on top of that? I know there have been consultations about it, but we do not know yet what is going to happen. Therefore, I put a plea to the Government and the Minister: please try to establish a broad framework for setting apprenticeships and then do not fiddle with it for about three years to give it a chance to bed down.