I thank all noble Lords for contributing to the debate. It has done what we wanted, which was to begin to open up this whole area and to get a sense of where the Government are going, and to try to see through to the vision and the framework, which the noble Baroness mentioned.
I think the slight problem we all have around the Room is that we are not quite sure what the vision actually is because we have not seen some of the detail of it. We have some doubts about whether the framework is going to be sufficient to get the country to the point where we can say that we have a competitive environment similar to Germany and others who have been at this for some time. The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, is quite right to bang on about whether or not large charities doing work for local authorities are going to be included. It will make a huge difference to them. We need to know a bit more about who will be on the list. If the Government are, as we know, changing around the definitions to housing associations so that they are in but they could be petitioned to come out by some other piece of legislation, this is not going to provide the basis of what we are talking about.
I suppose we were being a bit cheeky in trying to delete the first subsection of the first new Section in the clause, but we wanted to draw out from the Minister
the rationale behind what we are doing. She says that it makes economic and social sense for bodies to recruit something like 2% to 3% of their workforce, even if they are charities, and that the burden should be on the larger—presumably, the 250 employees threshold will become the standard, as that is the target for small and medium. So it is largely going to be on those that are not SMEs, which is interesting but nevertheless understandable in the circumstances. Where we disagree is that, although it seems to the Government to make economic sense for those bodies to be involved, that does not read across to the productive sectors of the economy, for which there will be challenges and obviously lots of things are still to happen but for which the case is still very strong that there should be some engagement. After all, if the Government are going to levy them for payment of the apprentices that they are going to take on, presumably they are already in contact with them—presumably, they have to write to and communicate with them—so it would not be very difficult to put a target in place in return for the money.
However, a lot of this will come up later. We have had a good start to today’s debates. I am grateful to all concerned. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.