My Lords, Amendment 50B relates to an issue on which we touched earlier; namely, the question of small and medium-sized businesses and the availability of apprenticeships. The difficulty is that many small and medium-sized businesses find it quite difficult to organise apprenticeships. The Government have done their best to cut back the amount of bureaucracy involved; nevertheless there still is quite a lot. One only has to read Clause 19 and see precisely what is and is not a statutory apprenticeship to recognise that there is a lot of paperwork, including, initially, the setting up of an agreement, the contract with an apprentice and getting the terms of the contract correct and so forth, and subsequently making sure that the various points in the agreement are fulfilled. If you are a small or medium-sized business employing a dozen people or less, the extra bureaucracy seems formidable.
Until recently, training providers—further education colleges and the independent training providers—often handled the paperwork for a small and medium-sized business in return for them providing the work-based training. But with the development of employer ownership, training providers are no longer encouraged to do this. Another solution lies in group training agencies. This model that has been around for 40 years, primarily in the engineering industries, but it has now spread out on a more general basis as a model of industry provider/partnership. As Ofsted put it, they have,
“responded very effectively to the training demands of industry. Training companies”—
that is, independent training providers—
“that are members of GTA England generally provide high-quality training. Of the 23 GTAs that were inspected between January 2010 and April 2015, 21 (91%) have been judged good or outstanding for overall effectiveness. This compares with 79% of the 386 other independent learning providers inspected that were judged good or better over the same period”.
The amendment proposes that a specified public body—probably a local enterprise partnership, or its equivalent; but it could be a local authority or a further education college—should be tasked with the setting up of a GTA in their local area to build up the appropriate partnerships with industry, and especially to bring in the SMEs and their local partners. I note that in some cases where SMEs are part of supply chains, they are organised by the larger companies and may operate on quotas set by them for taking on apprentices, but in any locality, many small and medium-sized businesses could be good trainers. In Germany, on the whole, it is the smaller companies that are doing the training. They could be involved in apprenticeships, but many of them are not at present because they find the barriers to entering apprenticeship agreements too great. I beg to move.
6 pm