My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, has already made the case for Amendment 51A. When I read this part of the Bill, I was jolted and thought, “Good heavens, why trading standards?”. In the briefing that it provided for us, the LGA was very unhappy about it being trading standards. It said:
“We are concerned about the proposal (clause 19 (7)) in the Bill to make local trading standards teams responsible for enforcing the protection of the term ‘apprenticeships’. The LGA has consistently highlighted the expanding number of statutory duties that trading standards teams are responsible for, at a time when budgets and staff in the service have reduced by an average of 40 per cent over the last four years. Government has recognised the issue and is currently undertaking a review of trading standards with a view to identifying key service priorities, yet in the past month alone it has introduced two new statutory duties for the service”.
It seems very odd for the Government to be introducing a statutory duty in an area where trading standards has no expertise whatever. Local enterprise partnerships have much more knowledge of what is going on with apprenticeships than trading standards. It is really rather absurd that we are looking to a body with no background or expertise in the area. We should be looking for a body that has some expertise and can do the job without too much difficulty.
It should be acknowledged that local enterprise partnerships are at the moment very sparingly funded; they do not have a vast amount of money at their disposal and, whether one likes it or not, this responsibility will require some resources, particularly if the body is required to make regular reports to the Secretary of State about what is going on. If we place that duty on local enterprise partnerships, we should know that they have sufficient resources to fulfil it.