My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 56, which is in my name. I endorse what my noble friend Lord Mendelsohn said about ensuring that we get high-quality as well as high-level skill. We are about to enter quite a complicated area in relation to apprenticeships. In the Autumn Statement today, the Chancellor talked about the apprenticeship levy. How it operates in relation not just to large companies but to SMEs will be vital. The Government have a doubled-edged, or perhaps even a triple-edged, challenge: increasing the number of apprenticeships to a large degree; ensuring that we sustain quality, which has already been mentioned by my noble friend Lord Mendelsohn and the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp; increasing the number of SMEs
that employ apprentices; and attracting young people into apprenticeships with the guarantee that they will participate in a high-quality scheme.
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My amendment addresses something that I have raised on a number of occasions. Although the Government have an impressive target, and I do not quarrel with the importance that they attach to apprenticeships, our experience to date is that somewhere between 60% and 70% of apprentices are adult apprentices and a significant number of them are people who were already in employment. In my view, the title is wrong. We are talking about retraining and reskilling, although it is important that we do that.
The Government talk about reporting back against this target in the public sector, in which that situation exists. The aim of my amendment is to ensure that we get an accurate assessment of exactly what is happening and of how many real, new apprenticeships are being created for those in the 16 to 24 age range and how many adult apprenticeships are apprenticeships—in other words, new jobs for people who have changed their occupation—or are just for people who are reskilling and retraining in existing employment. That information would be helpful in assessing what real progress is being made. I look forward to the Minister’s response.