Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL]
Wednesday 9th October 2024
(2 months, 1 week ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL] 2024-26 Read Hansard Text
Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL]
Tuesday 22nd October 2024
(1 month, 4 weeks ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL] 2024-26 Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Smith of Malvern
That the Bill be now read a second time.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)
First, I thank noble Lords who contributed to the debate following His Majesty’s gracious Speech, when we first discussed this Bill. That was also my maiden speech, and it seems an awfully long time ago. I thank noble Lords who attended the recent open briefing sessions with me in this House to talk about the Bill and the work that the Government are doing in this area. Our central mission is to grow the economy. We have set out a modern industrial strategy with a primary objective of long-term sustainable growth in our highest-potential growth-driving sectors.
To succeed in our growth mission, we need to harness the talent of our people, meet businesses’ skills needs and break down the barriers to opportunity. Education is critical to breaking down those barriers, and we are focused on ensuring that all children and learners can achieve their ambitions and thrive in education, work and life, no matter their background.
However, I am sorry to report that this country’s workers still lack the skills they need. This means that businesses cannot grow and people are not able to make the most of the opportunities that come their way. For example, around 7.5 million working-age adults do not have even basic digital skills, despite most employers saying that these are vital for their businesses. As recently as two years ago, UK employers put over one-third of their vacancies down to skills shortages.
Our businesses have become overly reliant on importing skilled workers from abroad as they have not seen a plan to develop the skills they need in this country. Compared with other countries, our workers are underqualified. The OECD states that 26% of the UK workforce are underqualified for their job, compared with an OECD average of 18%. That underqualification is in part the result of a “missing middle” in our skills system. Not enough people attain post-school qualifications in sought-after disciplines.
Technical training at levels 4 and 5, between A-levels and undergraduate study, is low compared with other countries and with our own historical levels. In England only 4% of people have level 4 and 5 qualifications as their highest qualification, compared with around 20% in Germany and 34% in Canada.
Not only do we lack the skills we need today; our economy’s skills needs are changing, with 1.4 million jobs in new fields projected by 2035. England’s skills system has a crucial role in ensuring that businesses and individuals are prepared for the future, but the current fragmented skills system is preventing young—and older—people from seizing the opportunities that are out there.
That is the sorry state of the skills system that we have inherited from the last Government, a system that employers and individuals report is overly complex, where people cannot find the training opportunities that would help them achieve and which is holding back our businesses, our public services and our economy from accessing the skills they need to grow. After 14 years of tinkering with qualifications, introducing a levy that has seen apprenticeship starts fall, and a failure to look to the future needs of our economy, the skills system is failing individuals and our country. The skills system needs an overhaul. It needs to be strategic, creating opportunities for young people to get on and for adults to upskill and retrain, and delivering the skills that will help our businesses to grow.
The Bill is a crucial step towards creating a skills system fit for the future, enabling our growth and opportunity missions to deliver better life chances for all, meeting the challenge of our industrial strategy, supporting our NHS to have access to the people and skills that it will rely on, and delivering the skills to build the houses and infrastructure that we need and to support our clean energy superpower mission.
This Government have already begun to take action. In July the Prime Minister announced the launch of Skills England, which then published its first report in September. This new organisation will bring coherence to the system, ensuring that we have a clear assessment not just of where the skills gaps are now but of what we will need in the future to realise our potential in a rapidly changing world. It will use that assessment to ensure that there is a comprehensive suite of apprenticeships, training and technical qualifications for individuals and employers to access. At its heart will be employers working with trade unions, training providers across our further education, higher education and independent sectors, and local and regional government—a partnership raising the profile and impact of our skills system. Skills England’s strong board and chair will deliver the operational independence, external expertise and challenge to drive the change that we need to see. Its link back into government will provide the voice and the advice to ensure that skills sit at the heart of joined-up decision-making across government.
Skills England will transform our ability to determine and then deliver the skills that our country needs, giving it a key role as part of an even more ambitious programme of reform and national renewal. The launch of our industrial strategy will provide the firm foundation and confidence for businesses to plan. We are moving away from the chaos of recent years, where policy changed as quickly as Prime Ministers. Skills need to support this growth and investment rather than being the barrier that many employers highlight, so Skills England will work closely with the industrial strategy council to remove those barriers.
Skills England will work closely with the Department for Work and Pensions on our major cross-government effort to get Britain working and tackle deep-seated challenges in our labour market. It will work closely with the Migration Advisory Committee to ensure that we have a strong skills pipeline.
We plan further fundamental reform to support a vibrant and responsive skills and education system. We are creating a growth and skills levy to bring the focus and flexibility lacked by the last Government’s levy; a curriculum and assessment review to ensure that our schools are providing the learning to maximise all children’s chances to develop the skills, knowledge and creativity to make the most of their education; a youth guarantee to ensure that all young people have access to jobs and training; and a new national jobs and careers service to provide direction and support for people entering the workforce.
To create a single, unified body in Skills England, it is crucial that the functions that currently sit with the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education are folded into it. Skills England will build on IfATE’s role in securing the quality of technical qualifications and apprenticeships, and we are grateful for the role that IfATE has played in doing that—but, to pave the way for Skills England, the Bill will abolish IfATE. It will remove functions relating to IfATE’s current accountability to the Secretary of State and Parliament, transfer IfATE’s functions to the Secretary of State and amend five of them. It will allow the skills system to operate without organisational boundaries and administrative hurdles. Skills England will help the skills system become more agile and responsive by identifying what skills are needed where in the economy, supporting our industrial strategy and securing the availability of high-quality qualifications that meet those needs.
The Bill is narrow in scope and technical in nature. There are two main elements. The first part of the Bill, as outlined, will abolish IfATE and transfer its functions to the Secretary of State. These functions will largely be exercised by Skills England, operating as an executive agency. The Bill will also enable the transfer of IfATE’s property, rights and liabilities to the Secretary of State. The second part makes changes to some of the functions to be transferred. We have examined the functions carefully and determined that the way some of them are set out in the existing legislation is overly prescriptive and could hamper the responsive and agile skills system we need.
The Government therefore propose some changes to functions relating to apprenticeships and technical education to increase our responsiveness and allow the Secretary of State to make small and fast adjustments to our education and training programmes. This should provide the speed and flexibility the skills system needs. Clauses 4 and 5 remove the requirement for each occupational standard and apprenticeship assessment plan to have been prepared by an appropriate “group of persons”.
Employers will continue to be central to how technical qualifications and apprenticeships are produced. In the preparation and design of standards and apprenticeship assessment plans, while design by employers and others will be maintained as the default position, these changes will allow greater flexibility in scenarios where preparation by a group can be unnecessary or restrictive—for example, where training requirements are already tightly defined as a result of there being a regulator or an industry-recognised qualification, such as the dental hygienist occupation being regulated by the General Dental Council. Giving the Secretary of State the flexibility to consider whether to convene a group of persons in such cases will enable the skills system to be more agile.
Where the Secretary of State makes the determination not to use a group of persons to prepare standards or apprenticeship assessment plans, a high level of rigour and recognition of the value of external input will be upheld, for example by publishing standards in draft for stakeholder comment before they are finalised.
Clause 6 will retain the duty to maintain arrangements to review technical education qualifications, standards and apprenticeship assessment plans. But we will remove the duty to review these at regular intervals and publish information about these intervals. This change is necessary in light of there now being more than 700 standards, spanning a huge range of sectors and occupational specialisms. The frequency with which different standards should be reviewed and updated will depend on their performance, how widely they are used and the pace and extent of technological advancements resulting in changes to the type of tasks performed and expertise required. This change will therefore allow the Secretary of State flexibility to focus on reviews with the greatest need and impact.
Clause 7 will remove the requirement for a third-party examination of a standard or apprenticeship assessment plan to be carried out before approval. Again, we expect the default position to remain that standards and assessment plans will be examined by independent third parties. The Secretary of State will deviate from this only in a minority of instances, where appropriate. This change will allow flexibility where examination would add limited value—for example, in highly regulated occupations in the health and finance sectors where the assessment plan simply sets out the regulator’s requirements.
Clause 8 will allow the Secretary of State to grant an exception to Ofqual, which is currently prevented from exercising its accreditation power for technical qualifications. This amendment would allow Ofqual, where the Secretary of State deemed it appropriate, to be given the discretion to apply its accreditation power to specified technical education qualification types, subject to appropriate consultation. This change reintroduces the potential for technical qualifications to be accredited in the same way as general qualifications, so that learners and employers can be assured of the quality of the most high-stake qualifications.
These flexibilities reflect the calls from employers and others to ensure that the system is agile and flexible and can respond to rapidly changing needs. In developing Skills England we are already building the vital partnership I mentioned earlier through a series of engagement events. So far, the round tables led by Skills England’s interim chair, Richard Pennycook, have involved more than 100 key stakeholders, including a wide range of employers. These sessions have emphasised the need for greater flexibility in the skills system and more opportunities becoming available to shape technical qualifications and apprenticeships so that they best reflect the changing needs of industry, particularly in the most critical sectors. It is in this spirit that we bring forward the Bill.
The Bill makes vital, practical changes that enable us to deliver Skills England, to bring coherence to the skills system and ultimately to deliver the skills we need for the future. These reforms will sit at the heart of this Government’s missions to drive economic growth and to spread opportunity across all parts of this country. I beg to move.
The Earl of Effingham (Con)
My Lords, I look forward to hearing the maiden speech from the noble Lord, Lord Beamish. The apprenticeship model is a win-win that builds a skilled labour force while at the same time stimulating local economies and creating jobs. There are surely few better ways to foster innovation, enhance productivity and drive growth. IfATE was part of our commitment to deliver employer-led apprenticeship standards.
Since 2010, 5.7 million people have started an apprenticeship—our system is working, and we were on track to building a skills and apprenticeships nation. We would have increased investment in apprenticeships to £2.7 billion per year by 2025. Leading companies agree with our policy: Amazon, Specsavers and Premier Inn all make the most of their levy funds to recruit talent. In fact, 98% of the apprenticeship budget was spent over the last two years.
More than 690 apprenticeships are now available for a broader variety of jobs than ever before. We train nurses, lawyers and scientists, with around 750,000 people currently on apprenticeships. These apprenticeships are all designed by employers, so apprentices can be confident that they are learning skills valued by businesses. A national survey of apprentices revealed that 92% of respondents felt that the employer-defined knowledge, skills and behaviours they are required to learn through their apprenticeship would equip them to succeed in the future, while 80% said they felt empowered to have successful careers in their industry.
One has only to look to Preston in Lancashire, where BAE Systems has a vast college in which it trains apprentices on its fighter programmes, or to Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, where they train on submarines. BAE’s number of apprenticeships has nearly tripled since 2017. Higher apprenticeship levels 4 to 7, from foundation degrees to master’s level, increased from 27,000 to 112,000. These levels give apprentices the opportunity to earn a degree, combined with enjoying many years of work experience at top UK firms, and the benefit of avoiding taking on significant student debt.
In February this year, BAE Systems and the University of Portsmouth launched the UK’s first ever degree apprenticeship in space systems engineering. Not content with stopping at space systems, IfATE is also helping heritage industries such as stonemasonry. In 2020 just one person took up an apprenticeship. Last year, that number jumped to 53. In March this year, we pledged to create a new £60 million investment fund to enable up to 20,000 more apprenticeships, including for young people and small businesses.
Our record speaks for itself, so we have concerns around various proposals in the Bill. It is not yet clear whether Skills England will be established in statute as IfATE was, which raises questions about its independence from the Department for Education and its ability to galvanise other government departments. How will it be able to pitch for the money needed from the Treasury to fund the skills gap that we know we have? Can the Minister please enlighten the House on this?
Clause 4 gives the Secretary of State the power to prepare apprenticeship standards either herself or to commission others. It would therefore technically be possible for an apprenticeship standard to be prepared without the input of employers, providers or industry groups. The Secretary of State could even close down or fundamentally change Skills England without the consent of Parliament. Can the Minister explain what failsafe measures will be put in place to avoid this happening to the detriment of employees, employers and the many people who currently benefit from the apprenticeship programme?
There are concerns that the Bill may decrease the standards of technical qualifications because Clause 6 removes the IfATE requirement that reviews of approved technical qualifications should happen at regular intervals. The reason given in the Explanatory Notes is
“to enable flexibility to review standards according to priorities and employers’ needs”.
But how can the Government guarantee to maintain the high standard required if this clause is left in place? A regular review process significantly improves performance via proactive feedback, identifying areas for improvement and setting clear and achievable goals. We designed an apprenticeship programme to encourage personal and professional growth, which ultimately leads to enhanced productivity and job satisfaction. Will the Minister please explain whether there will be a guaranteed minimum amount of reviews per annum?
The Bill’s impact assessment states that there may be a drop in apprenticeship starts while IfATE’s functions are transferred to the Secretary of State and, ultimately, Skills England. It states that this will disproportionately impact adult apprentices and disadvantaged learners and regions. AI and technology are transforming the nature of work and the skills people need to be successful. Many older people need help to be better with technology. We have more than 5 million older workers in the UK who are thinking of retiring early and, of those, circa 500,000 said that they could not keep up with the skills needed. These are the people who will be hit, according to the impact statement. What assurances can the Minister give us that this negative impact will be mitigated as much as possible?
There are also concerns that the unions will have a disproportionate influence over Skills England, to the detriment of employers. The senior deputy general secretary of Prospect welcomed the launch of Skills England, but argued that it
“won’t achieve its objectives without engaging and involving trade unions at every level”.
What reassurances can the Minister give the House that there will not be undue involvement of the unions, to the detriment of employers and learners?
The Government have said that they will build 300,000 new homes every year, but we do not have the electricians, plumbers, bricklayers or roofers needed to build that number of homes every year. Their skills cannot be conjured up; they need training and apprenticeships, which take time.
In March this year, the current Secretary of State for Work and Pensions announced that Labour would fund 1,000 new careers advisers in schools and a number of employment advisers in new young futures hubs. The Government committed to 1,000, but what is the timetable for getting them all in place?
In the Government’s manifesto, they set out plans to reform the levy and allow businesses to use 50% of their funds for non-apprenticeship training. But analysis has shown that, if you allow employers to use half the funds for other skills training, you materially reduce the number of apprenticeships. Are the Government still taking this course of action and, if yes, why?
Apprenticeships and technical qualifications are the engine room of the UK economy. A successful programme leads to innovation, productivity and growth. This must work, so that everyone in the country feels the benefits. We very much look to forward hearing from the Minister on our concerns.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I am looking forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Beamish.
It is an odd experience to find yourself looking at a document with a background that seems to agree with you. In the last speech I made in the previous Parliament on this subject I said that levels 4 and 5 needed tremendous support and encouragement. We now have a document which, in the policy summary notes, says more or less that. So I can sit down and say. “The Government are listening to me at last” and all will be right in the world.
But when you see something that is all going to the Secretary of State—their office, but really the person in charge—alarm bells start to ring. If the Secretary of State is going to do it, what happens if they do something which is slightly off? What is the warning construction? Does Skills England go back and say, “You’re wrong”? How would we resolve that? Would we actually find out if there was real disagreement? That is something we should have a long hard look at during this Bill.
We also have to make sure that we have a balanced approach to skills. Key to this is the approach—the previous Government did start this—to careers guidance. The two have to work together to get a decent result. We have to make sure that people know what the skills are and where you are going to start to apply them. I was never comfortable with the previous Government’s approach to the breakdown between the local skills structure and the national skills structure. We should get a better balance, especially for levels 4 and 5, with a big emphasis on the technician level. We have historically been bad at this—for decades we have been bad at this. When I first got into Parliament, I was told that we were bad at it.
If we are going to do that, where should that support come? Where are we going to look at that balance of getting a high technical level of training? It might be delivered by the higher education sector in places—indeed, it probably should be. One of the things we might have lost when we lost polytechnics was something that bridged that gap. I know that that battle was already lost before this came in, but how will we deliver that higher level of training? Apprenticeships are one way to access this, and colleges will be another. How do we balance these two things and how does Skills England take on this role? That is one of the important things we have not heard about in enough detail to pass judgment.
If we are being more flexible and removing barriers to flexibility, we are also removing potential safeguards. It is the trade off, balancing the two. How will we know when the Government have decided that something has gone wrong? And it will—there will be mistakes and misjudgments; all Governments make them. It is not making a mistake that damns you; it is not realising and not adjusting. How will they report back and let us know what is going on? How will they let the sector know that they are making changes? That will be vital to ensure confidence, which is once again a feeding-in point; if there is confidence across the sector, people will buy in. It is important that we hear that during the Bill’s progress. Our skill here will be tested with probing amendments, but we need to know what the Government’s approach is in more detail than we will get tonight.
I could speak for a long time but I do not think it is appropriate—I could try to work salmon into my speech but I think I will give that a miss. The final brick that will make this work is knowing where we will get the structure to examine what is being done, if it is all held in the department. This has got to talk to every other bit of government, and then all the bits outside government. If there is a central structure, how that is intended to happen and its capacity to change—how to extend bits that work well and what to do when bits do not—is what we are coming to.
The intention behind the Bill is basically good; it is the delivery that we should talk about. How do we bring in practical solutions, from inside and outside government—indeed, from inside and outside the Department for Education? The Department of Health, for instance, will know what it requires, and if those two bits of Whitehall can talk to each other, that is great. But anyone who has been here for any length of time knows that Chinese walls take a lot of kicking to get through. Everybody here has done that. Whoever is looking after trade or local government will have an input. If Ministers can say what they expect to happen, at least within Whitehall, I would be much more sanguine about the Bill. But we will have to find out how this works to have real confidence in the process.
I wish the Government well, because any sane person would, but we are not writing them a blank cheque yet. We would like to hear about the process behind this, because if it achieves success then that will be great, but knowing how they will recover from any mistakes and adapt to them—the cock-up school of history is one I agree with—would reassure me. I hope that the Government will be forthcoming about their plans. In that way, we will all be able to rest a little easier in looking at the training agenda.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to talk about the importance of skills with many who we might think of as the usual suspects assembled here this evening, even at rather a late hour. I too look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Beamish.
I welcome this Bill, which is an important, if mainly technical, step towards a much-needed revamp of overall skills policy. Other elements of this include the establishment of Skills England, a new growth and skills levy to replace the apprenticeship levy, and the curriculum and assessment review addressing those two aspects of education. All this is in the overall context of the industrial strategy launched last week, which rightly includes a strong focus on people and skills.
Three of the Government’s five missions, on growth, net zero and opportunity for all, make specific reference to jobs, productivity or education, and the NHS mission also depends on skills. The skills system is a critical enabler of economic growth. Yet employers across virtually all sectors report significant skills shortages, combined with growing future skills needs. Meanwhile, the education system is failing to respond adequately to these needs, particularly for young people who are less academically inclined and do not aspire to university but are not made sufficiently aware of the alternative technical and vocational pathways available to them and the rewarding and fulfilling employment opportunities that those pathways can lead to. In her foreword to Skills England’s first report, the Secretary of State for Education highlights that we have a
“fragmented and confusing skills landscape that lets down learners, frustrates businesses and holds back growth”.
This Second Reading debate poses an unusual challenge: whether to focus on the Bill itself, which is relatively short and technical, or to address the bigger skills policy picture, of which the Bill is a harbinger. The Minister has managed skilfully to ride both these horses. By the way, it is very good that we have the Skills Minister in the House of Lords, and I wish her every success in her crucial role. Taking my cue from her, but possibly in another order, I shall address some provisions in the Bill before raising questions about other aspects of the Government’s overall skills plans.
The Bill transfers IfATE functions to the Secretary of State, with the intention that most of them will be passed on to Skills England when it is up and running. What can the Minister tell us about what criteria will be used to determine which functions will or will not be transferred?
Clauses 4 and 5 provide the option for standards and apprenticeship assessment plans to be prepared by the Secretary of State rather than “a group of persons”—typically a group of key employers. I have heard mixed reactions from employers to this: it is welcome if it speeds up the review process for minor changes so long as it does not become the default, but there are concerns if it results in employers becoming less engaged or even bypassed and the quality and consistency of apprenticeship being undermined. I was reassured by some of what the Minister said about the intentions.
Can the Minister confirm that both standard-setting and assessment plans will be transferred to Skills England to avoid inconsistent outcomes for the same apprenticeship if these functions are separated? In particular, will Skills England be required to work closely with industry skills bodies to ensure effective employer input?
The Bill’s impact assessment, as a previous speaker mentioned, recognises that there may be some delays in approving qualifications during the transition process. What is the Government’s assessment of the likely impact of these on learners and employers, and what steps are they taking to mitigate or minimise that impact? Together, the points I have mentioned come down to a single underlying question: what reassurance can the Minister give that the specific proposals in the Bill will not be used in a way that results in the influence and centrality of employers in the process being diluted?
I turn now to three broader skills policy issues. I could have covered many more, so I will try to keep to just the three. The first relates to the proposed growth and skills levy and how it might address the perennial challenge of persuading more small businesses to offer apprenticeships. Taking construction as an example, the Government are seeking to build 1.5 million new homes over the next five years which, according to the Construction Industry Training Board, will require the current workforce of the sector to increase by an estimated 30%, or some 152,000 people. Where are these people going to come from if not from SMEs, which account for 98% of the construction industry?
Yet the tight margins on which SMEs in the sector operate, exacerbated by issues such as cash retentions—about which noble Lords have regularly heard me complain—mean that they find it hard to invest in apprenticeships and other forms of training and lack sufficient incentives and support to do so. How will the growth and skills levy seek to overcome the challenges of funding and bureaucracy preventing so many SMEs, not just in construction, from offering apprenticeships? Might the Government be considering some sort of weighting in the allocation of growth and skills levy funds—for example, to prioritise apprenticeships in smaller businesses, or for younger people, or for higher priority sectors, or at lower levels, given that employer skills needs in construction are primarily at level 3 and below? Hitherto, it has been very unclear what the desired balance of apprenticeships in these areas might be.
My second issue concerns the limited focus, and lack of alignment and agility, of the education system in meeting the skills needs of the employment market which students will need to navigate. The Education for 11-16 Year Olds Committee on which I served last year, some of whose members are here today, found an alarming imbalance between the academic subjects required to obtain good GCSE results and the more technical and vocational options that develop the essential practical and life skills sought by employers, including digital skills, communication skills, such as oracy, which I wish I had learned, teamwork, problem-solving, resilience and creative skills. An effective skills strategy must be clear not only about the skills that employers in key sectors need, now and in the future, to boost productivity and growth, but also how the education system should be adapted to provide those skills. Will these issues be fully taken on board by the curriculum and assessment review, and how will employer needs be reflected in the review, given that there seem to be no employer representatives in its membership?
Finally, to pick up on what previous speakers have said, what can the Minister tell us about how Skills England, as a non-statutory—and “Why non-statutory?” I ask—executive agency within the Department for Education, headed by a chief executive at Civil Service director level, and with a range of detailed technical and regulatory functions to fulfil, will at the same time be able to co-ordinate skills needs across sectors and regions, building on local skills improvement plans and driving strategic collaboration across the whole of government, in partnership with sector skills bodies, unions, the devolved nations and others? That is an enormous task for any single organisation to fulfil, particularly at that level of government. How will the pieces of this complex puzzle fit together to create a coherent national strategy, fully integrated with the industrial strategy, to ensure that the identified demand for skills is matched by the provision from education and training at all levels, and who will be responsible for driving this process across government? To pick up on what the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said, what tools will be available to identify and fix things that are not working, and who will exercise them?
The Government have set themselves ambitious and inspiring goals for skills policy, and I look forward to hearing more from the Minister about how they will be achieved and what part this Bill will play in what will be a long, complex and vitally important process.
The Lord Bishop of Leeds
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare. I realise that I stand in the way of the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, which I look forward to hearing shortly. I shall try to be brief.
I support the Bill in principle, and certainly the ambition behind it—and I certainly understand the logic behind it. A number of questions have already been raised about it that will need some careful addressing and answering if the House is to be confident about what is proposed. I want to focus on the FE sector, which has been facing some difficulty in recent years—facing the uncertainty while awaiting the outcome of the Government’s pause and review of level 3 qualifications, deals with FE pay being considered separately from the ongoing negotiations for the recently resurrected School Support Staff Negotiating Body, and faces up to the impact of sustained cuts and falls in funding in real terms. But FE is doing amazing work, particularly with particular sectors of our young people.
My questions relate to the move of IfATE into Skills England in relation to several issues. First, on young people, the apprenticeship levy has resulted in fewer young people undertaking apprenticeships, Young people in general, but especially those not in employment, education or training, form a demographic that stands to benefit immensely from apprenticeships, but it seems to me that we have seen a trend of employers choosing to spend their apprenticeship levy on older employees or career changers, as young people are sometimes perceived as harder to work with. How will Skills England incentivise the recruitment and training of young people through apprenticeships?
Secondly, on SMEs, small and medium-sized enterprises have not found the apprenticeship levy simple to navigate. It is much simpler for those with a turnover of more than £3 million a year, as they contribute automatically. Complexity and perceived uncertainty around a solution of co-investment has limited the take-up of apprentices by SMEs, which can disproportionately affect smaller or more rural communities, where larger businesses simply may not operate. How will the new structures around apprenticeships incentivise and support provision of apprenticeships by small and medium-sized businesses?
On the question of levels, the apprenticeship levy has had a much bigger impact on higher-level qualifications, such as higher and degree apprenticeships, and in turn therefore helps higher education institutions. But it is not improving the range and offer of courses available at lower levels, such as intermediate apprenticeships at levels 2 and 3, to anywhere near the same level. Arguably, that increases the options available to already more privileged or socially mobile apprenticeship candidates, while restricting the options available to those most in need.
I shall give an example to illustrate my point. There is currently a crisis in care. Statistically, care-experienced young people are far more likely to study at FE institutions than HE institutions. Given the weaker social fabric supporting them, and the complexity of transitioning to independent adulthood after 18, which is challenging enough as they leave the care system, these young people should be the ideal candidates for apprenticeships and the training and salary or wages that they provide. However, they are more likely to need to undertake a lower-level apprenticeship in the first instance, and are seen by some providers as harder to work with, as I indicated earlier, and are therefore doubly passed over in favour of older and more experienced candidates undertaking higher or degree level apprenticeships, for which a young learner may not be eligible, depending on their prior education. How will Skills England use apprenticeship structures and incentives to make sure that our apprenticeship structures and technical education are making the most impact for our most vulnerable young adults and learners?
Lord Beamish (Lab) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to give my maiden speech in your Lordships’ House. I begin by thanking Black Rod and her staff for their help and assistance since my introduction. I also thank the principal doorkeeper and other doorkeepers and other House staff for their welcome and advice, along with the warm welcome that I have received from noble Lords from across the House.
I also take this opportunity to thank my two sponsors, the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay of Cartvale, and the noble Lord, Lord Grocott. I have been friends with the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, for many years. We served together on the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. On our many travels, she used to describe me as her unofficial Batman, as I carried bags through numerous airports around the world. However, it was a delight to undertake that role for such a noble Baroness.
The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has similarly been a good friend and, like me, is an early riser. We were both members for many years of the House of Commons tearoom breakfast club, which meets at 7.30 am every day. It is an opportunity to read the morning papers, and usually by 9 am the assembled masses have put the world to rights. I am also pleased to be reunited in your Lordships’ House with the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom. We served together on the House of Commons Defence Committee, but more importantly we have also worked for more than 15 years on the campaign to get justice for sub-postmasters affected by the Post Office Horizon scandal. Although we are of different political parties, we have worked well together and over the years have helped right a grave injustice. In your Lordships’ House I hope to continue that work on Post Office justice. The latest scandal is around a system called Capture, which pre-dates the Horizon system and has just been the subject of a report by the Department for Business highlighting a similar scandal that took place with that system. It is something that I think we now need to address.
I join your Lordships’ House having had the honour of being the Member of Parliament for North Durham for 23 years. Many people have inquired about the origins of my title, Lord Beamish. Many, including my good friend Gavin Robinson, the leader of the DUP in the Commons, asked me whether it is in honour of the famous Irish stout. No, it is not. It is one of the many villages that make up the North Durham constituency and, as those from the north-east know, it is also the site of the world-famous open-air museum. As your Lordships know, it is always difficult to decide which village or community to include in one’s title, but I drew the line at a village very close to Beamish called No Place—I did not think that being Lord No Place would have the same ring.
I am the third former Labour Member of Parliament from North Durham or its predecessor constituency to enter your Lordships’ House, the others being Jack Lawson—Attlee’s Minister of War in the 1945 Labour Government—in 1950, and Giles Radice in 2001. I know that many noble Lords will remember him with affection. In his maiden speech to your Lordships’ House in 1950, Lawson said that
“I have listened to the debates in this House for some weeks. I confess that from time to time I felt very much like David Copperfield on one occasion, when we are told he felt ‘very, very young’”.—[Official Report, 23/5/1950; col. 442.]
Being a 60 year-old, I think I understand what he was saying.
My maiden speech in the House of Commons in 2001 described North Durham as
“a rural constituency with urban problems”.—[Official Report, Commons, 9/7/01; cols. 585-86.]
It is a former coal-mining constituency with beautiful countryside, and the sad thing is that the economic reason why most of the communities existed is no longer there: coal mining closed and industry moved away. The jobs now are mainly to be found to the north, in Newcastle, Sunderland and the A1 corridor. The communities are still very strong, but jobs are needed. The other thing that is needed is to raise the aspirations of many young people who live there. That is why I welcome the new Government’s commitment, as one of their key missions, to economic growth and concentration on skills.
There has been much debate about the need for capital investment but, unless we invest in people, the economic gains that we strive for will not be achieved. If your Lordships look around the world, the most successful economies are those that invest in their workforce. This Bill is a key step in that direction. As the Minister said in opening the debate, the skills landscape for too long has been fragmented. If Skills England is to succeed, though, it will need to be a genuine partnership between government, the education sector and the private sector. Government and the private sector will need to come together not only to identify the areas where skills are needed but to make sure that resources are directed towards them. I also argue that skills and Skills England need to be hard-wired into all government departments—they need to be thinking about skills when policies are developed.
I note that the policy publication for the Bill, produced by the Department for Education, refers to work with devolved Administrations, combined authorities and government department such as the Department for Energy Security, DWP and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology but does not mention other departments such as, for example, the Ministry of Defence. As many noble Lords know, defence has been one of my interests, as a former Defence Minister. According to ADS, aerospace, defence, security and space employ 427,000 people in the UK, from large primes down to small SMEs, and provide some 20,000 apprenticeships every year. It is therefore vital that the Ministry of Defence and groups such as ADS work in partnership with Skills England when drawing up strategies for those sectors.
As has been said in this debate, skills are important for the economic well-being of our nation, but I also argue that they are vital for our national security. As a former member of the Intelligence and Security Committee, I saw at first hand that if we are to defend our nation against those who wish to threaten us, whether they be nation states or not, we will need a new generation with computer and IT skills and mathematicians in the future. That is something that needs to be thought about. I also draw the Minister’s attention to the work that is going on at GCHQ with the neurodiverse community, tapping into a resource that is not only having great beneficial results for the individuals but helping it develop new programmes and ways to protect our country.
When government departments, particularly the Treasury, are awarding contracts, they also need to think about skills. Some 38p in every pound spent on a defence contract with a UK company not only comes back to the Government in tax and national insurance but helps grow the skills base of our country. This was clearly demonstrated in Philip Dunne’s excellent 2018 report Growing the Contribution of Defence to UK Prosperity. Sadly, the last Government completely ignored that excellent report.
I conclude by making a plea for what I call our traditional skills. There is still a need for stonemasons, glass craftsman and traditional carpenters, and I commend the work being done by the Beamish museum in giving apprenticeship opportunities to young people in those skills, which are in danger of dying out. If the Houses of Parliament ever decide to get around to the restoration and renewal programme of the Palace of Westminster, these skills will be vital.
I thank your Lordships for listening to my maiden speech. I look forward to making further contributions and taking an active part in the work of the House.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
It is my great pleasure and privilege to follow my noble friend and congratulate him on an excellent maiden speech. We are very glad that he is here, bringing the experience he outlined, his cross-party campaigning zeal on the Post Office scandal and his work on defence. My noble friend on our Front Bench will very much welcome his expertise. I agree with him about craft skills, which my city was built on as well, and the collaboration between the public and private sectors that we will need if we are to make the skills agenda work. I appreciate that very much.
I knew about the Beamish open-air industrial museum. As my noble friend was making his maiden speech, I was thinking that he had moved from one museum to another. This is more like a natural history museum where the occasional dinosaur moves around the corridors—responsible, in part at least, for not changing the sitting hours of this House. So here we are debating something really important late on a Tuesday night, perhaps too late to do it justice. I will therefore cut my speech down. I declare my interests in the register on a wide range of issues relating to education.
I congratulate my noble friend the Minister on being able to ride the two horses—and Houses; she has been in both—referred to earlier of addressing the minutiae of this legislation and the greater vision of Skills England. I was proud to lead on the learning and skills proposals published two years ago from which Skills England, the growth and skills levy and much else have been drawn.
I am still struggling with the idea of being on the Government Benches rather than in opposition. After 14 years, it is quite hard not to make a remark like “This Bill is necessary but not necessarily sufficient” sound like a criticism. While the Bill is needed to transfer IfATE’s duties to Skills England, it is only a tiny part of creating a vision and pathway to generate the energy, drive and commitment of everyone involved to make Skills England a force to be reckoned with. Some of the questions already asked today arise directly from that.
Figure 7 in chapter 3 of the paper published on 24 September—the day the Prime Minister made a speech at Labour’s party conference—lays out the challenge of getting the right skills in the right places, not just now but for the future. That paper made some interesting comments that I strongly welcome and hope we can build on in Committee and in responses from the Government, as well as in wider workforce planning.
My noble friend Lord Beamish referred to using other departments as a template. He noted the massive investment of the Ministry of Defence. Defence procurement reminds me that we have an enormous opportunity that has not yet found its way into government policy: using procurement to drive apprenticeships as well as the necessary skills agenda for the future. When asked what consultation he had carried out on the production of his first car, Henry Ford indicated that, if he had bothered to consult anybody, their first thought would have been “faster horses”. In just the first 25 years of the last century, the proportion of movements by mechanical means moved from 5% to 95% due to the creation and development of vehicles. We are at a point where enormous change is happening as we speak.
That is why, as I imagine my noble friend will know, there is such controversy in Germany at the moment about where it is going on the skills agenda and investment for the future. We have always turned to Germany as an example of what we might have done in the past and might do today. I fear that the world is changing around us, sometimes leading us and sometimes giving us an example of how we have to skip a generation in what we are doing in order to be in the right place to deliver the skills we need for the future.
My noble friend mentioned dental technicians. I make a plea that we move very rapidly to decentralise the accreditation of industry standards to organisations such as the Construction Industry Training Board and the ECITB—both of which had a role in this area before 2016 when IfATE was created—to cut out the bureaucracy. Over the last eight years IfATE has undoubtedly developed a bureaucracy, but we owe it a debt of gratitude because it has had a thankless task. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, its chief exec, all its staff and Richard Pennycook, who has done an incredible but unsung job in a very short period of time to get shadow Skills England off the ground.
There are questions about the level of the post of chief exec, which I hope my noble friend will address not just now but in the weeks ahead. We have an incredibly powerful director-general in the Department for Education who has a reputation for delivery and is in a position to drive Skills England forward. However, we are talking not about individuals in a post but about whether Skills England will have a chair who can deal with business, trade unions and departments in an independent and vigorous fashion and advocate for the resources needed.
The apprenticeship levy—I hope the Chancellor of the Exchequer will say much more about it next week—is fundamental and should be expanded. The Treasury should stop top-slicing it and thereby diminishing the amount of money and resource available to deliver. Skills England can play an important part in making that advocacy work, but not if it does not have the clout or reputation to ensure that it can be done.
I was going to raise many other questions but, to respect those still to come on this late Tuesday night, I will end with this. We have to be really ambitious. Microcredits and modular learning will mean that in future we will need a learning passport; to answer a query raised earlier, we will need to reinstate the Union Learning Fund created in 1998. I was very proud of that, because along with it went learning representatives who advocated alongside management for learning in the workplace and beyond. There are many examples of how well that worked, such as the UK Commission for Employment and Skills.
Let us not reinvent the wheel; let us work out what worked in the past and what did not, and then build on it. Let us also rejoice in the fact that we have a Minister of State in this House with hands-on experience, who understands the economic and business needs required and who can be a great leader in ensuring, along with the Secretary of State, that we get it right. Tonight is the beginning of a journey that I hope we will be on together.
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)
My Lords, I am pleased to be speaking in tonight’s debate and I draw attention to my registered interests. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, on his maiden speech and very much look forward to his contribution to the House.
As this debate has already shown, across the House there is cross-party agreement on the importance of an effective skills agenda to develop a high-skill, high-productivity workforce that fulfils employers’ needs and provides the opportunities and training that employees need to thrive.
I, too, recently served as a member of the Education for 11-16 Year Olds Select Committee with a number of other noble Lords speaking today. While our focus was on the schools system, during our evidence sessions we heard time and again from witnesses about the need for an increased focus on skills and training to equip our young people for the world of work both now and in the future.
The data bears that out. Studies consistently highlight the importance of skills to growth, with around one-third of average annual UK productivity growth between 2001 and 2019 attributable to the expansion of skills in the workforce. As we have heard, it is estimated that there will be 1.4 million new jobs in the economy by 2035.
For instance, evidence to our Select Committee suggested that, over the next five to 10 years, more than 200,000 jobs could be created in the energy efficiency sector, with the retrofitting of buildings alone requiring the training of 45,000 new technicians a year. It is against this context of the changing skills demands of the economy that we are considering this Bill.
Yet the Bill does not tell us anything much about the Government’s approach to the challenges. As the Minister said in her opening remarks, the Bill is narrow in scope and technical in nature. That is certainly true and it raises some concerns.
The Bill abolishes the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, giving the Secretary of State significant powers as a result, but includes nothing at all about the new body, Skills England, that is intended to be at the centre of the skills landscape under this Government and absolutely fundamental to the delivery of their agenda.
Despite the department’s policy summary repeatedly referring to the role of Skills England, as the Minister set out in her opening remarks, the Bill itself does nothing practically to progress its establishment. Surprisingly, the organisation which is intended to be the “driving force” behind a
“much-needed upskilling of our economy in the coming decades”
is not mentioned once in the Bill. Instead, most measures transfer a significant number of powers and functions directly to the Secretary of State.
In its briefing on the Bill, CITB noted that this was
“contrary to the previous characterisation of Skills England that was outlined in the … King’s speech … and contrary to the vision for Skills England to be an independent body, established in law, with a cross-governmental role”.
In her introduction to the first report published last month by Skills England in its shadow form, the Secretary of State set out a number of responsibilities that will be invested in the new organisation: first, bringing together business, training partners and unions with national and local government to develop a clear assessment of the country’s skills needs and how they can be filled; secondly, working closely with the Industrial Strategy Council, the Migration Advisory Committee and across government to deliver the necessary skilled workforce required in the future; and, finally, shaping the Government’s response to skills needs by identifying key priorities, including advising on the new growth and skills levy.
In his foreword, Richard Pennycook, interim chair of Skills England, added a further list of actions the body will be taking, including working with providers in further and higher education to clarify and strengthen the skills landscape, and supporting schools in the provision of high-quality advice to students on career opportunities.
There is no question but that these roles are extremely important and need to be fulfilled, but there is no detail about any of this in the Bill. So we are being asked to abolish IfATE and give the Secretary of State significant powers, but with no legislative underpinning of what Skills England will actually do in practice, and no details about how it will fulfil its extremely important functions to achieve the laudable outcomes the Government want.
I am not sure how the Bill fits with the speech made by the Attorney-General last week, in which he said:
“Excessive reliance on delegated powers, Henry VIII clauses or skeleton legislation upsets the … balance between Parliament and the Executive. This not only strikes at the rule of law values ... but also at the cardinal principles of accessibility and legal certainty”.
The Labour manifesto itself made several very clear commitments about Skills England: that it would work with the Migration Advisory Committee, co-ordinate with local and regional authorities and determine which courses would be eligible for levy funding. So I would be grateful if the Minister could explain why at the very least these are not included in the Bill, with reference to the creation of Skills England.
The lack of a statutory footing for Skills England and the centralisation of powers in the Secretary of State in the Bill raise questions for many of us. With all the powers in the Bill passed to the Secretary of State, how independent will Skills England—and indeed the board—really be able to be in practice? Will they truly feel able to challenge Ministers if they believe that government policy is not delivering on the outcomes intended if they have no legal independence? How in practice and on what basis will their relationship develop with the Industrial Strategy Council and the Migration Advisory Committee? What role will they have in approving new qualifications or overseeing the system and what will be the extent of their responsibilities?
There are also important unanswered questions around how Skills England will be asked to oversee the apprenticeship system. Policy Exchange’s report, Reforming the Apprenticeship Levy, published last year, found a recurring complaint from employers of all sizes that standards were too inflexible for their needs. How will Skills England address this problem and what safeguards will be in place to ensure that powers taken by the Secretary of State are used appropriately?
Unfortunately, with the paucity of detail about the new body within the Bill, there is a very long list of questions. So, in conclusion, I believe the Bill raises more questions than it answers and I look forward to our more detailed discussions during its passage, when I hope the Minister will build on her opening comments to provide much more detail on the role and responsibilities of Skills England, and, perhaps most importantly, offer clear reassurances that it will have the autonomy, responsibility and flexibility to lead the revitalisation of our skills system that we all want to see.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, as ever, I declare my interest as a teacher in a state secondary school in east London. I thank the organisations that briefed us—there were a lot of them. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, on his excellent speech. I have to admit that I am rather sad not to be congratulating the noble Lord, Lord No Place—but that was maybe a good choice.
This is an interesting one. We get very little detail in the Bill, so this debate is more about a wish list than talking about the Bill itself. Through the Bill we get Skills England and its utopian dream: stronger, flexible, nimble, swerving, agile, breaking through barriers. This is less of an arm’s-length body and more of a job description for an England rugby fullback.
So here is the first question the Minister might like to answer. According to the Association of Employment Learning Providers:
“The remit of the IfATE had become bloated and not fit for purpose”.
Given the larger remit of Skills England, how will it remain nimble? Now that so much power will be vested in the Secretary of State, how is this agility going to work? I am not being flippant when I ask: does the department have the skill set for this new agile way of working?
As my noble friend Lord Aberdare quoted, in its first report Skills England said that over a third of the vacancies in 2022 were the result of skills shortages. It said that the qualifications landscape for employers was “opaque”; that, for learners, career paths were “not sufficiently clear”; and that the current skills system was not always equipping learners with the necessary skills.
There is work to do; we need to go back to fundamentals. We must not confuse skills with knowledge. Skills are practical abilities developed through practice and application. The knowledge-rich curriculum in schools has been to the detriment of skills. For too long, we have concentrated too much on getting the best maths results this side of Mars, while downplaying skills that employers want and need. By prioritising mathematics and engineering, the Government sought to boost innovation and competitiveness, but neglected the very sectors that have made the UK a cultural powerhouse: arts, music, design and literature. Obviously, an ability in maths and English is important, but not to the exclusion of everything else. The Empire is gone; there are no jobs for life.
As a teacher, I am constantly amazed that students can name every god in the major religions but cannot use Microsoft Office. Designing and populating a spreadsheet should be part of the basic maths taught in primary school. Every student should leave school having started at least one business, and I commend the work of Young Enterprise in this field. Every student should have the skills to build healthy work, social and sexual relationships, and again I urge the Minister to look at the work of the charity Tender if she does not know it. These are some of the many reasons why every child should be in school. Maybe by making the curriculum more relevant, we could tempt the abstainers and their families back into the fold—it might also be fun to teach—otherwise, I have no idea where the thousands of new teachers will come from.
I welcome the recent government Statement on the British film industry:
“Britain is open for business, and creativity is … at its heart”.—[Official Report, Commons, 9/10/24; col. 317.]
That is great news given that successive Governments spent time downgrading creative subjects.
Can we say goodbye to Ebacc and Progress 8, which penalise schools and give them no credit for large amounts of high-performing creative subjects? Can the Minister expand on an answer she gave during Oral Questions earlier this afternoon, when she said that the “curriculum and assessment review” would be “creating space for … creativity”?
Qualifications are a mess. Apparently, Skills England will intervene “sometimes” in the award of technical qualifications. Clause 8 means that Ofqual may not decide whether there may be an accreditation requirement for approving technical education. Can the Minister explain the high-stakes qualifications and the specified technical education types? I am afraid that I still do not understand them.
I am member of the APPG on T-levels and I have chaired a conference on them. Time and again, we hear that they are too technical and that schools and colleges are struggling to find meaningful relations with industry. The Minister said in an answer yesterday that T-levels would be beefed up—great gung-ho language. Does she have more detail of the beef to be applied? I have taught both the unloved BTECs and V Certs, and friends of mine have taught unteachable V Certs. What will happen to those lower qualifications?
According to the CITB, each year 58,900 people either on a construction apprenticeship or an FE course fail to achieve their qualification or immediately progress into construction employment on completion of their qualification. The main reasons for this training wastage are the limited focus, the lack of alignment and the limited agility of the education system to meet construction employer skills needs, which are primarily at level 3 and below. Ultimately, this leads to low apprenticeship completion rates and unacceptable FE outcomes for the industry. The Minister mentioned the short qualification reform review; can she say how that is going?
Overall, this Bill is to be welcomed. Skills England talks a great fight, and if it can truly deliver the skilled workforce that this country so desperately needs, it will have achieved something monumental. However, this Government need to be brave, for Skills England can thrive only in an education system that is as agile and relevant as Skills England itself.
Lord Layard (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Beamish. I warmly welcome this Bill for two reasons. The first is economic growth. That is obvious, but equally importantly—I want to stress this perspective—skills are crucial for people and their individual ability to earn a living. For those two reasons, it is highly desirable that we have a well-focused system of skills development led by a single body. That is what this Bill will provide.
However, when I read the brief from the DfE for Skills England and the first report that it produced, I immediately noticed what seems to be an imbalance. It is concentrating entirely on the first of the two reasons I gave: the perceived needs of existing employers for labour and the estimates of the new types of jobs of the future. This is very important—it is crucial that we know all that in order to have the right balance of training that fits the pattern of future jobs—but there is also the other perspective: that of the individual.
If one were thinking about the need for a particular volume of training, that would lead one to ask how many young people need to be trained to earn a decent income. I have not seen them mentioned in the documents I have read so far. It is quite impracticable to say how many people should be trained just by adding up the estimates from employers and the estimates of new jobs. If you want to think about the numbers that have to be trained, you have to think about how many people are out there. The estimates from employers and the estimates of new jobs are vital for understanding the pattern of training.
If we want to think about the total volume of training, we should start with the very simple principle that it is in the national interest that every young person achieves the highest level of skill they can and wish to achieve. It is a prime duty of the state to get every young person off to the best possible start in working life. It is a much lower duty of the state to support lifelong learning, and indeed most in-service training should be, as it always has been, paid for by employers. By contrast, getting people off to a good start in life is central to the Government’s opportunity mission, but we are currently far from achieving that.
Where is the problem? The problem is not in schools. At age 15, our young people do better in the PISA tests than youngsters in France, Germany and most other European countries. However, by age 25, they are way behind, unless they are in the group who went to university. It is after school that the real barriers to opportunity exist.
For example, in the Government’s apprenticeship matching scheme there are three times more applicants than there are places on offer, so it is no wonder that at the age of 18 a third of our young people are getting no education or training. This is a shocking state of affairs. Let me break it down. There is the 14% who are NEET—not in education, employment or training—that we often talk about, but I think just as bad is the 20% who are in jobs without training and heading for a lifetime of low pay. It is this lack of training that I consider one of the biggest problems facing our country: the people who are getting nothing beyond the age of 17. It is completely extraordinary.
That is why I am encouraged that the Government are offering young people up to the age of 21 a Youth Guarantee of education, training, or help with finding work. That is good, but it is not nearly enough. What we need for these young people is, in addition, inside the Youth Guarantee, a guarantee of training if that is what they want and are qualified for, and I hope the Government can modify the Youth Guarantee in that way.
In 2009, the previous Labour Government passed an apprenticeships Act which obliged the Government to ensure that every young person who was qualified for a level 2 or level 3 apprenticeship could expect to receive an offer. That was repealed a year later. The guaranteed offer is, of course, what we do for people going down the academic route to university. They are pretty much guaranteed a place—not necessarily what they want but a place. We have never applied it to the other 50%, and that is why we have low productivity, low pay and inequality in our country.
To apply this guarantee principle would require a major administrative effort at the centre, working through local authorities, and, if necessary, an extra element of subsidy. I suggest that every local authority would be required to assess the number of young people likely to want an apprenticeship and it would then do its best to persuade local employers to provide these opportunities. The research shows that employers like the idea of an apprenticeship guarantee. They are not averse to it. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that 85% of those surveyed supported the idea and 60% of them said that, if it was introduced, they would provide more places than they currently do.
This guarantee would be only fair to that cohort of young people, but also it is a very good investment, because, according to our calculations, within 12 years it would recoup enough in extra taxes and reduce benefits to repay the cost of the apprenticeship to the Treasury. The total cost of such a guarantee would in fact be no more than 40% of the growth and skills levy, so my proposal is that 40% of the growth and skills levy be ring-fenced for young people aged up to 21 taking an apprenticeship up to levels 2 and 3. These are mostly young people without A-levels and I think we have a prime responsibility, if we are looking for change, to focus above all on that group. Their claims must come before the claims of people doing levels 4, 5 and 6, who have already been helped through their A-levels and are now eligible for student loans.
The future of the levy is a crucial early issue for Skills England. I hope it will be interested in some of the arguments that I have put forward, but whether or not it accepts the idea of a guarantee and some ring-fencing of the levy, it is crucial that Skills England not only looks at what employers and the jobs of the future suggest but includes a serious study of the number of young people who are needed to acquire a skill—that is a crucial point. I hope we can continue to discuss that additional focus for Skills England in the later stages of the Bill. It is a vital dimension, because in the end the economy is for people and not people for the economy.
Baroness Finn (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, on an excellent maiden speech, which was both informative and entertaining, and I thank the Minister for her exposition of the rationale for this Bill. While I applaud the ambitions for Skills England—our country must obviously have the right skills to meet the challenges of modernity— I wish to provide some gentle warnings of the risks that I fear will inevitably arise with the Government’s approach.
First, I readily accept that, despite the previous Government’s best efforts, skills shortages remain a challenge for the UK, as for most developed economies. Despite record participation rates in higher education, a generously funded apprenticeship scheme and soaring levels of net migration, skills shortages remain. I sympathise entirely with the Government’s desire to act to shore up skills gaps.
The last Government had considerable success with their reforms to apprenticeships, and the Institute for Apprentices and Technical Education—IFATE—was set up as part of those reforms. Its purpose was to be independent of Government and to represent employers in setting standards for technical qualifications. It succeeded through instilling confidence in the integrity of apprenticeship standards. Employers are fundamental to the input of the qualifications they need in the workplace.
I pay tribute to the chair, the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, and her team for the work of IfATE. It has, among other successes, created and maintained around 690 apprenticeships, which supported around 750,000 people on apprenticeships last year. It created 21 T-levels and 174 higher technical qualifications, and enabled 120 employer leaders to set strategic direction for skills in their sector. Perhaps the best assessment of IfATE comes from apprentices themselves. A national survey found a 90% satisfaction rate with IfATE from apprentices who had completed their apprenticeships—what other part of government can report a 90% satisfaction rate?
Established in statute, IfATE has an independent chair and a board that afford a certain distance from the Department for Education. The chair of IfATE is independent of the department, while ultimately remaining accountable to the Secretary of State. This governance arrangement has been key to instilling confidence among employers and being able to galvanise others in support of the standards that IfATE sets. However, Skills England is to be an executive agency of the Department for Education. Under the Government’s proposals, Skills England will report to a senior official in the DfE. In my view, this change in status is both critical and presents significant risks.
In all so-called arm’s-length bodies, there is a hand at the end of the arm. This hand exercises a certain amount of control depending on how the body is set up. The Bill will place far greater control in the hands of officials, rather than employers, in setting and ensuring the rigour of future standards.
This concern is borne out in Clause 4, which gives the Secretary of State, or the officials reporting directly to her, the power to prepare apprenticeship standards herself or to commission others to do so. David Kernohan, in a recent article, highlighted the issue thus:
“This tweak makes it technically possible for an apprenticeship standard to be prepared without the input of employers, providers, industry groups or indeed anyone. The Secretary of State could knock out an apprenticeship standard while bored on a train provided she is ‘satisfied that it would be more appropriate for the standard to be prepared by the Secretary of State than by a group of persons’”.
Such wide-ranging powers lead to genuine concerns that the Bill could decrease the standards of technical qualifications.
Clause 6 removes the IfATE requirement that reviews of approved technical qualifications should happen at regular intervals. The reason given in the Explanatory Notes is that this is
“to enable flexibility to review standards according to priorities and employers’ needs”.
Can the Minister explain why a statutory requirement for regular reviews of the suitability of qualifications is to be replaced by such a broad discretion? Would she also be able to provide some clarity on who will decide these priorities and how the decision-maker will determine “employers’ needs”?
As my noble friend Lord Effingham highlighted, the new skills foundation will give increased influence to trade unions, with Sue Ferns, senior deputy general secretary of the union Prospect, arguing that:
“Skills England … won’t achieve its objectives without engaging and involving trade unions at every level”.
Although trade unions play an important part in the workplace, they should not be allowed to push out employers and exercise a disproportionate influence on the standards and formation of qualifications. There is a very real danger that a successful organisation such as IfATE could be subsumed in a new Skills England and become merely a convening body for interested parties.
On the levy, Ms Ferns has called for flexibility and argued that it
“must extend beyond a demand-led model”.
While I appreciate that she does not speak for the Government, I wish to express my alarm that anything other than a demand-led model is appropriate for solving a skills shortage. Such an approach would imply that Skills England is at risk of taking on the role of a central planner for skills—an approach that Governments long ago experimented with and which I hoped had been consigned to the dustbin of history.
I close by acknowledging the scale of the challenge facing the Government. Skills shortages arise in almost every advanced economy and there is a wide variety of tools by which government can contribute to meeting this unmet demand for skilled workers. My fear is that Skills England assumes, philosophically, that the state knows best. One need look only at the alarming number of skilled vacancies within the National Health Service and the startling paucity of specialist skills within the Civil Service to recognise that the Government are not best placed to fill skills shortages among those they directly employ, let alone those they do not.
IfATE may not be perfect, but it has gone a long way towards remedying many of the underlying problems. I urge the Minister to give careful thought to whether a governance arrangement that places so much discretion in the hands of civil servants is one that is likely to best meet the needs of our economy.
Baroness McGregor-Smith (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, on his excellent maiden speech. I declare my interests as set out in the register in a number of businesses that would benefit from a strong economy.
My background is business and I am passionate about business and economic growth in the UK, but today it is a pleasure to speak to your Lordships in my capacity as chair of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, known as IfATE. I recently met with the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Malvern, in her role as Minister of Skills in the Department for Education, and we agreed that the progress and achievements made by IfATE offer firm foundations for Skills England to build on, and that they support the Government’s ambitions on growth and opportunity across our economy.
I am proud of all that IfATE has achieved. No arms-length body is perfect, but it has done some fantastic things to begin the reform of the skills system that is so desperately needed. The baton will now pass to Skills England, an organisation whose remit will be much broader and wider. What matters now is keeping employers’ voices at the heart of the skills system. This has been central to the successes that IfATE has had and should form part of Skills England’s DNA. Growth will be underpinned by employers getting the skills that they need.
I will take the opportunity to outline to this House some of the achievements that IfATE, and the thousands of employers who have worked with it, have had since 2017. Apprenticeships and technical qualifications in the UK are all now based on IfATE’s occupational standards, which have been created using expert input from employers across the economy, covering everything from nursing to aerospace engineering. These standards capture the essential knowledge, skills and behaviours that employers want within their businesses, increasingly including more and more technology and AI. They form a spine within our skills system, from which apprenticeships and technical qualifications can grow.
I am proud of the breadth and range of standards that we have, which demonstrates how employers from every sector have engaged in the development of the skills system. I am also proud of the recent prototype, the skills compass, which IfATE has been developing in collaboration with the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and Innovate UK. It will use labour market insights and AI to update rapidly these standards and capture changing skills needs. This is what we need in a responsive and flexible skills system.
IfATE has worked with employers to develop and approve over 700 apprenticeships, and 750,000 people participated in an apprenticeship in England last year. The estimated annual gain for employers from apprenticeships is between £2,500 and £18,000 per apprentice during their training, and many apprentices will remain loyal to their apprenticeship employers long-term. I am sure the many noble Lords who have met apprentices will know that they are so passionate and committed to what they do. I have been a big employer of them and am hugely proud of so many of their continuing achievements.
IfATE has set out occupational maps of career paths using apprenticeships and technical qualifications. They show everyone, from school leavers to employers, how you can progress in technical and professional careers. I am pleased to say that seven out of 10 of the mayoral combined authorities now use these maps and the back-office digital interface developed by IfATE to support their own careers guidance offerings. These maps are a real asset that can be transferred to Skills England as a result of this Bill.
IfATE has made great strides in working with employers to identify where existing occupations and apprenticeships can become greener, supporting sustainable growth and our net-zero targets for the UK. We have also supported the Government’s ambitions on T-levels. As we know, T-levels offer routes to professional careers, such as construction, nursing, agriculture and digital, with students able to progress to high-quality apprenticeships. They also offer an alternative route to university education, and 97% of T-level students who applied this year were offered a university place.
IfATE has approved over 230 technical qualifications at levels 4 and 5, providing a quality mark showing alignment to employer-led occupational standards, enabling learners to enter their chosen profession or progress to higher education. This is about expanding the opportunities that learners have to develop their careers and for businesses to get the high-quality skills that they need.
The list goes on. I wanted to share this picture to assure everyone that Skills England will inherit a skills system with the foundations in place. It still needs to be developed, but we are ready to realise the Government’s ambitions to reshape the economy and unlock growth. However, there is a lot more to do.
As well as translating the existing duties that IfATE has into powers for the Secretary of State, the Bill seeks to introduce flexibilities which will help to increase the pace at which we can deliver the skills that are needed by employers and learners. For example, the Bill sets out that groups of persons, currently in the form of employer groups known as trailblazers, may not always be required in the development of occupational standards and apprenticeships as is the case now. This provides the flexibility to make standards based on labour market data and information, and could avoid delays in revising and improving standards.
My view is that, while this flexibility is a sensible tool for the Secretary of State, we should still seek for the norm to be to combine this type of data-led insight with the views of groups of employers and other experts. This matters because it provides them with a direct stake and role in the shaping of the skills system. I would encourage the Secretary of State to make clear and publish her rationale for any exceptions where a group is not used in the development or updating of standards.
I also note that the Bill, in abolishing IfATE, removes the general duties that IfATE has with regard to the needs of learners and employers in exercising its functions. These are not replicated in the transfer of powers to the Secretary of State. I would welcome clarification from the Government on how they envisage Skills England will continue to ensure that those interests are considered under the system. In due course, strategic guidance to Skills England from the Secretary of State may be one helpful way of ensuring that these priorities are protected.
Before I finish, I want to thank my fellow IfATE board members, who represent many of the largest employers in the UK, and all the IfATE employees for all the outstanding work that has been done since 2017. I also thank Jennifer Coupland, the chief executive of IfATE, whom I really admire for her passion, expertise and leadership of the organisation.
In conclusion, I urge the Government not to lose momentum on the work that IfATE has done since 2017—there is too much at stake for everyone involved in the skills system—and to always keep the employer voice central to the development of apprenticeships, qualifications and flexible skills training. We should not forget that, as our workplaces are changed beyond recognition by further advances in technology and AI, we have to ensure that the entire country’s workforce still has the opportunity, under any new system, to constantly reskill.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, this looks such an innocuous little Bill, but there is so much more to it than meets the eye. It is a precursor to the arrival of Skills England, which we all hope will bring together the myriad of agencies operating in FE and skills to ensure quality and accessible education and skills for 100% of the population, as the Association of Colleges so heartily wishes, along with all of us who really care about technical and vocational skills and the well-being of the further education sector.
However, the Bill does something that those of us on these Benches will always be wary of, as my noble friend Lord Addington has set out and other noble Lords have alluded to. It transfers powers from IfATE, a body made up of professional people who know and care about apprenticeships and vocational education, to the Secretary of State. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, who has chaired the board of IfATE so successfully. I add my congratulations, too, to Jennifer Coupland, the chief executive, and the other key members who have shown knowledge of, and dedication to, the further education sector and work-based qualifications.
Alas, they are to be replaced by a here today, gone tomorrow Minister, almost certainly university-educated, with little direct knowledge of, and, sadly perhaps, even less interest in further education colleges and the work-related training and qualifications which they so brilliantly deliver. In a democracy, we should never aspire for unlimited power to be given to politicians. The Minister may argue that this is an interim stage, but it appears that Skills England, when it comes, will not have a statutory basis—as many other noble Lords have pointed out—and will be at the whim of the Secretary of State, who could fundamentally change it.
Skills England will legally be part of the Department for Education, so not as notionally independent as IfATE was. The Education and Skills Funding Agency is also an executive agency, and as such could be easily abolished without parliamentary debate. So what will happen to IfATE’s “employers first” approach to developing policy and qualifications, which could well be at risk if the Education Secretary of the day prescribes a different policy?
It was hoped that Skills England would be able to work across departments, have recourse to employers and be flexible enough to be responsive and approve standards to ensure that work-based qualifications were always employer-led. As I know from my days at City & Guilds, work-based qualifications have always been employer-led. This was by no means true at first with T-levels, which were always billed as different because they were employer-led. Will that be the case when it is set up?
As we have heard, the impact assessment states that there will be a drop in apprenticeship starts while functions are transferred from IfATE, which will disproportionately impact adult apprentices and disadvantaged learners and regions. What will the Government be doing to minimise this? We know that the numbers of young people starting apprenticeships are already disappointing. If these changes make the position worse, what steps will the Government take? What steps are being taken to ensure that apprenticeships under the growth and skills levy will be available to learners of all ages and at all levels, and how will the growth and skills levy do a better job than the apprenticeship levy?
Lifelong learning matters now more than ever. Can the Minister say what steps are being taken to incentivise flexible lifelong learning? What assessment has been made of the lifelong learning entitlement and its introduction from 2026? It is crucial to improving the UK’s economic growth. Supporting and encouraging adults to upskill and reskill will help with increasing productivity and filling skills shortages in growth areas of the economy. Flexible study is also essential in allowing people to fit their studies around busy work and family lives and in allowing people to access higher-level skills in the local area where they live, even if there is limited face-to-face provision. However, over the last 15 years, the number of adults aged 21 and over accessing higher-level skills courses has fallen dramatically. Policy and funding interventions are now long overdue for flexible higher education provision.
This little Bill could hide a very damaging move to overpowerful politicians overriding experts in the field. We shall monitor this with great care as this Bill and the Skills England Bill proceed. Of course, we all hope for the best, because this is a vital area, but we shall be watching carefully for the independence of Skills England if it really is to fulfil its ambition.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I offer my congratulations to my noble friend Lord Beamish on an excellent maiden speech. It is clear that he is going to be a real asset to your Lordships’ House.
It is probably not unfair to say that there have been few more uncontroversial Bills presented to your Lordships’ House than the one we are discussing this evening. That is not at all to denigrate this Bill, which is an important cog in the wheel that will power the development of the skills needed to drive the economy in the uncertain years ahead.
There is little that I want to say about the Bill itself, other than perhaps to ask my noble friend to say a little more about the additional powers being given to Ofqual around accrediting technical qualifications for the first time. The Secretary of State will have the power to ask Ofqual to do so, and it would be helpful to have some clarity as to when that power might be exercised. There is another issue that I want to raise, which I will speak to later.
Skills England is not mentioned in the Bill, but I follow other noble Lords in using this as a convenient means of welcoming the formation of a new body and considering what role it might play in a future likely to be dominated by AI. I envisage Skills England being key in developing a new post-16 skills strategy, co-ordinating engagement across government with key agencies and devolved bodies.
I must say that it is a pleasure to be on this side of the Chamber for a change when debating skills provision. Several noble Lords, not least the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, who is here today, were involved three years ago when the skills Bill was making its way through your Lordships’ House, demonstrating to the then Government that we felt their plans lacked the breadth and depth needed to address the shortfall in providing for training and skills development.
At that time, local skills improvement plans were identified as the means of achieving the spreading of opportunity more evenly across the regions. Many noble Lords, including some on the then Government Benches, submitted amendments to the skills Bill. They highlighted that, with a disproportionate role given to employers, existing structures were being ignored, such as metro mayors, combined authorities—many with democratic accountability for local skills and economic regeneration —local enterprise partnerships, trade unions, universities, FE colleges and training providers. All were originally excluded, and only university and training providers were eventually allowed a meaningful say. It is refreshing that the current Government appreciate the contribution to be made by a wide range of bodies and are willing to empower them to coproduce local plans in recognition of their unique feel for priorities and skills development in their areas.
I like the description given to Skills England by the Association of Colleges in its briefing to noble Lords for this debate. It describes it as a “new social partnership body” bringing together business, FE colleges, training providers and unions with national and local government to ensure we have the highly trained workforce needed to deliver the industrial strategy announced last month.
On the subject of FE colleges, if they are to be able to play their full role in delivering the Government’s missions and in helping to ensure that Skills England is a success, it is vital that the long-term underfunding of the sector compared to schools and higher education is addressed. With that in mind, I was one of a number of Labour peers who wrote recently to the Chancellor emphasising that point and asking that greater funding for the FE sector be a feature of the Budget.
Following the UK’s departure from the EU, skills shortages are a major problem. Indeed, one third of all job vacancies are due to the lack of people suitably skilled to fill them. That is an indictment, surely, of the previous Government’s record, and it is not acceptable simply to cite the pandemic or exiting the EU as reasons.
Skills England has not allowed the grass to grow beneath its feet. The organisation had been in existence for just two months when it published its first report. Its title, Driving growth and widening opportunities, is certainly relevant and it included an index, ranking the demand for each occupation across the UK labour market.
I studied economics, but I had never come across something called an SSVD—a skills shortage vacancy density. Worryingly, the report revealed that the sectors with the highest vacancy density are construction, information and communications, and manufacturing, with health and social work and education not far behind. All those sectors are pillars of any economy, essential in achieving the growth everyone is searching for.
That report noted that much of the UK economy is dependent on skills gained in higher education. Future job projections suggest that occupations requiring higher education are expected to see the most employment growth over the next decade. Addressing shortages in higher-level skills is therefore essential to achieving government missions to drive growth and widen opportunity, making universities critical delivery partners to Skills England. What role does the Minister envisage for universities in the development of Skills England?
Also critical to the effectiveness of Skills England will be the re-shaped growth and skills levy. I echo the point my noble friend Lord Blunkett made about the money that goes back to the Treasury from the existing apprenticeship levy. A means has to be found to use money that has not been spent in whatever the period is—currently two years—so that it stays within the training budget and is not just returned to the Treasury, where it will be spent on anything the Treasury deems then appropriate.
Since the introduction of the levy, there has been a steep decline in apprenticeship starts for young people and a shift in starts from the most deprived parts of England to London and the south-east, as well as a decline in starts in sectors where skills challenges are most acute. Added to that is a growth in management and leadership courses and a decline in starts for those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. It is to be hoped that Skills England will address the effects of those trends by bringing greater transparency, especially in how the growth and skills levy is spent.
Apprenticeships are essential for ensuring that young people from a diverse range of backgrounds can access high-quality training. They can also tackle skills gaps, particularly in the public sector. Across the apprenticeships landscape, almost two thirds of those who started a degree apprenticeship in the health, public services and care sector in 2022-23 were aged 25 and over, including 93% on the social worker programme and a large number of those on the nursing programme. Apprenticeships must be available to learners of all ages and at all levels to enable them to upskill and reskill, which I know is the Government’s aim.
Open University students tend to be older compared to the rest of the sector, and that is a good example of flexible lifelong learning, which is crucial to improving economic growth. Can the Minister say what steps are being planned to incentivise flexible lifelong learning? Linked to that, of course, is the lifelong learning entitlement. Can she also reveal what assessment has been made of it and its introduction, we understand, from 2026?
I turn to my final issue today as the only Scot taking part in this debate. I have given notice to my noble friend that I would raise questions relating to the assumption that, as education and skills are devolved matters, the Bill applies only to England and Wales. However, as set out in Clause 10, that is not the case. That is because the remit and responsibilities of Skills England will feed into UK-wide policy and funding agendas, resulting in both direct and indirect implications for the post-16 skills landscape and higher education in Scotland.
Both the Skills England report to which I referred earlier and the Government’s industrial strategy are UK-wide in scope. Skills England is responsible for identifying where skill gaps exist and, as my noble friend said in her opening remarks, is expected to work with the Migration Advisory Committee to address them. The MAC is, of course, UK-wide in scope.
The same applies to the growth and skills levy. The apprenticeship levy is collected at UK level by HMRC, and Scotland receives a proportion via the Barnett funding formula. The Scottish Government then have discretion as to how the levy is distributed north of the border. Without going into detail, I will just say that they do it differently.
Can the Minister say what engagement the UK Government have had with the Scottish Government on the creation of Skills England? What mechanisms are the Government considering in order to ensure strong connectivity between Skills England and the Scottish Government—indeed, all the devolved Administrations —where the work of Skills England feeds into UK-wide agendas such as the industrial strategy and the recommendations of the Migration Advisory Committee?
Ensuring that the country has a sound base of the skills needed for the demands of a fast-evolving economy should not be seen as a cost. It is clearly an investment in the future and an essential part of driving economic growth. I welcome the establishment of Skills England as a decisive step in that direction.
Lord Ravensdale (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interests as a chief engineer working for AtkinsRéalis, the chair of Midlands Nuclear and president of the Sustainable Energy Association.
I deal with skills challenges on the ground every day. I work in business and my industry, the nuclear industry, is undergoing a significant period of growth. We currently have around 83,000 people in the sector but, to meet growing demand and replace people leaving, we need to fill around 40,000 new jobs by 2030. My business in Derby has some really specialised technical skills that are difficult to find on the market, which is acting as a brake on our ability to grow our business and contribute to the Government’s economic growth goals, as well as the national goals of clean power and the defence of the realm. For example, software engineers, electrical, control and instrumentation engineers, and process engineers are very difficult to find. The Minister will be aware of the Nuclear Skills Taskforce and the resulting nuclear strategic plan for skills, which are a great first step in meeting these opportunities.
In that vein, I welcome the intent of the Bill in taking a more integrated and joined-up approach to skills across the country, particularly in better considering regional needs. I will concentrate my remarks on how Skills England will work from a regional perspective.
First, local skills improvement plans—LSIPs—were set up as part of the previous Act, to which noble Lords have referred. I was grateful to the Minister for speaking at a recent Cross-Bench meeting where I raised this issue. Overall, LSIPs have been a welcome development in helping to set out plans to meet local skills needs and provide better join-up between local businesses and skills providers, but we have sometimes found limited join-up nationally. This can result in them being fairly generic or overlapping, in some cases. Can the Minister provide more detail on how Skills England will help set the strategic direction for LSIPs and other potential reforms to these plans?
Secondly, on regional partnerships, in the Midlands where I live, we are now blessed with two combined authorities. We have the East Midlands Combined County Authority and the West Midlands Combined Authority, but these cover only a relatively small part of the region. How will Skills England operate regionally and deliver for those areas not covered by combined authorities?
For me, part of the answer is in the regional partnerships—for example, the Midlands Engine and the northern powerhouse. I am currently chairing an energy security task force for the Midlands Engine that is all about how the region can seize the opportunity of the energy transition. One of our offers to the Government is to work right across the region to collaborate, test and scale a skills-hub approach to address the technical gap in the region’s clean energy and manufacturing sectors, intervening where the markets currently cannot. In fact, following a meeting earlier this year with the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, we are setting up a regional nuclear skills hub, which will start to reap some of those benefits. Such hubs could provide specialised training and school-level engagement, foster innovation, support workforce transition, and encourage collaboration between academia, industry and local communities, leveraging the region’s wealth of universities and colleges. I would be grateful if the Minister could say how Skills England might work at a broader regional level to ensure that the overall skills picture and demand is being considered.
Finally, following on from the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, on better linking up schools’ under 16 education with regional opportunities, there is a real opportunity here for the Government, and that is something else that we in the Midlands region are considering carefully. There are lots of successful opportunities, such as the Science Summer School of the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, and Professor Brian Cox. In many regions across the UK, it is doing a great job of linking up schools with broader opportunities. As the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, said in his excellent maiden speech, this all feeds in to raising aspiration in many areas across the country and getting young people excited and enthused about contributing to the national goals that the Government are pushing. I very much look forward to working with the Minister and her team on this important Bill.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interests in the Good Schools Guide and as a member of the council of City & Guilds.
It is good to see a skills Bill here so early on and being tackled with such impetus—it gives me great hope for what this Government might achieve—although I celebrate IfATE’s achievements and our own achievements, and I join the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, and my noble friend Lord Effingham in what they have said about that. But this Government clearly think we must do better—a phrase I recognise from my school reports.
I hope that the Government will start by taking the advice of their own excellent Science Advisory Council and the Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Viner, and establish from the outset of this change a set of metrics that will enable them to know how well they are doing and assemble the evidence of what works, understand where the gaps in that evidence are and what they are going to do about it, and fundamentally evaluate the process that they are setting out on, from the start, so that whatever happens we end up with a really good body of knowledge as to how to improve the skills system in this country.
I hope that the Government will work back through the conclusions they arrive at on skills in their schools policy. I have been gently disturbed recently by some of the cuts made in science spending in schools. I share with the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, the thought that there are some basic skills that we are not teaching in schools at the moment which are pretty fundamental to the subsequent skills agenda. At a time when we are reforming the Civil Service—the future fast stream will be 50% STEM rather than 10%, as it is at the moment—we need to look right back into our school system to see where these skills are going to be coming from. I hope too that the Government will take a critical look at our qualifications landscape. I like T-levels, but we need BTECs alongside them because we are not providing for anything but the brightest students if we insist on T-levels.
I hope we will look at university courses that say they are teaching skills. If you go back a few years, the Next Gen. report showed that 80% of the courses at universities which said that they were something to do with the computer games industry were rubbish and just using that in their titles as a way of seducing students. The same situation pertains. If you are looking—as doubtless many noble Lords have—to help your children choose a university course, the titles are there but there is no information as to what children go on to do afterwards. Is this a good course for getting into the industry that it says it is about? Is it actually teaching what those industries want? The information is not there. Given how much students are investing in their education, we really owe them better information on which to make those decisions.
At the other end of the scale, I hope the Government will pay attention to the developing world of micro- credentials. The idea that you can pick up someone, give them a relatively short bit of training and have them ready to go and be useful is the structure of training in a lot of industries—it certainly is in IT and a lot of the creative industries. We need to work out how to work with that. What IfATE has done to help bring the bigger qualifications up to speed more quickly is admirable, but the world is changing so fast—for instance, in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity—and we need to understand how to move at that pace and how to offer pastoral support to people whose careers start to be made up of an accumulation of bits and pieces that there happens to be a demand for at the time.
To pick up on what the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, said, I hope that we will see an emphasis on local skills, but somewhere in my town of Eastbourne there is a nuclear engineer, and that will never be picked up by a local skills policy. We need to understand the needs and talents of children and young people and not just the needs of the local industry, and make sure that we are offering the education that our children need, rather than just the education that their employers are after.
I turn to the abolition of IfATE. I very much support all that the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, said about it. I saw the previous Government on several occasions do the exact opposite, but it is hugely important to preserve the network of relationships that has been built up by an institution which is being supplanted. It takes a long time for these personal relationships to subsist; they exist at not only the senior level but the junior level. Those relationships need to be preserved; you do not want to have to rebuild them from the base up. We also need to build a structure—which is not easy in the Civil Service—where such relationships can be maintained. We cannot have endlessly rotating civil servants responsible for maintaining long-term relationships with industry. A sense of career and institutional memory has to be built into this.
A last question for the Government is this: how does the Careers & Enterprise Company fit into this?
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, I am delighted to speak at the Second Reading of this Bill. It gives me the first opportunity to welcome my noble friend the Minister to her place. I should have had that opportunity last week, in Thursday’s Questions, but unfortunately illness prevented me attending the House. I thank my noble friend Lord Watson of Invergowrie for asking the Question on my behalf. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Beamish on an excellent maiden speech and an introduction to the open-air museum which brings the history of north-east England to life. I note that we have an excellent open-air museum in south Wales, St Fagans, and I highly recommend it to your Lordships.
I am sure that many noble Lords will be familiar, after my time spent in debates such as this, with the fact that education is at the heart of my lifetime’s experience: I served as a teacher for almost 35 years. I know that education is at the centre of Labour’s mission to spread and expand opportunity. From our earliest years through to learning or retraining as adults, gaining knowledge, skills, qualifications and exploring our interests and abilities, it enables us to build the lives that we want and the society that we wish to share.
Labour will track progress on its education mission through three stages of education. These are: to boost child development, with 500,000 more children hitting the early learning goals by 2030; to see a sustained rise in young people’s school outcomes; and to build young people’s life skills, with an expansion of high-quality education, employment and training routes so that more people than ever are on pathways.
The ONS, which is based in my home city of Newport, released updated data this summer. The percentage of all young people not in education, employment or training in April to June 2024 was estimated at 12.2%, up 0.9 percentage points on the year. It is clear evidence that over 14 years the former Tory Government did not develop the appropriate apprenticeships and skills pathways that allow youngsters to develop, coupled with an inability for adults to reskill and upskill throughout their lives. The result is that we have too few people with the skills we need for growth.
The former Government’s levy saw millions of pounds that should have been used for skills training going unspent, even as businesses reported growing skills shortages. Labour’s plans, giving businesses flexibility, would ensure that money could be best spent on a greater range of training courses, including basic English, maths and digital skills, so that businesses can fill those gaps and people can gain new skills. The Bill’s technical changes set out what is needed to begin to redress this serious imbalance in our opportunities for growth in the economy. The transfer of IfATE’s powers to the Secretary of State will enable closer integration of employer input with broader government strategies and policies.
Skills England has been tasked with driving forward a national ambition to meet the skills needs of the next decade. This will be driven by pushing power and decisions on skills spending out from Westminster to local communities, so that those communities can better match up skills training with their local business needs and grow local and regional economies. It will transform the skills system to make it truly world-leading. It will help to build a high-skill, high-productivity workforce that is matched to employers’ needs, and ensure that everyone, regardless of their background, can access the opportunities they need to thrive, and deliver change by bringing together formerly disparate functions into a single organisation, with a single feedback loop into government.
It will be an executive agency. It will be legally part of the Department for Education and will have a role in convening education providers, employers, unions and regional and national Governments, which is the sort of social partnership approach that sector bodies have been pushing for over many years. It also changes the overly prescriptive functions, and the DfE believes it can make the skills system more responsive. It is about speeding up the amendment or introduction of standards and assessment plans, bypassing what can be an arduous exercise of lengthy reviews involving employers, awarding organisations and multiple layers of officials. We cannot afford to continue to let overly complex bureaucracy stand in the way of growth and opportunity. I draw on my previous experience as a senior A-level examiner when developing new specifications. I remember the level of detail and delay that went into such changes. A minimal tweak could delay the introduction by a whole academic year.
People are ambitious for their futures. They want to learn new skills to get new jobs. We will reverse the trend of the past 14 years and give businesses the flexibility they need to train people up with new skills, from digital technologies to the green skills needed to tackle climate change. Understandably, there are always concerns in the sector when any changes are proposed, but the department has noted that any possible temporary disruptions affecting learners and apprenticeships during the transition would be limited and has promised to address the impact. From digital skills and green skills to childcare and social care—this Labour Government will harness the talents and abilities of the British people so that we can strengthen our economy and break down barriers to opportunity.
I was extremely pleased to read last month’s first report on Skills England and to note that Richard Pennycook, the interim chair, said that while it is called Skills England, the UK skills needs do not change or stop at Chepstow or Carlisle. Skills England intends to work closely with colleagues in the devolved nations to ensure that students and employers have a seamless experience across the UK. Indeed, the whole relationship between the UK Government and the Welsh Government, in terms of engagement, has been transformed in the last three months, notwithstanding the establishment and successful first meeting of the Council of the Nations and Regions just two weeks ago.
Let us harness the changes needed in the education system by changing those persistent skill mismatches. Let us change the high proportion of the working-age population who lack essential skills for work and redress the undersupply of highly technical training.
This Government will provide more training opportunities so that people can gain new skills, access better jobs and grow our economy. That is the difference we will make, and the technical changes in the Bill begin an important and necessary part of the journey.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I thank all the organisations that sent excellent briefings. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, on his maiden speech. I was fascinated by his final comment about traditional skills, which we often forget. I know that Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral is desperate for masons to repair the sandstone blocks. When I drive round Cumbria, I always wonder where we are going to get the skills to repair those dry walls.
The Minister kicked off this Second Reading by referring to harnessing opportunities for our young people. I thought we would all be agreeing with each other and was quite surprised that that was not the case. However, on reflection, we did in our own ways agree with each other, albeit from different angles. My noble friend Lord Addington talked about what to do when things go wrong and how to make sure that they are put right. The buck will stop with the department that takes all these powers.
The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, referred to things being rather cosy, with Skills England, the director-general and the Civil Service, which does not have any public profile and operates behind closed doors. Where is the grit in this figurative oyster? That was also picked up by the noble Baroness, Lady Evans. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds talked about apprenticeship levies and how it was difficult to navigate around them. I shall come back to that in a moment.
The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, was very sure that Skills England needed the independence, the force and the fundamental clout to make things happen, although there are two powerful Ministers in charge of delivery—a Minister in this House and a Secretary of State.
I am always fascinated when the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, talks, with his knowledge of state education. He went off-script a little bit and rightly asked where we were going to get these 1,000 new teachers from. My mantra has always been that one thing that is holding back the creative industries has been the wretched EBacc. We were promised that T-levels would be a practical opportunity for some young people, and perhaps they are too technical.
I, too, pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith. Perhaps the title IfATE, given what its fate was to be, was a bit ironic. She talked about apprentices being passionate about what they do, but foundations are being put in place there that are going to be hugely important to the future and where we go.
My noble friend Lady Garden was, as usual, in her own inimitable style, very direct. She talked about the potential power of Ministers in this regard, and rightly raised the issue of lifelong learning, which matters now more than ever, and what will happen to lifelong learning entitlements.
The noble Lord, Lord Watson, started off by saying that, like me, he thought this was one of those few uncontroversial Bills, and like me he was quite surprised by the tenor of some of the comments made. I thank the noble Lord for raising the issue of Scotland and Wales. I scratched my head about that and thought, “Is this yet again a purely English thing?” But I did not know about Clause 10 of the Bill—so I thank him for raising that.
The noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, talked about the jobs that we need. Not just in his sector but in all sorts of sectors across the UK, there is a huge skills shortage and jobs shortage. He wanted to know how Skills England would operate at a regional level.
I was absolutely fascinated by the point that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, made that the Government need to set up metrics for how well we are doing so that we can evaluate progress. I want to come to that at the end of my contribution. I hope that, if they do that, that metrics or evaluation will be published on a regular basis.
As a nation, we develop and prosper by nurturing, educating and training our young people. We have been very successful at developing those young people of an academic disposition but less so for those young people who want or need to follow a vocational route. At a time when we need people with particular skills and have skill gaps in many industries and businesses, we seem constantly to wrestle with the problem, slow in identifying the skills needed and even slower in providing the training and opportunities for those skills.
I am still scarred by Objective 1 in Merseyside in the 1970s. Merseyside was one of the poorest regions in Europe, measured by its GDP, and as a result it received literally millions of pounds from the EU. But in terms of training, Objective 1 money was spent on hairdressing and beauty courses. Why? Because those courses could easily attract and enrol students and give a much-needed income stream to the FE college. The college that needed the revenue did not have the financial security to develop courses that would provide the skills for the developing industries. That is, I hope, a lesson that we have now learned. I relate that historic situation because it shows that FE needs to have resources, finance and flexibility to provide skills not just for today but also for tomorrow.
We are probably not aware of the skills that are required for the future. We were not aware of AI five or 10 years ago. We probably thought that it was a Geordie expression, “Wey aye, man”. That did not go down well—I shall refrain from doing jokes; it is not my forte. We are not opposed to the Bill, but we have concerns and we would like reassurances. We also have ambitions that could be picked up by this Bill.
Currently the institute is responsible for bringing employers together to develop the apprenticeship standard and what apprentices need to learn—in short, the apprenticeship plan. They are good at this and the employer input is very important to ensure that consistency in training, assessment and outcomes. I ask the Minister: who will set the apprenticeship standard and who will regulate assessment plans developed by awarding bodies?
We need to avoid inconsistencies of outcome. We need to be reassured that Skills England develops a partnership with business skills bodies to secure that quality and consistency of apprenticeships and that there is a partnership involving employees, giving industry skills bodies a formal role in the skills system, to set standards and assessment requirements.
We were getting to the position of seeing the regions working with FE, understanding the needs of industry and understanding SMEs. We have to be sure that the new arrangements do not lead to unintended consequences and that the progress and working relationships that are beginning to be successful are not lost.
The Government need to invest in skills and training. Any business will tell you that the apprenticeship levy does not work. They often cannot get the funding they need to train staff and the ridiculous situation whereby hundreds of millions of pounds of training funding goes back to the Treasury at the end of the year if it is not spent is absolutely crazy.
We also believe that the lower minimum wage for apprentices should be scrapped and that they should be paid the same minimum wage as those other employees of their age. Apprenticeships are critical for social mobility and ensuring that people from a diverse range of backgrounds can access high-quality training. They can tackle skills gaps and help learners of all ages to upskill and reskill. The Open University, interestingly, carried out a survey that found that 72% of apprentices received a pay rise on completion, and 71% gained promotion.
When the apprenticeship scheme was conceived— I think it was by the coalition Government—it was aimed very much at 16 to 18 year-olds. But, over the years, the number of 16 to 18 year-old apprentices dropped dramatically, and they are often the ones in the most vulnerable situations. I hope that the new Government will try to ensure that there are plenty of opportunities for that age group.
To go back to the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, at the end of his contribution he made the point that if the Government got this right and delivered what they said, it could be one of the major successes of this Government, which will be lauded for generations to come. We want this to be successful. We are not here hoping that this will not work, we want it to be successful and, never mind turning around the health service, it would be absolutely amazing if they could turn around the skills sector and the skills shortages. It would be something that would be remembered for years to come.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, as I rise to speak at Second Reading, I say first how much I enjoyed the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Beamish. I look forward to the insights he will bring to your Lordships’ House.
The goal of improving our skills system and meeting skills gaps is not a new one. Indeed, today, as my noble friend Lady Finn said, it is an international one. Under successive Governments, we have seen work to simplify the system, achieve parity of esteem with academic qualifications, place employers at the heart of the system and improve the quality of skills-based qualifications. In their manifesto, His Majesty’s Government committed to establishing a new body, Skills England, to deliver their skills strategy, but unfortunately this Bill merely abolishes the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education and transfers its functions to the Secretary of State; in effect, absorbing them into the Department for Education. We have no details on the plans for Skills England itself, nor on how the Government’s proposed changes to the funding of skills-based qualifications will work in practice.
On these Benches, we have three main concerns. First, we do not believe that the proposed machinery of government changes are likely to make the difference that the Government hope they will. In the last 50 years, there have been no fewer than 12 skills agencies, or 13 including Skills England. If the creation of a new body was alone enough to address our challenges in this area, surely one of the earlier iterations would have been the answer. Secondly, as we have heard across the House, we believe that the powers of the Secretary of State created by this Bill are too wide-ranging, have little accountability and will risk directly damaging the status of these qualifications. Thirdly, we have real concerns that these changes will lead to harmful delays in addressing some of the most important strategic issues in skills development that the Government face and have set out.
Given that all noble Lords want the most effective approach to developing our skills system, it is important to recognise the achievements of the last Government and the key challenges that remain so that the new Government benefit from the institutional memory of this House and avoid repeating any past mistakes. The last Government delivered on a major simplification of the system in relation to T-levels, higher technical qualifications and apprenticeship standards. We raised the value of skills-based qualifications in the minds of students and employers, particularly in relation to apprenticeships, which we put on a statutory footing for the first time.
The noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, spoke eloquently about the importance and effectiveness of putting employers at the heart of the system, which IfATE brought as well as the creation of local skills improvement plans, which linked employers and providers for the first time. We improved the quality of qualifications across the board, including for the missing middle which your Lordships have referred to, and we laid the foundations for lifelong learning through the skills Act and the lifelong learning Act of 2023 so that options for training and retraining were available at every stage of a person’s career. I hope the Minister will confirm that the Government will not discard the progress of the past 14 years but build on it and focus on the key challenges of the future.
If we look at the challenges of improving our skills system, I am genuinely baffled as to why one would start by creating a new agency within the DfE and abolish IfATE. I am not sure how this helps build demand for newer and less well-established qualifications such as T-levels and HTQs. I am not sure how it addresses the workforce pressures in further education or the decline in investment in training by employers or how it will help the Government realise the potential of the lifelong learning Act. How does it quickly set out the plans for the new growth and skills levy which the Government promised in their manifesto, so that we avoid a hiatus in skills development and investment, as alluded to in their impact assessment? Can the Minister explain why the Government could not have achieved their goals of co-ordination with the industrial strategy council and the Migration Advisory Committee through IfATE rather than placing Skills England within the DfE, with all the time, cost and reorganisation that would have avoided?
If we had a blank sheet of paper—in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, perhaps a sheet of paper that was nimble, agile and other good adjectives—and had to choose between an independent, employer-led body and an internal team within a government department to create the best skills system, I am pretty sure that most people would naturally assume that the former would be more effective. It would help if the Minister could give the House examples of where such centralisation of power has actually delivered on the Government’s aspirations.
We are also really concerned about the powers of the Secretary of State and expect to come back to these in Committee. In the King’s Speech, the Government committed to creating a new body, Skills England, but as noble Lords have noted, the Bill does not do that. Far from simply replacing the institute, the Bill abolishes it, leaving the Secretary of State in control. We now understand that Skills England will not be on a statutory footing and therefore will unquestionably be less independent than IfATE.
The Bill gives the Secretary of State sweeping powers to prepare apprenticeship standards and plans, either personally or by commissioning others. Clauses 4 and 5 make it possible for the Secretary of State to bypass industry groups and employers entirely. In her opening speech, the Minister helpfully set out some examples to reassure the House about some of the limitations on how those powers might be used, but can she explain what the barrier is to putting them in the Bill if the Government are clear on what those limits are?
Secondly, we should be concerned about the potential impact on the quality of technical qualifications. Clause 6 removes the requirement for reviews of technical education qualifications, standards and apprenticeship assessment plans to be published at regular intervals. What will the arrangements be to do this in future, and why has the duty to publish been removed? This flexibility is supposedly to align qualifications with employers’ needs, but we know that without rigorous and independent oversight, standards can slip. Can the Minister tell the House how she plans to ensure that we have standards that are recognisable and high, without that regular independent review?
There is the further risk of dilution of quality via Clause 7, which removes the requirement to have a third-party examination of a standard or apprenticeship assessment plan before approval, leaving the power for the Secretary of State to appoint one if she sees fit. What should we expect from this? How often does the Minister expect this power to be used and under what circumstances? It would also help if the Minister could clarify under what circumstances the Secretary of State would use her powers set out in Clause 8 in relation to Ofqual.
Clause 9 is also of concern, as my noble friend Lady Evans of Bowes Park pointed out, quoting the Attorney-General. Through regulation made by statutory instrument, it allows for the Secretary of State to make provision that is consequential on other provisions in the Bill. This is a very broad Henry VIII power, applying to existing and future legislation passed in this Parliament. I would be grateful if the Minister could give an example of how Clause 9 would be used. Perhaps she could commit to listing the existing legislation where Clause 9 will apply.
The assumption of power by the Secretary of State reverses the reforms of the Enterprise Act 2016 and risks severely eroding the parity of esteem between academic and technical qualifications. Imagine the outcry if A-level standards were directly controlled by the Education Secretary—I hope your Lordships see the point I am making. Yet the Bill gives ministerial control over all technical qualifications, which risks undermining their credibility and status.
Leaving the specifics of the Bill, we are genuinely concerned that Skills England will not achieve its goals. The Government are actually creating not one but three new bodies with an interest in skills: Skills England in the DfE, the Labour Market Advisory Board in the DWP and the new Industrial Strategy Advisory Council. How will these three—or four, if we include the Migration Advisory Committee—potentially competing bodies work together?
This approach raises so many questions. Can the Minister reassure the House about the level of seniority the head of Skills England will have? How will Skills England, sitting in a corner of Sanctuary Buildings, have the authority to influence other government departments? How will it work with the devolved Administrations and the mayoral combined authorities? How will it interact with the Office for Students? It is of great concern and regret that the objectives and limits of the new body are not clearly set out in statute, and we will seek to gain as much clarity as possible on these points during the passage of the Bill. I ask the Minister again: where is the evidence that such an approach has ever worked in this country before and will be successful now?
My belief is that, if His Majesty’s Government were serious about progressing quickly with the urgent strategic issues around skills reform, they would build on the success of IfATE, rather than dismantling it. The real risks here are, first, that the Government will unwittingly create confusion, lower standards and erode trust in technical qualifications; and, secondly, that the time and cost involved in creating yet another overcentralised agency in the DfE delays addressing the big opportunities and challenges that need to be grasped in this area and leaves us with an unwieldy, unaccountable and ineffective approach.
The Bill threatens to undo much of the progress made under successive Conservative Governments in building a world-class apprenticeship and technical education system. I have no doubt that the Minister wants the best for our skills system and those who learn and work in it, but I have grave doubts that this Bill will deliver the system that the country needs and that she wants. I hope very much that the Minister will listen to these concerns and act to address them when the Bill reaches Committee.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their contributions and acknowledge the many passionate and informed speeches that we have heard and the expert knowledge that this Chamber has brought to the debate.
I particularly welcome and give a special mention to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Beamish. He and I served together in the other place. I remember the breakfast meetings that he used to have in the tea room—particularly when I was Chief Whip, because no Chief Whip likes to know that there is plotting going on in the tea room. My noble friend was a steadfast colleague and a strong supporter of the Government. As he outlined in his maiden speech, he used his real enthusiasm to challenge the Government on issues relating to defence and to protect those affected by the Post Office scandal. Based on his maiden speech and what I know about his history, I know that he will certainly play a very important role in this House, and I am very pleased to welcome him.
The Government’s first mission is to grow the economy. To succeed, we need to harness the talents of our people. A skills system fit for the future can enable people to learn the skills that they need to seize opportunity and businesses to access the skills in the workforce that they need to grow. I join the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, in celebrating both those who are taking part in apprenticeships and those who are delivering them. There is excellent work going on across the country, which I often have the opportunity to celebrate, where providers and employers are providing a splendid apprenticeship opportunity.
The noble Earl asked me, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to celebrate the last Government, but I have to point out that apprenticeship starts peaked in 2015-16 at 509,360 and in the most recent year were at only 337,140—in other words, a 34% reduction on the levels seen in 2015-16—so I do not think it is enough for us simply to rest on what the previous Government have done. In fact, we need a fundamental change in our skills system if we are going to ensure the potential of our people and our economy.
On the specifics of the debate, I will start with the number of contributors who have asked questions about how we maintain an employer-led approach to the skills system. The noble Baroness, Lady Finn, the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, asked questions about that. I reassure noble Lords that employers will continue to play a central role in the design and delivery of apprenticeships and technical education. Indeed, it is crucial that apprenticeships and technical qualifications reflect the needs of employers and that employers have confidence in them. That is why, through Skills England, we will ensure that there is a comprehensive suite of apprenticeships, training and technical qualifications for individuals and employers to access, all of which will be informed by what employers and other partners tell us that they need.
The default will be that employers will set standards and assessment plans—I hope that responds to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Storey. It is not the case that this legislation enables the Secretary of State to rewrite a standard on a train, even if she were to have the time to do that. Employers remain fundamental. In fact, regarding standards and assessment plans, the legislation states that the Secretary of State will be able to prepare these only where she is satisfied that it would be more appropriate than using a group of persons. Each time the Secretary of State does this, she will need to make such a consideration and she will not be able to proceed without doing so. That approach will be taken in only a minority of circumstances where there is a clear rationale for doing so, some of which I outlined in my opening speech and all of which I will be very happy to go into more detail on in Committee. I think the important point was made by my noble friend Lady Wilcox, who, using her experience, identified some very good examples of the need for flexibility in the system, as was also recognised by others in the debate.
My noble friend Lord Watson asked about the Ofqual amendment. This amendment will ensure that, should the Secretary of State wish to in the future, she could grant an exception so that Ofqual can consider whether it is appropriate to accredit certain types of technical education qualifications. It will therefore reintroduce in a managed way the potential for Ofqual to exercise its accreditation power for technical education qualifications. Where the Secretary of State deems it necessary to maximise the quality of and confidence in technical education qualifications, it will become possible for the full suite of regulatory options to be applied to them, helping to put them on an even footing with other academic and vocational qualifications.
On the specific point about Clause 9 raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Barran and Lady Finn, these are not sweeping powers. This is not an undermining of the correct exhortations made by the Attorney-General on the use of delegated powers. Clause 9, in introducing Schedules 2 and 3, details the primary legislation that we are amending simply to remove references to IfATE as a result of its abolition. We have attempted to identify all the primary legislation that will need to be amended as a result of the Bill and the Henry VIII power that is included in the Bill exists solely in case we uncover any other Acts in need of consequential amendment after the passage of the Bill, so there is no way that this could be called a sweeping use of delegated powers.
To return to the nature of Skills England, at its heart will be the role of employers, alongside an important partnership to ensure that we are developing the most effective skills system. The noble Earl, Lord Effingham, questioned whether trade unions should play an important role in that, but my noble friend Lord Blunkett rightly identified the enormously important contribution that trade unions have made to the development of skills for their members, citing in particular the important work done by the Union Learning Fund. We make no apology for including trade unions in our work to improve the jobs and skills that their members will get. It is also a feature of high-performing systems across the world that trade unions are involved.
My noble friend Lord Watson talked about the role of higher education. We certainly believe that it has a very important role to play in this partnership with Skills England.
The noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, talked about regional flexibility and the excellent work that he identified. Skills England will collaborate with combined authorities as well as with equivalent bodies in places which have devolution deals but where there is no combined authority present, and it will also work with a wide range of regional organisations as well as other local and regional partners, such as employer representative bodies. It will support them to construct skills systems which reflect and feed into both local and national priorities. That is the partnership that Skills England will bring together to deliver the impact we need to see in our skills system.
I turn to the charge made by several speakers in the debate that, somehow or another, as an executive agency Skills England will not have the independence or, frankly, the oomph that it will need. That is wholly wrong. As an executive agency, Skills England will have operational independence from the department. A permanent chair and board members will be recruited to oversee Skills England. I am glad that my noble friend Lord Blunkett recognised the status, experience and impact that the current chair, Richard Pennycook, is already having in this role, and I can tell noble Lords that we have had several hundreds of applicants for the board of Skills England—clearly, people understand the significance of that role and the impact that it will have.
I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, did not mean to suggest that I was a “here today, gone tomorrow” politician with no clue about what I was doing, despite the fact that that is what she said.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
I assure the Minister that it was not personal.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
Okay. I do not note any other Ministers in the Chamber—but anyway, in that case I will not take it personally.
The important point here is that, once in place, it will not be Ministers who decide the day-to-day activity of Skills England; the board will provide scrutiny that Skills England is operating effectively within the agreed framework and will provide assurance functions as well as leadership and direction.
However, while operationally independent, it is critical that Skills England, for many of the arguments made in the debate, has sufficient proximity to government to directly influence and inform policy decisions, as many have argued for. This will allow Skills England to use its insights to influence skills policies and funding decisions. It is important that they are retained by the Secretary of State, but Skills England will have a crucial role in informing them.
For further reassurance, I say that we do anticipate the relationship between the Department for Education and Skills England will be set out in a publicly available format and updated periodically. I expect us to talk about this more in Committee. People have argued that we know little about Skills England and its functions —the noble Baronesses, Lady Evans and Lady Barran, for example—but having been set up only in July, Skills England has already produced a report which, as others have mentioned, outlines its functions and ways of working. That is how we expect Skills England to operate in the future.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, for the excellent work she has done in leading IfATE. I echo her thanks to the board and the chief executive for that work. In talking about how employers will remain at the heart of Skills England, I hope to learn from the way in which IfATE has done that. However, bringing the functions currently held by IfATE into Skills England is essential to address complexity and fragmentation in the skills system. The majority of IfATE’s functions will be transferred to the Secretary of State but will be exercised by Skills England unchanged, so we will be able to ensure continuity of skills delivery through the transition process. My officials are working very closely on this with IfATE’s senior leadership team. The noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, has been very clear about this, as she was when we met. She has been very engaged in ensuring that there is a transition plan which will ensure minimal disruption to learners, employers, providers and IfATE staff, and which will safeguard the good elements of the work that IfATE has already done, which she outlined.
It is absolutely not our intention to allow the transfer to cause a delay or drop in apprenticeship numbers. We will mitigate the risk of that through the transition plan I have talked about. On the point raised by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds, any approvals by IfATE will transition and will not have to be redone as a result of this legislation. These decisions will continue to stand until such time as the occupational standard, apprenticeship or technical qualification in question is reviewed under successor arrangements and a new decision is taken.
The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, also raised points about the sharing and transferring of IfATE’s functions. We have been clear that we expect the functions of Skills England to include broad continuation of the core work IfATE does with employers. I will be very happy to talk more about that in Committee. My noble friend Lord Watson asked about the engagement between Skills England and Scotland on UK-wide organisations such as the Migration Advisory Committee and the Industrial Strategy Council. We have had close collaboration with devolved Governments, as was recognised by my noble friend Lady Wilcox. This is critical to ensuring that there is an effective skill system regardless of where in the UK you live, work and train. We have had regular meetings with senior officials from all four nations to share best practice and approaches and their long-term strategic goals. These relationships will be important to Skills England’s success, as has already been set out by Richard Pennycook in his role as the chair.
My noble friend Lord Layard and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds rightly talked about the significance of young people and how we can ensure that we improve our skills system for them. This is where our commitment to developing a youth guarantee is very significant, and my noble friend Lord Layard once again made his strong call for the apprenticeship guarantee, which I have discussed with him on numerous occasions. He is pushing us further as a Government than we are able to go at this time, but he continues to make a strong case and I will continue to listen to him.
However, we have of course already started to think about how we reform the apprenticeship system to ensure it better serves young people, who have particularly seen the numbers of apprenticeships fall off. That is why we recently announced that we would develop foundation apprenticeships to provide a route into apprenticeships for young people who have not been able to benefit from apprenticeships up to this point.
We have also heard calls with respect to the growth and skills levy. Our reformed growth and skills levy will deliver greater flexibility for learners and employers, including through shorter duration and foundation apprenticeships in targeted sectors. We will want Skills England and the employers it engages with to have a crucial role in determining how that skills levy is spent. I also recognise the significance of the role of further education, as outlined by my noble friend Lord Watson and others in the discussion, and I can assure him that we will continue to do more than perhaps has been the case for FE previously to raise the status and significance of that sector, because it is so important for young people. We will include more about our overall role in the post-16 strategy, which we are currently working on.
The role of schools is really important, as my noble friend Lady Wilcox and the noble Lords, Lord Aberdare, Lord Hampton and Lord Lucas, outlined. I can assure noble Lords that the curriculum and assessment review will look at the significance of digital skills, creativity and how enterprise can be developed in our schools.
If we are to meet the skills gaps that persist in our economy, we must address the fragmentation in our skills system. To respond to the challenge of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, I do not believe we can do that by simply building on IfATE. We need, with Skills England, to make sure that we do more than the excellent work that IfATE has done. We have to make and maintain an authoritative assessment of national and regional skills needs in the economy, now and in the future, combining the best possible insights from employers and other key stakeholders.
This legislation will enable Skills England to build on IfATE’s work but will also enable us to build that broader partnership and assessment that will help us to transform our skills system. This Bill is an important milestone in the delivery of the Government’s manifesto commitment to establish Skills England. I look forward to further discussion through the passage of this legislation.
Baroness Smith of Malvern
That the bill be committed to a Grand Committee, and that it be an instruction to the Grand Committee that the bill be considered in the following order: Clause 1, Schedule 1, Clause 2, Schedule 2, Clause 3, Schedule 3, Clauses 4 to 13, Title.
Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL]
Thursday 21st November 2024
(1 month ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL] 2024-26 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 38-I(a) Amendments for Grand Committee (Supplementary to the Marshalled list) - (21 Nov 2024)
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I shall also probe whether Clauses 2 and 3 and Schedules 1 to 3 should stand part of the Bill.
At Second Reading, we heard about the importance of skills development to boost economic growth, the gaps that employers face in finding the skills they need to fill vacancies, the continuing complexity of the skills landscape, and the ambition of the Government to meet these challenges. At this point, I thank particularly the Learning and Work Institute and the Association of Colleges for their advice and their perspectives on the Bill. On these Benches, while we accept that the Government have a real commitment to address these issues, we also believe that they need to give Parliament and employers much greater clarity on their plans. The Bill is clear in the door that it closes—the abolition of IfATE—but is silent on the door it opens; that is, Skills England and its powers and accountability. We are left with an interregnum, with the Secretary of State holding all the powers of IfATE and a few more for good measure.
I will try also to explain the logic of my Amendments 32 and 33. Ideally, we would have liked to be debating a much clearer, more detailed Bill and have all the answers to the concerns expressed across the House at Second Reading. I note that in her closing remarks at Second Reading, the Minister committed to setting out the relationship between the Department for Education and Skills England in a publicly available format which will be updated periodically. Even the phrase “updated periodically” begs questions about the clarity and stability of roles and accountability. No doubt the Minister will give us further details on this today.
My amendments suggest solutions on a sliding scale. At one end, we are proposing to stick with the status quo through the stand part notices for Clauses 1 to 3 and the associated schedules; from there, to different degrees of independence and accountability for a new body called Skills England; to, finally, although not in this group of amendments, accepting the Government’s proposals, but with a clear and rigorous reporting requirement to Parliament. At this stage, these are probing amendments.
As we heard at Second Reading, there are genuine concerns about the transfer of IfATE’s powers to the Secretary of State, in terms of compromising the independence with which apprenticeships and wider technical qualifications, including T-levels, are accredited, and in diluting the voice of employers. These concerns are only amplified by later clauses which extend the powers of the Secretary of State beyond those of IfATE to prepare standards without employer input, and remove requirements for regular reviews of technical qualifications and third-party examination of standards. We will, of course, debate these points later in Committee.
The proposed creation of Skills England as an executive agency within the Department for Education, rather than as an independent statutory body, although not part of the Bill, has raised questions about both its autonomy and its effectiveness. More broadly, our stand part notices seek to elicit from the Minister explanations on the following points.
First, why does the Minister believe that this organisational change will be any more effective than the previous 12 changes in the past 50 years?
Secondly, the impact assessment set out that the Government had considered both keeping IfATE as an organisation separate from Skills England and expanding its powers to take on Skills England’s full set of powers. My Amendment 32 attempts to reintroduce this as an option for the Government to consider. It would create an executive agency of the department, which would be called Skills England, and would focus on wider skills strategy, as well as keeping IfATE as an independent body for the accreditation of technical education qualifications and for its other responsibilities.
That amendment has a lot in common with Amendment 21 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, although Amendment 21 would not retain IfATE, as mine would. One can make the case that it is more coherent to have everything in one place, but one can also argue that Skills England has a huge brief and should focus on some of the more urgent priorities, leaving IfATE to continue its good work in setting up clear lines of communication.
It is hard to avoid the conclusions that the Government are knowingly diluting the voices of employers; that they want to have as much control as possible over these qualifications in future; and, importantly, that they are seeking to reorganise the structures to deliver skills reforms rather than getting on with “doing the doing”, which is much needed on the ground. The impact assessment sets out briefly the advantages of the Government’s chosen approach but says almost nothing about the drawbacks of losing an independent, employer-led organisation that the Government acknowledge does an excellent job. It would be most helpful if the Minister could explain in more detail the barriers to doing this and how His Majesty’s Government evaluated the shortcomings of this approach.
Moving along the sliding scale, I turn to Amendment 33, which aims to commit the Government to introducing a draft Bill that would create an independent arm’s-length body, to be called Skills England. I note that organisations such as the St Martin’s Group, which represents employers, training providers and awarding organisations, have been clear in their briefings that it is
“crucial that Skills England’s independence needs to be exerted in statute”.
Given the independence that this would create from the department, we have assumed that IfATE would no longer need to exist. I hope very much that this is something to which the Minister can respond positively.
In my Amendments 32 and 33, we stipulate that the chief executive of Skills England must report to the board of Skills England. It seems extraordinary to have to make this point but noble Lords may have noticed that the job description for the CEO of Skills England made no reference to the board; rather, they report to the relevant director-general in the department. Given the emphasis that the Minister put at Second Reading on the strength and operational independence of the Skills England board and its members, it seems a major drawback that the chief executive of the organisation, on whose board they sit, does not report to it. Could the Minister undertake to reconsider this?
Finally, I turn to my Amendment 42, which I tabled, as the French might say, “pour encourager”. I am hopeful that the Minister will take my other amendment seriously as a way of actively demonstrating her commitment to the independence of Skills England but, failing that, this amendment seeks to sunset this legislation and give the Government time to come back with a Bill that addresses the concerns that we heard at Second Reading—and that we will no doubt hear more of in Committee. I beg to move.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I consider myself encouragée. We on these Benches have some sympathy with these wrecking amendments. We have never supported taking decision-making out of the hands of experts and into the hands of a Secretary of State, whoever he or she may be and however informed and enthusiastic he or she may be about colleges, further education, and technical and vocational qualifications. As I said at Second Reading—I do not apologise for repeating it—politicians are almost always university-educated and may have little understanding of or enthusiasm for the world of skills. I exempt our Minister from this because I know that she cares but, of course, there is no guarantee that she will not be replaced—not for some time, I hope—by a “here today, gone tomorrow” Minister with no knowledge of this sector. These posts do not last, as we all know.
I speak with some knowledge. In the coalition Government, I was appointed Minister for the Olympics and Sport, having never had any interest in sport in my life. At school, I was a fat little bespectacled nerd who was always chosen last for any team. But, given the portfolio, I spent days and weeks of my life learning all there was to know about rugby league—thanks to my noble friend Lord Addington—cricket, hockey and other unmentionables in order to give educated answers to questions. But that is not the same as having a lifelong enthusiasm, and, because Ministers have almost always been educated—surprisingly enough—and can display an astonishing academic superiority, they may look down on practical achievement, as I discovered when I worked in Michael Gove’s team.
We are disappointed, as we always thought of Labour as a party supportive of education in all its guises, yet it has brought forward the damaging VAT on independent schools Bill, which would make us the first country in the world, I believe, to tax education—shame on them—and now this damaging Bill to attack practical education. It is a sad day indeed. We are also bemused that this apparently is the skills Bill, yet there is no mention of skills in it. It might as well have been the flying fish Bill because there is no mention of flying fish either. Some of the amendments in this group try to remedy this, including Amendments 32 and 33 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, which we broadly support.
I will speak to Amendment 21 in this group in the name of my noble friend Lord Storey, who much regrets that he cannot be here today, to which I added my name. We are spelling out what is missing from the Bill—namely, the establishment of a new executive agency to be called Skills England. Our amendment sets out the conditions for Skills England to be established and the need for both Houses to agree proposals. Other, linked amendments have been regrouped for some reason—I had some work today to try to work out where the groupings have changed since yesterday; I am not quite sure why they were—but we still have the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, which seeks to keep some of the duties of IfATE alongside the new body. As IfATE contains many real experts and champions, we feel this is a sensible move and we support it.
We have very strong objections to the power grab by politicians over the experts who really care. We will seek to change this and to convince the Government of the harm that could be done to enhancing the much-needed skills of the country if this goes through unamended. I hope that our listening Minister will appreciate how much is at stake in the Bill and will take note of the very well-intentioned and well-informed amendments that have been tabled.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, I start by reminding the Committee of my educational interests, in particular that I serve on Pearson’s qualification committee, which includes its oversight of BTEC and other technical and T-level qualifications. I apologise that I was not present at Second Reading, but I had to be elsewhere. I have a number of noble friends who would have liked to have been here today but unfortunately are unable to be, particularly my noble friends Lord Blunkett, Lord Watson and Lady Morris.
I listened carefully to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, with all the considerable respect that I afford her and was reminded of the ill-fated Schools Bill. She is playing the same game that some of us played at her, with the stand part notices and trying to wipe clauses out, which we did successfully in the case of the Schools Bill. It is interesting to reflect on that, because there are a few lessons that the department perhaps needs to learn about introducing controversial Bills in the Lords. There is controversy, as we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, who spoke more fruitily than I might have expected.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
Well, not fruity—more forthrightly than I would have expected. Is that better? There is some reflection to be had on that because if a House of Lords starter gets significantly amended, it is difficult to undo that anywhere else.
I also think some learning from the Schools Bill is necessary in respect of the Secretary of State taking on significant powers without really consulting or properly engaging and not having time to do that. In the case of the Schools Bill it was a trio of ex-Ministers—the noble Lords, Lord Nash, Lord Agnew and Lord Baker—who did for it. We do not have a trio of ex-Ministers trying to do for this Bill, so I hope that is a relief to my noble friend the Minister.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I very much support the intention and aims underlying the Bill; namely, to create a new and more effective UK skills system, with Skills England at its heart, to replace the current system—if you can call it a system at all—which is complex, fragmented, lacking in clear measures of success, and failing to deliver the skills we need.
The King’s Speech spoke of a Skills England Bill and that promise is surely not met by a Bill which does not mention Skills England at all. It has required considerable ingenuity on the part of several noble Lords to produce amendments that do mention Skills England and are deemed to be in scope.
The Bill focuses entirely on abolishing IfATE and transferring its functions—not to Skills England but to the Secretary of State—but it says nothing about the role, status and powers of Skills England, to which presumably these functions will in due course be passed, nor, as other noble Lords have mentioned, about how Skills England will combine the essentially practical, administrative and awarding functions it inherits from IfATE with its much broader and important role of aligning the skills system with the aims of boosting growth and spreading opportunity.
I feel some sympathy for the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to remove Clauses 1 to 3 and their respective schedules, because they and other amendments address the fundamental issue of how Skills England is intended to work, how we are supposed to get there from here—I was interested in the point made by the noble Baroness about the interregnum—and what the transition plan is.
I would prefer Skills England to be a statutory body, with sufficient authority and independence to fulfil its vital mission across the numerous government departments and other bodies involved and to bring together the demand challenges that employers face with skills shortages and so forth, given that the education and training systems are not delivering the skills we need to meet that demand.
For those reasons, I have considerable sympathy for Amendment 21 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and for Amendment 33 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, which would ensure the establishment of Skills England, preferably as an arm’s-length body.
It is frustrating that there are so many key aspects of skills policy that we need to talk about, as well as the role of Skills England in delivering that policy—I welcome the principle—but the Bill doesn’t enable us to discuss those things. I therefore hope that the Minister will shed more light on how Skills England is expected to tackle the current mismatch between employer needs and education provision, including plans for the comprehensive strategy for post-16 skills promised in the manifesto.
Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con)
My Lords, I want to speak to the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lady Barran, raising the issues that arise from the fact that Skills England, for all the hype, is to all intents and purposes the DfE. As others have mentioned, it will not have a statutory basis of its own. It might have a grand name and have been billed heavily in advance by the Government, but it is not a non-departmental public body which would be legally separate from the department and staffed by public servants rather than civil servants; it will be created by simple administrative action rather than legal instrument, meaning that it is basically just the department.
Executive agencies, of which Skills England will be one, are units of central government, perhaps administratively distinct to some extent but remaining legally very much part of it. What does this mean in practice? In some ways, it could be good. Potentially, it means a shorter feedback loop into Ministers’ red boxes, where responsibility for overarching skills policy rightly resides—there will be no room for excuses; the buck will stop with the Secretary of State for Skills England’s performance; and there will be no excuses for any failure of Skills England to work successfully across government departments and to corral Treasury to fund our skills system appropriately. However, that is the upside and, to be honest, I think there is potentially rather more downside from this change, because it is a misdiagnosis of where priorities need to be right now.
A prerequisite for a successful skills system is a reasonable degree of stability and certainty necessary to get businesses to invest in training, and there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that our businesses are not investing enough in training their workforce—as we all know, we are spending less than half the OECD average. Instead, we have near-permanent policy churn in this area. Supposedly once-in-a-generation reforms take place nearly every Parliament, sometimes every other year, creating chronic instability in the policy framework for investment for skills.
Now we have a massive machinery of government change with the abolition of IfATE, which was created less than seven years ago. Machinery of government changes are rarely worth the cost, disruption and distraction from other necessary priorities. This really is not what we should be debating right now. Machinery of government changes are no substitute for Ministers driving their teams hard, doing the difficult work of policy development and securing funding for skills from a very sceptical Treasury.
I am worried, therefore, that we are losing focus on the real issues. To my mind, there are two very big areas where I would prefer us all to focus our attention right now. The first is securing clarity from the Government on their plans for the defunding of applied general qualifications. I appreciate that there has been considerable movement from the Government on this matter since they took office in July, but further clarity is still needed on which qualifications that were due to be defunded next year will now be retained and when providers will get that vital information.
The second area I would prefer us to focus on is how we can end the confusion over the future of the lifelong learning entitlement, which has been delayed yet again in recent weeks and now will not start until sometime in 2027, and the provision by the Government of a clear statement as no one knows how the LLE will interact with their planned new growth and skills levy. These are two really important reforms and there is a desperate lack of clarity across our system on how they will work together. I would be very grateful if the Minister could help us with those two issues and take the opportunity to confirm that, in her mind, the LLE will still deliver the skills revolution that the last Government wanted from it and that Skills England will not quietly be asked to kill it off in the months to come.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
My Lords, in rising to speak very briefly in this debate, I apologise for the fact that I was not at Second Reading. Most of the points that I sought to make have already been made. Therefore, I do not need to repeat them, save that I am sure that there is an absolute commitment in this Room that what we need is high-quality skills training and education and that no one would demur from that. The differences—or possibly the similarities—across the aisle are that we want to make sure that it is done effectively and as speedily as possible while ensuring it is done properly.
I am very sympathetic to the view expressed by my noble friend Lord Knight about the consideration that might be given to a statutory body. Some noble Lords who know my history may know that I have not always been a great fan of everything being held in the hands of the department or the Secretary of State—obviously, it depends on the Secretary of State. In this case, we can afford, if we to make a move, to think about making the appropriate move. From the discussions that I have had, it seems that the appropriate move from where we are would be to a statutory body, for all the reasons that a number of speakers have outlined. That may well confer a greater sense not just of stability but of consistency, which is where we need to be if we are to carry with us young people, their teachers, their parents and employers, who are all extremely concerned, and to ensure that we have excellent skills provision and skills acquisition in this country.
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
My Lords, I too apologise that I was unable to be at Second Reading, although I have read all the contributions made by noble Lords, including those here, at the time. I add my general support to pretty much everything that has been said, including on Amendments 21 and 33. I have considerable sympathy with the proposal to get rid of Schedule 1, and specifically with those noble Lords who have said that we really need a statutory body. Just putting everything inside the Department for Education in an extremely unclear way is really unsatisfactory.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, I was at Second Reading. I am a teacher and an optimist, and I genuinely trust the Government. As the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said, we all desperately want this to succeed; we want the 13th iteration to be the Bismarckian iteration that actually cuts through and cuts down flab. We were talking about this and I said that it is like trying to amend fog. We have the sunshine coming through, but at the moment we cannot really see it.
Amendments 21 and 33 seem like a sensible idea because there is a real worry about something going into a government department. I will talk about my amendments later but they are all about scrutiny. There seems to be less scrutiny rather than more once something has disappeared into a government department, which is slightly strange. If we could get Skills England to being a statutory body, out in the open and with more scrutiny, people would have a lot more belief in it.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I share many of the concerns expressed by noble Lords. The Bill should by no means leave the House in the state in which it entered it. It is important that whatever body Skills England occupies has a great deal more status than the Government have proposed. I just do not think that what they have proposed will ever work in Whitehall. We need to take more care with the preservation of the relationships that have been established by IfATE, which make it work so well. I do not see anything in the transition proposed here that does that and, as I said at Second Reading, I would like to know what is going to happen to the Careers & Enterprise Company.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)
I thank noble Lords for their broad enthusiasm for Skills England that we heard on this first set of amendments. I hope my response will reassure noble Lords not only that the intention behind the legislation is precisely to transfer functions from IfATE into Skills England—legislatively, that needs to be done via the Secretary of State—but that, furthermore, Skills England is already making an impact on the types of issues that have been identified in the debate. Legislation is important, but it does not always drive action. This Government’s absolute commitment to bringing the current fragmented landscape together has enabled us to make progress already, which I will outline for noble Lords.
The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education has worked closely with employers to develop, approve, review and revise apprenticeships and technical qualifications. It is important to acknowledge IfATE’s achievements, most notably to develop and revise a suite of more than 700 high-quality occupational standards across sectors.
However, despite IfATE’s success in embedding employers into the processes for designing technical qualifications and apprenticeships, the wider skills system remains too fragmented and complex. It is insufficiently responsive to the present and future skills needs of the economy.
To address this fragmentation and unlock the potential for skills which drive growth and widen opportunity, we are creating a single organisation—Skills England. On the point sort of implied by some people that Skills England is, in some way, just a figment of Ministers’ imagination, I reassure noble Lords that it is not just the Department for Education; it is already operational in shadow form. Noble Lords may remember its announcement by the Prime Minister in July, which was one of the earliest actions of this Government. It is already driving change in the way that skills gaps are identified and how key organisations are working together to fill them.
On 24 September, Skills England published its first report, Driving Growth and Widening Opportunities, which provides an authoritative assessment of the key skills challenges that limit growth and opportunity, and an initial assessment of the skills needs in the economy. It also laid out its ambitions for the way in which it would operate, for noble Lords and others to read.
Over the coming months, Skills England will continue to work closely with government departments and relevant stakeholders to expand on the initial assessments of skills needs within 10 particular sectors, both identified in the industrial strategy and because they need quick action. Skills England will continue to develop a detailed, consistent approach to skills measurement and cement its position as the single authoritative voice on skills needs in the economy, which should be addressed to support growth and opportunity.
As I say, Skills England is already working across government. It is working with the industrial strategy advisory council to support the industrial strategy. Regarding when Skills England will broadly take on functions currently delivered by IfATE, it is our intention to lay commencement regulations promptly following Royal Assent to bring into force the provisions that transfer IfATE’s functions, along with its assets and liabilities. Skills England is already operational, and we are determined to ensure that there is no delay in enabling it to become even more effective.
The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, referenced the Government’s post-16 education and skills strategy, which we are currently working on. I talked about the broad principles of the strategy at the Association of Colleges conference last week. We will publish a broad framework for that relatively soon, with further detail at the beginning of next year.
Skills England will provide an authoritative assessment of skills needs in the economy. It will then use those data and insights to develop and maintain a comprehensive suite of technical qualifications and apprenticeships. As I said, it is already working with key stakeholders to ensure that the identified need and available training are reflected in local and regional skills systems. In response to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, who argued that it would be appropriate to run Skills England and IfATE concurrently, that would very much lose the benefit that comes from bringing those functions together so that the available training and qualifications that are developed exactly reflect the analysis that Skills England will be in a better place to do. Skills England will take on functions currently delivered by IfATE, delivering them alongside and in line with its broader strategic purpose. In doing so, it will ensure that the system becomes more responsive and better able to quickly and efficiently supply the skills most needed by the economy.
We intend to establish Skills England as an executive agency of the Department for Education. In our debates on the Bill so far, and in Amendment 33 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, it has been suggested that Skills England should instead be established as a statutory body. I reassure the Committee that we have considered carefully the risks, opportunities and benefits of different models, to understand from the beginning how the organisation will be successful.
Thanks to the progress that IfATE itself has driven, the system for developing technical qualifications and apprenticeships has matured since IfATE was established in 2017. However, as I said, at the same time we have seen a growing severity in the skills challenges the economy faces. We need Skills England to be a different type of organisation, to support the Government’s growth and opportunity missions. Working as an executive agency, Skills England will balance on the one hand the need for rapid action and independent objective analysis of skills gaps and on the other—this was the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Johnson—proximity and clear links into central government to inform decision-making. This is an appropriate balance of independence and the ability to drive at speed what all noble Lords have argued is the impact that we need Skills England to have.
Skills England will, as with any arm’s-length body, be subject to the highest standards of governance and transparency, including any relevant requirements for review. I will come to some of the questions raised on that in a moment.
Clause 1 introduces Schedule 1, which transfers functions to the Secretary of State and will therefore enable Skills England to take on and deliver functions currently delivered by IfATE, alongside other functions as appropriate, in line with its strategic purpose. This will help address the fragmentation that is holding the system back and restricting improved workforce development and productivity gains.
Clause 2 introduces Schedule 2, which makes provision for a transfer scheme to transfer IfATE’s property, rights and liabilities smoothly to the Secretary of State. It will ensure functional continuity of property, rights and liabilities, including the many contracts that are critical to the operation of the skills system, and it will set a firm basis for the operation of Skills England.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
I am sorry to interrupt my noble friend’s flow, but is it likely that this framework document will address that issue of the Secretary of State becoming, in effect, the awarding body for T-levels? Does she have any reflection on how precarious that makes the Minister if things go wrong with being an awarding body, which they do? Sometimes that becomes a resignation matter.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
Perhaps I could write to my noble friend with more details on that point. Currently, IfATE controls the licensing of T-levels, which is awarded to awarding organisations for them to develop and deliver. IfATE is not an awarding organisation but the contractor; that responsibility will transfer to the Secretary of State. It is the certification of T-levels that is delivered by the department. As I say, I will respond to my noble friend with a bit more detail on T-levels.
I was attempting to provide noble Lords with some assurance about the governance of Skills England through its framework agreement. On the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, about internal governance, Skills England will be run by a permanent CEO within a clear governance and accountability framework, and with a robust management structure at all levels. The CEO will be supported and challenged by an independent chair and a strong board with the experience and knowledge to support Skills England’s delivery. Once appointed, the chair and the board will help set the direction of the organisation, establish key relationships and provide important expertise on matters related to Skills England’s strategic aims and core functions. We are currently recruiting for these positions; we have received a large volume of very high-quality applications. In the meantime, I put on record my gratitude for the work of Richard Pennycook, who has been working as the interim chair of Skills England to support the creation of the new body.
I understand the noble Baroness’s specific point in relation to the governance and the reporting arrangements of the CEO, and I accept her point about the reporting arrangements and the role of the board. Perhaps I could come back to her with more clarity on her point about the advert for the CEO and where we see that accountability going.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
I apologise to the Minister but can she explain something? We are all talking about Skills England but there is no mention of it in this Bill. Can she explain why that is?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
It is because, as with all executive agencies, the process for setting up Skills England as an executive agency does not require legislation, but for it to hold the functions that enable it to operate in the coherent manner I described, the functions currently held by IfATE need to be transferred to and delivered by Skills England as an executive agency of the DfE. It is the route through the Secretary of State that enables that to happen. I reiterate my earlier point: Skills England might not appear in the legislation in this place, but it very much appears on the country’s skills landscape. Notwithstanding the significance of the scrutiny that this place is able to give, as well as the concerns about Skills England’s longevity, that is probably more important than whether it is in a Bill.
The passage of the Bill provides an opportunity for both Houses—as we are doing today, in fact—to consider the approach we are proposing, which is to move away from the current, narrow IfATE model. Creating any further requirement for parliamentary approval before Skills England operates fully would frustrate the intentions of the Bill to enable a smooth transfer and the delegation of functions to Skills England; the efficient and orderly closure of IfATE; and the ongoing work in the service of employers and learners. I assure noble Lords that the practical transition of functions will be designed to ensure that, where standards or apprenticeship assessment plans are in the process of preparation or approval at the point of transition, these will continue. Similarly, approval decisions for technical qualifications that are part-way through the process will also continue. It is our intention that employers and other stakeholders perceive no interruption in that work.
The noble Lord, Lord Johnson, asked about the progress on the review of level 3 qualifications. Briefly, let me say that we will, as I have said all along, make public our decisions on the review of those qualifications; they are due to be defunded in 2025, before Christmas.
I have talked in the House about this Government’s commitment to the lifelong learning entitlement. We will now be introducing it for courses starting from January 2027, precisely to ensure that it has the impact that the noble Lord rightly identified that it can have for lifelong learning.
I hope I have set out the intentions behind Clauses 1 to 3. For these reasons and those that I outlined on the remaining amendments, I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, will not press her stand part notices and amendments.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I thank all noble Lords who contributed to this debate and the Minister for her remarks. I hope she heard loud and clear that no one in this Committee is arguing about the Government’s ambition for skills reform; rather, we are all rooting for success in this area. This is not about what the Government are trying to do but more about how they are trying to do it.
I was struck by the almost unanimity of view about the importance of greater independence from the department for Skills England. It was raised by the noble Lords, Lord Aberdare and Lord Knight of Weymouth. He triggered what I think is the ex-ministerial version of PTSD—I call it PLSD, or post-legislative stress disorder—by talking about the Schools Bill, but I will forgive him this once. Importantly, it was also raised by my noble friend Lord Johnson, who talked about the importance of credibility with employers, which need stability in our system, and by the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, who rightly mentioned the importance of bringing students, families and others on this journey.
I was also struck by the constructive tone of the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, and the aspiration to make this the best it can be to deliver for our country. However, as the noble Baroness went on to say, there is a lack of confidence that this approach will deliver without that independence. Ironically, it is almost the fact that, as the Minister says, Skills England is already operating when the Bill has not even passed. It is just kind of happening within the department. There will be a framework published, but without any potential to input to it. It feels like DfE marking its own homework, which is not a healthy place to be.
I did not feel a lot of movement in the Minister’s remarks. I am sure that, when she looks at Hansard, she will note the strength of feeling across the Committee but, for the moment, I withdraw my opposition to the clause standing part.
Lord Blunkett
“(3ZA) A group of persons in subsection (3) may be an organisation that is the representative body for a sector.”
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
My Lords, I first apologise to my noble friend the Minister and the Committee that I will not be able to stay until the very end of the debate. I have a medical appointment in Sheffield for one of the many ailments that seem to be striking me down at the moment, but maybe I will be in better shape next Tuesday.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 3, 4 and 7 in my name, and to Amendment 1 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett—who I am delighted to see is well enough to join us today—and to which I have added my support.
As we have already heard, the Bill moves the powers from IfATE and transfers them to the Secretary of State while removing the requirement for external stakeholders to be consulted in all circumstances. The effect of this is to reduce independence regarding both the powers transferred and the examination processes—perhaps I should say “scrutiny processes” for the avoidance of doubt—as well as removing the requirement to work with those outside stakeholders which best understand the needs of their respective areas.
As also noted earlier in the debate, the Bill does not specify who will be consulted in reference to a group of persons. This lack of detail is concerning, and my amendments seek to rectify that. Amendment 3 in my name would include a list of relevant stakeholders which must be consulted before the creation of standards, which includes employers, mayoral combined authorities and sector representative bodies.
The spirit of the amendment is to retain the focus that IfATE had on employers and those with a strategic interest in technical education, whether that be regionally or by sector. They are all important to provide knowledge across a range of issues. Employers employ and train those who are undertaking apprenticeships and other qualifications and so can provide a perspective as to what business and the economy are in need of in relation to these qualifications. Mayoral combined authorities will be able to provide information as to what skills a particular region is lacking and advocate for a change in qualifications when necessary, and the local skills improvement partnerships will be able to provide their data as to what current, future and priority skills are in certain areas and expertise in how to increase collaboration between employers and regional authorities.
As noted by the Association of Colleges, there is a real opportunity here to bring together local plans, which sometimes exist in a vacuum, and a national plan, to encourage alignment and avoid duplication or gaps. Given that the Minister explicitly referred to this point at Second Reading, I hope that she will see the merit of my amendments.
The sector representative bodies will be able to provide knowledge on what skills and qualifications are relevant to the sector, both now and in the future, to ensure that these qualifications remain up to date and relevant to their economic needs. One of the central pillars of IfATE was its focus on employer and business needs to create and maintain suitable qualifications to equip people for the world of work. As such, we want to recognise the importance of keeping that focus to ensure that businesses can still trust the qualifications so that they continue to invest in the future generation of employees.
As mentioned at Second Reading, the Bill gives wide-ranging powers to the Secretary of State without maintaining those clear external links and the accountability that they help to provide. This is potentially damaging to the status of these qualifications. When in government, we delivered an increase in the value of skills-based qualifications, with a relentless focus on quality and developing a range of apprenticeships in particular that aim to reflect the breadth of our economy.
As such, we on these Benches want an effective approach to developing our apprenticeship and technical education system—I am sure that sentiment is echoed across the Committee—but I am concerned that the reduction in accountability and scrutiny in the creation of standards will not do that. That is why my Amendment 4 seeks to remove the Secretary of State’s power to act alone when creating standards. If the Government do not accept my Amendment 4, my Amendment 7 at least seeks to increase the transparency about when and how these powers will be used.
At Second Reading, the Minister was careful to set out some of the circumstances in which these powers to act alone would be used. She talked about making “small and fast adjustments” and allowing
“greater flexibility in scenarios where preparation by a group can be unnecessary or restrictive”.—[Official Report, 22/10/24; col. 581.]
Although it is unnecessary to have these powers, if the Government are so clear about these circumstances then surely it would be responsible to put them in the Bill so that the power of any future Government is constrained by the same things. I hope that, when she responds, the Minister will give the Committee some encouragement on this point. I also hope that she will reiterate the Government’s commitment to publishing standards in draft for stakeholder comment before they are finalised, and how the Government will respond if stakeholders have concerns.
As we heard, Amendment 1, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, to which I added my name, also seeks to bring the perspective of, and give greater responsibility to, sector representative bodies in the development of standards in future. This has much in common with my Amendment 3. The Minister will have views on the relative merits of “must” and “may”, but the spirit of the amendments is similar and aims to link the Government’s decisions as closely as possible to the real world. As the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, put it so eloquently, it aims to ensure that we do not lose that focus on delivery.
We recognise the merits of Amendments 2, 5, 6 and 8, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare. All of them drive broadly in the same direction—namely, to urge the Secretary of State to bring as much clarity as possible to the people she chooses to include in the group of persons referred to in Clauses 4 and 5, and to the circumstances in which she would exercise her powers in new subsection (3A) in Clause 4. The noble Lord’s Amendment 6 would give the Secretary of State more time to do so than my Amendment 7, but the aim of the amendments is similar.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I have a number of amendments in this group, which the noble Baroness kindly just introduced for me. Most of them are based on concerns expressed by employers that they should remain genuinely at the heart of the new system and that it will continue to meet their real needs. I have heard concerns from employers in the construction industry, CITB, the engineering services sector and the energy and utilities sector, for example, that the changes will possibly lead to less engagement of employers. To succeed in its aims, Skills England will need to foster close collaboration with employers of all types and sizes across all key sectors, including the eight growth-driving sectors identified in the industrial strategy.
Baroness McGregor-Smith (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I would like to talk a bit about Amendment 1 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, has added her name. As the outgoing chair of IfATE, I have listened carefully to some of the words expressed both today and at Second Reading. There are a small number of things that I would urge everyone to consider here; I say that to the Minister in particular.
Today, we have not yet discussed what really sits at the heart of the skills system with IfATE. We talk about the technical side of it, but we need to talk more about the employer voice. Yesterday, one of our board members, Robin Miller, who is one of the most famous music producers in the country and has been there from day one of IfATE—I have not—said something really interesting to me. He said that it took five years to get employers on side and to believe that IfATE could do really good things. Nothing is perfect. No arm’s-length body is ever perfect. Everyone can have their criticisms. I wish Skills England well for the future—I really want it to build on the momentum that has been built up in the skills system, as fragmented as it is—but I urge us to do more than just holding webinars with employers. Employers sit at the heart of the system; I can say that having myself been a very large employer in this country.
We need to understand how momentum will be built around the critical skills that this country is going to need in future. While this transfer is going on and all this is happening, behind the system sit employers with skills gaps to fill. They need urgently to make sure that everything they are doing in terms of the new apprenticeships, new qualifications and new, high-level technical qualifications that they need is done quickly and brilliantly. I genuinely do not understand how putting it into an executive agency that is part of a bigger department will necessarily do that; I would love to believe that it will, but we are going to need more evidence of how that will be done. I am, and many other people are, here to support that but, frankly, the quicker we can do it, the better.
Speed, momentum and delivery are what really worry me. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, asked whether Skills England might be swamped by the very technical things that it may have to do now. Yes—that will be the case. Does Skills England really want to sit there with the Secretary of State and be the awarding body, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said? I do not necessarily think so. We need to look closely at how these functions will move and what will be done so that employers understand.
Even more importantly, let us talk about the learners. Let us talk about the young people doing T-levels today. Yesterday, we spoke to one of them for half an hour about what she was doing in her journey. At the age of 16, her journey is fantastic. She is doing a T-level. She is heading towards an apprenticeship degree. She wants to be a chartered surveyor, as one example of many young people’s aspirations in this country. However, she said that too few people understand T-levels, career pathways and so on. There is so much work to be done. I simply urge us all not to forget during the passage of this Bill that the employer voice and the learner voice need to be heard more highly.
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
My Lords, I rise to speak to the two amendments in this group in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, to which I have added my name. More broadly, I want to speak to the general thrust of the group. I think that our joint amendment was not specific enough. It is not so much that we need criteria; we need to know that employers will be there and who else will be there. It is not just that we would like some criteria published.
It is important that some of this is publicly and legislatively specified because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, alluded to a little, things start very well, people know exactly what they are doing and then they slide. It might seem inconceivable to anybody involved in setting up Skills England that apprenticeship standards would, in the future, be written without really consulting employers. All I can say is, “I wish”.
I have been looking back at the history of skills policy and implementation in this country, as I do periodically when I decide to write something, and it has reminded me how easy it is for harassed and busy civil servants to just get things through and for powers given to a department, which do not require them to go out beyond the department, to be used by it. It is not that anybody means badly, but that is sort of how it goes. That is why, on repeated occasions, we have ended up with disastrous skills policies and approaches, in essence, for which there is equal-opportunity guilt across the parties. They became just a small group—harassed, busy, pulling very few people in—not putting down the infrastructure to ensure that what you get reaches out into whole economy. We need to do that.
I was staggered when I was working as an expert adviser in government to discover, for example, that most people in the apprenticeship division in the DfE had been in their jobs for only a couple of years. There were some wonderful people, but there was no real collective memory of why things had gone wrong before. That is why you have to make it clear in legislation that, as Skills England goes forward and as, particularly in this context, its apprenticeship functions go forward, it has to involve everybody, even though it takes longer, it is awkward and sometimes it does not work out well.
IfATE has not been perfect. I think more than 700 standards is mad, actually, and when I was involved in the Sainsbury review, I expressly asked that there should be fewer of them. It is not that what we have is perfect, but we have to be aware of the lessons that come from previous mistakes. It is very risky to put everything inside the department without anything that, in effect, says, “You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to do that. You’ve got to talk to employers and the key organisations”. Yes, it takes longer, it is awkward and you do not always think they are very good, but it has to be there. The general feeling coming out of these amendments is that we need Skills England to be better than what we have at the moment and not be set up such that the institutional structures invite a repeat of the things that went wrong in previous decades.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, on the importance of consulting employers and that 700 standards might be a little “mad”. I reinforce the sense that it is important to consult not just large employers as, for small and medium-sized employers, that granularity is really challenging.
I am glad to see the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, in his place, because he and I did a little work with EngineeringUK looking at apprenticeship take-up. We heard quite strongly from the SME community that it needs more sectoral standards, with more modularity for the specificity that you see in the 700. There is an opportunity attached to more modularity which could address the problem of English and maths requirements within apprenticeships, as it would then be more possible to think about sector-specific English and maths at level 2 and 3, as appropriate, so that the relevance of the learning to the English and maths content could be made much clearer and much easier for those learners. In that context, I support what the noble Baroness and most noble Lords have said. I listened very closely to the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, and my noble friend Lord Blunkett.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
My Lords, the interesting Library briefing on the Bill contains the following paragraph:
“Unifying the skills landscape to ensure that the workforce is ‘equipped with the skills needed to power economic growth’, by bringing together mayoral combined authorities and other key local partners, large and small businesses, training providers and unions”.
That brought joy to my ears. In this question about determining standards and all the other things that need to be done, we have a wealth of experience and expertise within trade unions of various kinds. My own experience, of course, is in education, but there will be other unions covering other sectors. It is important, when we are thinking about this, to ensure as we move forward with skills that we take account of those people who are either delivering the training or have themselves done the jobs. The best way to hear that voice may well be through the trade unions. I therefore commend to the Government listening to trade unions and having trade unions in the conversation.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, I shall speak briefly to Amendments 2 and 6, to which I have added my name. The great thing about following so many intelligent noble Lords is that I have little to say. In particular, my noble friend Lady McGregor-Smith talked about the employer, which is important for everybody. I have been playing bingo with words and phrases and “clarity” has come up many times. With due deference to my noble friend Lord Aberdare, I am going to repeat myself: we need clarity; employers need clarity; teachers need clarity. This is my second bite at the cherry and I am not sure whether I declared my interest as a teacher at first. Everybody needs clarity from the Bill and these amendments give more rather than less, which is vital.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, it is great to see the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, with us, because his voice has enormous stature in these discussions. These amendments are all to do with the creation of standards. My noble friend Lord Storey added his name to Amendments 2 and 6, but we are broadly supportive of all the amendments in this group. It is vital that in any work-based qualification the voice of employers is heard loud and clear. I should perhaps have declared that I worked for 20 years for City & Guilds on what we always called “vocational qualifications”, because while some were technical, some were craft qualifications. I always regretted the fact that we had taken over the word “technical” to cover all those myriad work areas.
Of course, employers may not be expert in teaching or assessment, as we discovered in spades when we were developing national vocational qualifications. Employers had wonderful, grandiose ideas about all the things that they wanted to assess, but when we got the colleges and City & Guilds with them, they realised that if they wanted staff to know about fire, they could not actually create a fire for every member of staff to have a real experience of dealing with fire. Assessment bodies had their place, as well as the colleges.
I was working for City & Guilds when the first national vocational qualifications were established. NVQs were going to revolutionise the “skills” word with a very easy to understand grading, which would have enabled parents, teachers and everybody to understand exactly where the vocational system was in relation to the academic one. Alas, where are they now? Why do we have local skills improvement plans and partnerships if they are not to be used for all the skills they have in this brave new world? I think it is important that the Secretary of State must set the priorities for LSIPs and review them regularly to ensure that their priorities are reflected in national strategies for the creation of standards, so I think this set of amendments has a great deal to commend it.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, like others, I welcome the fact that my noble friend Lord Blunkett has both attended and made his usual well-informed and passionate contribution in this debate. It appears that very little in the way of ill health or accident will prevent him from making his contribution. We all hope that he recovers as soon as possible. He rightly made an argument about the centrality of skills for everything that the Government are trying to achieve. He is exactly right about the role of skills in delivering all the missions that this Government have set out: growth, opportunity for individuals, rebuilding the NHS, delivering a green superpower, providing opportunities for young people as part of the contribution to keeping our streets safer, and building new homes. I completely agree with him about that and I hope that his words will help our efforts with the Treasury in the way he identified to ensure that that is recognised there as well.
The debate on this set of amendments has been interesting. I will talk about the relatively narrow nature of Clause 4 in a moment, but noble Lords have understandably also taken the opportunity to argue for the significance of a broad range of inputs into the activity of Skills England. I agree with the overarching argument about the importance of the involvement of a wide-ranging set of stakeholders. That is how Skills England has already set off in its work. It has already begun to engage with a wide range of employer representative bodies, individual employers and education and training providers. As I said, it will work closely across government and, in working on the industrial strategy, it will work in partnership with business, devolved Governments, regions and other stakeholders in developing the industrial strategy sector plans.
As my noble friend Lord Blunkett emphasised, there needs to be a sectoral approach to the way we develop skills across the economy. That has been an early focus for Skills England. It will work with employer representative bodies and directly with employers. It will work with education and training providers and with mayoral combined authorities. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State and I had a good meeting just last week with mayoral combined authorities on skills, and Skills England has been meeting regularly with them. On the point raised by my noble friend Lady Blower, one of the important elements of Skills England has been the engagement of unions, in a way that was not the case previously in the development of the skills landscape. I hope that I can give noble Lords some assurance that that is already the approach that Skills England is taking.
Narrowing the discussion down more specifically to the nature of the intention behind Clause 4, I make it clear that this is to provide the Secretary of State with greater flexibility in the minority of circumstances where preparing occupational standards using a group would be disproportionate or unnecessary for the limited scale or nature of the change or where the system needs to move particularly quickly to respond to employer demand. With over 700 standards currently in place, this clause ensures that the system for preparing and reviewing standards is fit for the future.
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
Can the Minister give an example of what might spark that off? I am finding it hard to imagine a situation in which it might occur.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I will be delighted to, and I was coming to that.
Before I do that, I note the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, and repeat from Second Reading my gratitude for her contribution to the development of IfATE. I recognise her point about what is necessary to get employer engagement in some of the detailed work that IfATE has been engaged in and that will be transferred under this legislation to Skills England. She is absolutely right about that; it needs consistent work. But it also needs, as employers have told us, appropriate flexibility and agility to enable those standards to be developed in a way that reflects changing developments and does not put too onerous a responsibility on employers in terms of their engagement.
Let us be clear that the default position will remain that a self-forming group of persons will prepare a standard. It is probably worth noting that this definition of “a group of persons” also legislatively guided IfATE in its engagement on occupational standards and apprenticeship assessment schemes. Our proposals do not weaken legislatively the engagement of employers. When a group does not convene itself to prepare a standard for an occupation which the Secretary of State is satisfied requires a standard, the Secretary of State may convene a group to prepare one. In both circumstances, we would expect that such a group would normally, but not exclusively, include employers that are representative of that occupation. Only when the Secretary of State is satisfied that it is more appropriate for them to prepare a standard than for a group of persons will the Secretary of State then do so.
To come to the noble Baroness’s point, scenarios in which it may be appropriate for the Secretary of State to use this power to prepare a standard are those where using a group would be disproportionately onerous for employers or other stakeholders; unnecessary because only minor adjustments or revisions were required; or where it could create undue delays. This might include—I say for illustrative purposes—updating standards to align with changes to mandatory qualifications within the standard; creating or updating standards to align with industry-recognised qualifications or statutory requirements; or creating or updating standards more efficiently where employers do not have the capacity. We envisage that the Secretary of State may also use the power to create and update standards for emerging or rapidly developing occupations, such as those in the digital sector. The clause also enables the Secretary of State to ensure that standards are developed or updated quickly to respond to acute skills needs or urgent regulatory changes required in an emergency, such as the updates to the level 3 community fire safety adviser following the Grenfell disaster.
Finally, employers themselves tell us that current processes for preparing standards can feel slow, bureaucratic and time-consuming. This is not a criticism of IfATE; it is a criticism of a requirement currently in legislation that we want to use this opportunity to make more flexible. It is a barrier to their engagement. We want to focus their input where it has the most impact.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
Those are all reasonable grounds for using the power, but there is nothing in the Bill that says that the default is a group of persons or that those are the kinds of circumstances in which the Secretary of State might take the power. There is nothing in the Bill that reassures employers that the powers would not be used unreasonably. There is nothing to stop them being used in any circumstances; nothing says that using a group would have to be disproportionately onerous, or indeed what the definition of “disproportionate” or “undue delays” is. In one sense, I am reassured, but in another, I do not see why there cannot be something in the Bill that lays it out a bit more clearly.
Lord Addington (LD)
Before the Minister continues, I have been listening as attentively as I can manage. That exact thought occurred to me. Could we get something, such as some guidelines—or, at least, some idea of the current government thinking—on when you would not consult and the criteria around pressure and speed? This would put my mind slightly more at rest.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I hope to provide noble Lords some reassurance by way of guidelines, which I will come to in a moment, but I also hope to convince noble Lords—I shall try—that there is, in fact, a conflict between the idea of doing something as flexibly as possible in order to engage employers and spelling it in the Bill. I will make that argument as I continue.
I turn first to Amendment 1 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, Amendments 2 and 8 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and Amendment 3 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. They all relate to the membership of the group of persons. At present, as I have suggested, there are no statutory criteria that prescribe the make-up of a group that forms or is formed to prepare an occupational standard. Employers play a prominent role and are well placed to define or describe what occupational competence looks like in most cases, but different expert voices might have a role to play in different circumstances. This point was made by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden —although probably more with respect to assessment, which we will come on to in Clause 5.
We do not see any benefit in seeking to shape or fetter the structure of these groups with criteria that would prevent the membership of a group reflecting the specific factors relating to the need for its preparation. IfATE is under an existing duty to publish information about matters that it will take into account when deciding whether or not to approve groups of persons; I assure noble Lords that this duty is being transferred to the Secretary of State unamended, so it will remain in existence. Novel and additional criteria in primary legislation to specify the make-up of a group, for which noble Lords are arguing, might provide some assurance here. However, it would be a new constraint in the system.
Slowing down groups coming together, and slowing down the development and maintenance of occupational standards, could lead to a focus on ticking boxes instead of flexibly, broadly and inclusively finding the best people to define the knowledge, skills and behaviours required to be competent in the occupation. The optimal composition of a group will vary from occupation to occupation; for example, to represent the breadth of an occupation and the employers in it that will employ apprentices, it may be necessary in new, emerging or highly specialised occupations to look openly at who can bring to bear the relative expertise in the preparation of a standard. Retaining the existing flexibility around the make-up of a group of persons is critical to achieving high-quality occupational standards.
Amendment 4 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, would remove the ability of the Secretary of State to prepare a standard if they are satisfied that it would be more appropriate for the standard to be prepared by the Secretary of State than by a group of persons. I hope I have assured the noble Baroness of the need for this greater flexibility. I reiterate that it is needed for a minority of cases to ensure that standards are kept up to date without a disproportionate burden, given the volume of standards that now exists.
Amendment 5 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, would create a duty on the Secretary of State to consult with the relevant industry skills and standards-setting body when preparing a standard. Such bodies are important to the preparation of occupational standards, and in most cases high-quality occupational standards are developed by an inclusive and independent group. In fact, current guidance states that groups must seek advice and guidance from organisations with responsibility in their industry for defining skills standards in England and the wider UK. We expect this requirement to remain.
I emphasise that in only the minority of circumstances, where the Secretary of State considers it more appropriate, will standards be prepared by them rather than by a group, so there is a role for industry bodies in this process and we expect that they will continue to be engaged. However, this amendment would undo the flexibility and efficiency sought through Clause 4, by placing a requirement on the Secretary of State to consult specific bodies when they consider it more appropriate for the Secretary of State to prepare a standard than by using a group. That would be exacerbated in circumstances where the relevant industry skills or standards-setting body is unable to participate when required. It therefore risks giving them precedence over others, including employers.
Amendment 6, also in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and Amendment 7, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, would impose a duty to publish criteria for the preparation of occupational standards by the Secretary of State. To be clear again, employers remain best placed to define and describe what occupational competence looks like in most cases. As I have indicated, the Secretary of State would not convene a group in only a minority of circumstances. Setting criteria for that minority of circumstances would frustrate the necessary agility that this clause aims to bring to the process. It would restrict the Secretary of State’s ability to be responsive and to ensure that the suite of high-quality standards is kept up to date and relevant.
I hope that I have set out the intentions behind Clause 4 and provided some assurance and reassurance for noble Lords. For the reasons that I have outlined, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, will withdraw his amendment.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for her kind words, which I hope do not turn out to be a hostage to fortune. I am grateful to everybody who has contributed to a thoughtful debate.
As my noble friend the Minister described, we are debating areas that are obviously very much in flux. I was interested in the earlier debate about consistency and continuity on the one hand and collective memory on the other. It is important to carry this forward in a way that picks up the best of what is already in place and iterates that very speedily and easily, with the support and confidence of employers. The noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, was quite right to draw attention to the importance of that.
The amendments in this group were trying to explore the way in which the operation proceeds. There may be things that we come back to, as I know that amendments in later groups will return to this issue. On that basis, it is appropriate to withdraw my amendment now.
Lord Aberdare
“(6ZA) Within six months of the day on which the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Act 2024 is passed, the Secretary of State must publish criteria for selecting membership of a group of persons described in subsection (6).”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment, and a similar amendment to Clause 4, requires the Secretary of State to publish criteria for selecting members of a “group of persons”, which is not otherwise defined. The 2009 Act states that the “group of persons … must have been approved by the Institute”.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I have Amendments 9, 12, 13 and 15 in this group and have added my name to Amendments 10, 11 and 14 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, with the same reservations about Amendment 10 as I expressed about Amendment 3. Your Lordships will be glad to know that I have failed to think of additional points that I have not already made in speaking to identical amendments to Clause 4, so I will content myself with saying that I beg to move Amendment 9, on the same grounds as set out previously.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, that is quite a challenge to follow, and it is tempting to take the same approach—I think my popularity with the Committee might improve—but, in all seriousness, as the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, said, my Amendments 10, 11 and 14 are based on a very similar argument to that debated in the previous group about the concerning lack of detail regarding what we mean by “a group of persons” and the potential dilution of employer focus. With that, I commend the amendments.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I rise just to give my much wiser noble friend a break. The assessment plan for any qualification is of the essence. If you get that wrong, you might as well not bother doing it. When you have a group of people looking at this, you stand a better chance than you get from one centre. There are a series of clichés about Secretaries of State, and I will try not to kick and wring every one of them, but the basic one is that if the Secretary of State has spoken to somebody who just does not understand or gets it wrong, the whole thing can go wrong. If you have a group, you stand a better chance of getting a correct result. Nothing is guaranteed either way, but that is what it is about.
I hope that we can get some response from the Minister on where we are going to get this expertise in to check on what is happening. That is it, in essence, because we have had Secretaries of State who know exactly what they want and will talk to a certain group that agrees with them. That is very easy to do, and we have all done it. I hope that we will get some assurance that the Secretary of State will talk to a divergence of opinion to go through these things to make sure that they work. If we do not and start to get them wrong, the price will be huge and we will have nothing useful. Being a little slower and a bit more certain is infinitely better than taking the chance of getting it horribly wrong. I hope the Minister can give us a reassuring answer.
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
I do not have very much to add, everybody will be glad to hear, except to highlight the fact that assessment is not the same as getting to the end of the standards. We have a complex set of awarding bodies and some assessment standards which require an external qualification and some which do not.
It would also be good to be confident that the department has worked through all the ramifications of this. I am conscious that I do not think I have and am going to go back and look through some of the original legislation, but I do not think the considerations are exactly the same as they are for standards. Because we have a rather strange system in this country, with a lot of formal qualifications and a lot of awarding bodies, it is very easy to get the qualifications wrong or suddenly find that you have a huge political fuss on your hands, as I am sure everyone in this Room will recognise from the current BTEC discussions.
I just flag that it is not just the same as for standards. The complexity of many endpoint assessments and standards for which there are required external qualifications means that we need to be very careful that we have not inadvertently stored up some real problems for ourselves by just moving everything wholesale and saying, “But where necessary, the Secretary of State can cut through the bramble patch”.
Baroness McGregor-Smith (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I have a little sympathy for this additional request for the Secretary of State to do this if the defaults are not working. Having seen how the current system works, my only observation is: will that be quicker? If it is about speed, I am not necessarily convinced that, as the Secretary of State will be so busy, this will be one of the highest-priority things in the Department for Education, and that concerns me. With more employers and more people involved in the system, there is always a danger that this will slow down. I am not really sure in what circumstances this power will be used. I could probably see it for the odd exception, but I still cannot quite imagine what it could be. However, I have a little sympathy, as long as it is around speed in the odd exceptional circumstance.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I thank noble Lords for their concise contributions on these amendments. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, made clear, that does not undermine how important the nature of assessment is. I wholly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Addington, that the best chance of getting assessment right is by engaging appropriately at the right time.
On Clause 5, we are talking specifically about proposals regarding apprenticeship assessment plans and the transfer of the function from IfATE. Clause 5 amends the requirement for assessment plans to be prepared by a group of persons by making it subject to a power for the Secretary of State to prepare apprenticeship assessment plans if that is more appropriate. This will simplify the process for updating and creating assessment plans.
Noble Lords will recognise that our previous discussion also related to the use of groups of persons. We might find that some of the considerations are similar, but I assure the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, that I will have a few different arguments in response to this, not least because the arguments for apprenticeship assessment are different to the arguments for standards. But the principle about agility and flexibility remains at the heart of this.
Where the intention behind Clause 4, which we have just discussed, is to provide the Secretary of State with greater flexibility in a minority of circumstances in respect of preparing occupational standards, here we are concerned with flexibility in respect of apprenticeship assessment plans. In both cases, our intention is for employers to have a continuing and vital role in the composition of groups of persons. In both cases, it is important, as I am setting out, for the Secretary of State to have some limited flexibility not to define the membership of the group in advance and not to have a group if it is not needed in a small number of cases.
The default position will be that an assessment plan will be prepared by a group of persons that has been approved for this purpose. Only when Skills England or the Secretary of State is satisfied that it is more appropriate for them to prepare an assessment plan, rather than a group of persons, will the Secretary of State do so. Scenarios in which it could be appropriate to consider the use of this power are where using a group would be disproportionate or create undue delay—I hear the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, about the need for speed.
Scenarios could be, first, updating assessment plans to make adjustments that do not materially change the assessment or occupation competence of learners—for example, where they are aligned to deliver the competence required by a regulator, such as in regulated professions in the health sector. In such circumstances, using a group is unnecessary and burdensome because it is a reflection of updating that has happened in a regulated profession. The second scenario is creating assessment plans for emerging occupations, such as certain digital occupations. The third is creating or updating assessment plans where there are acute skills needs requiring an urgent response, and where there is a lack of capacity in the system to respond. Relying on a group in instances such as these can create undue delays and hinder responsiveness. Without this clause, changes to assessment plans to reflect straightforward adjustments would incur delays and require unnecessary time and resource.
I note Amendment 11 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, which seeks to remove the power held by the Secretary of State to prepare an assessment plan if they are satisfied that it would be more appropriate for the plan to be prepared by them than by a group of persons. However, for the reasons I have outlined already, it is crucial that we respond to feedback from users of the system to make the process for developing apprenticeship assessment plans more agile.
Amendments 9 and 15 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and Amendment 10 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seek to set criteria for membership of a group of persons and to name in legislation a particular type of person that must be included as part of a group of persons. In the discussions on Clause 4, we went through some of the arguments about the impact this would have in reducing flexibility. There are no existing statutory criteria for how a group is formed to prepare an apprenticeship assessment plan but, as I said previously, IfATE is under a duty to publish information about matters it will consider when deciding whether to approve groups of persons. That existing duty is being transferred to the Secretary of State unchanged.
When a group is convened, it is critical to consider who the experts are in the field in question. The noble Baroness, Lady Garden, correctly identified that the experts in assessment will not always be the same as the experts in developing an occupational standard—and, of course, this will vary from occupation to occupation. Employers play a prominent role and are well placed to define and describe occupational competence, but they do not always exclusively hold expertise about how apprenticeships are assessed, and other contributions may be valuable. It is important that there is the opportunity for groups of persons responsible for preparing apprenticeship assessment plans to reflect and draw on a broader range of expertise, such as in assessment methodologies, practical training delivery and costs.
Professional bodies, awarding organisations, providers, regulators and others with a background in assessment can be well placed to be involved in the development of an assessment plan. In new and emerging occupations or highly specialised occupations, such as digital, artificial intelligence and nuclear, it may be necessary to take a broad and creative look at who is best placed to be part of a group preparing an assessment plan. There are scenarios where it is unnecessary or disproportionate to rely on a group to create or update assessment plans. For example, attempts have been made to convene a suitable group to update the interior systems installer assessment plan for nearly a year. This has significantly delayed the commencement of necessary, time-sensitive revisions in the important construction and built environment industry—a sector that is critical to this economy.
Setting criteria would therefore create additional hurdles for, and potentially even prevent, groups being convened. This would further slow the development of assessment plans and risk employers and others losing confidence in the system and in our ability to meet acute skills needs. It is not in anyone’s interest, not least learners or employers, to incur such delays. That is why we are removing unnecessary barriers to simplify and speed up processes.
Amendment 12 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, would undo the intended flexibility and efficiency by placing a requirement on the Secretary of State to consult specific bodies when they have considered it more appropriate for them to prepare an assessment plan than to use a group. That also risks slowing progress when that body is unable to participate, and it risks giving unintended precedence to those bodies over others who may be well placed to determine how competence should be tested.
I should also note that we see no reason why Skills England would not continue the approach currently taken by IfATE whereby all new assessment plans and those that have undergone material revisions—whether prepared by a group of persons or the Secretary of State—are published online for comment by any interested parties before approval.
Amendment 14, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and Amendment 13, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, would establish a duty to set and publish criteria in relation to the preparation of an apprenticeship assessment plan by the Secretary of State. As I emphasised, we are improving the system in response to feedback from key partners. Employers, trade bodies and providers tell us that the processes for developing and reviewing assessment plans need more pace and agility to respond quickly to changing and future skills needs. They report that current processes can feel bureaucratic, drawn out and time consuming—all barriers to the expert engagement that we need from them and to the smooth operation of assessment for employers and learners.
Setting criteria that the Secretary of State would need to meet in order to prepare assessment plans—in the minority of circumstances when it is more appropriate to do so than using a group of persons—would restrict the Secretary of State’s ability to be responsive. It would be overly prescriptive and fly in the face of stakeholders telling us that processes need to be simpler. I hope I have set out the intentions behind Clause 5 and, for the reasons I have outlined, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part on this group, particularly my noble friend Lady Wolf and the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, who added some valuable points. I thank the Minister, who mostly but not entirely managed not to give me the impression that I had wandered into a Groundhog Day scenario—there were some additional points there, I was glad to see.
The Minister emphasised agility and flexibility as the advantages of the proposed system. This is probably something wrong with me, but I have an inherent unease about flexibility in the hands of Secretaries of State when compared with flexibility in the hands of an organisation with an independent statutory role. The noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, mentioned that agility might not be quite such a feature once it gets into the hands of the department. Also, there is a slight conflict with the point that my noble friend Lord Hampton made earlier: employers are looking for clarity, and there is a slight danger of clarity being obscured by too much flexibility. Of course, all these concerns reflect points raised with me and, no doubt, with others by employers about the way the new system might work in comparison with the existing one.
Having said all that, I will study all the contributions, including the detailed differences from the previous set of amendments. Meanwhile, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, reluctant as I am to join the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, in the bonfire of the clauses, I rather took against Clause 6 and was advised by the Table Office that this was the best way to discuss it. During the word bingo I have been playing, we have had “flexibility”, “agility”, “lean”, “speed”, “quick”, “quicker”, “responsive”, “speed”, “momentum”, “rapidly developing”, “fluidly” and “speed” about five more times.
In Clause 6, taking away the fact that we will be reviewing approved technical educational qualifications “at regular intervals”, the Government are getting terribly excited. It is like someone at new year who is going to join the gym, going to play tennis and going to run around the block every time. Then, gradually, the pie shop starts calling, it rains—yes, I am speaking for myself—and it becomes a little more flabby. The trouble is that there is this great enthusiasm—the Minister will be running around and talking to everybody—but, as my noble friend Lady McGregor-Smith said, it took five years to get IfATE. What will happen in five years?
In the Bill, we are mistaking consultation, scrutiny and review for rigidity and delay. We need more clarity, reassurance and scrutiny. By taking out looking at education qualifications at regular intervals and taking out the publication of information on standards and apprenticeships at regular intervals, we are putting a cloud of suspicion into this when we really need clarity. I beg to move.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I added my name to this stand part notice. My original thought was to table an amendment requiring the Secretary of State to publish regular reports detailing which technical education qualifications or standards and assessment plans had been approved without any review and why such review was deemed unnecessary. I was also concerned that the clause, as it stands, would seem to make it possible for no review at all to be conducted. The clause stand part notice in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, is more straightforward: it removes the clause altogether. I look forward to hearing from the Minister what exactly the Government’s intentions are for carrying out reviews and why these should not be spelled out in the Bill.
Similarly, although no amendment has been tabled, Clause 7 would make it possible for no third-party examination of a standard or apprenticeship assessment plan to be undertaken at all. Again, I hope that the Minister will tell us what the Government mean to do about such independent examinations. It has been suggested to me that they might be even more valuable sometime after a standard or a plan has been approved and put into practice, rather than before the approval, when it is not known what the effect will be.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, there is no mention of awarding bodies in the Bill but, when I worked for City & Guilds, it was part of our role to review qualifications at regular intervals. I wonder why that does not feature anywhere in the Bill and why the Secretary of State is apparently taking over a function that was done very effectively in those days by awarding bodies.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I was delighted to add my name to the Clause 6 stand part notice in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. Like him and the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, I am baffled about why the Government do not want to review the approvals of technical education qualifications, published standards and assessment plans at regular intervals. As the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, intimated, it seems that the closer one is to the department and any Secretary of State, the more one will need independent scrutiny to retain the confidence of employers, learners and providers. Obviously, there is a risk that, without that independent oversight, standards of technical qualifications could be eroded or become less relevant than they should be.
Does the Minister agree that Clause 6 potentially introduces conflicts of interest? By removing the requirement for independent oversight, are the Government not placing an undue burden on those directly involved in the design and delivery of standards to act as their own assessors, where they end up marking their own homework? It would be helpful if the Minister could explain to the Committee why the Government do not believe that this level of scrutiny is needed. I absolutely appreciate that, in some areas, the review might be very light-touch—for example, because of the suitability of a set of qualifications—but we have seen how qualifications rise and fall in popularity and relevance over time. As we have heard from a number of noble Lords this afternoon, including the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, there are clear calls from the sector for greater simplification of qualifications.
At Second Reading, the Minister committed to publishing information about the intervals for reviews of different qualifications. I wonder whether she could update the Committee on when that will happen.
Similarly, my Amendment 16 to Clause 7 seeks just to restore the status quo; namely, that the Secretary of State “must”, rather than “may”, make arrangements for an independent third party to carry out an examination of a standard or an apprenticeship assessment plan. As the Committee knows, independent reviews are there to provide feedback to policymakers and training providers by, for example, identifying areas for improvement and best practice. I very much hope that the Minister will consider this amendment and stand part notice positively.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I thank noble Lords for their contributions on this group. I feel confident in thanking noble Lords, because I am confident that I am on strong ground on this one. I hope nobody proves me wrong.
In preparing to transfer functions from IfATE to the Secretary of State, an assessment of the current operation of the system was undertaken to identify any functions that should be amended rather than simply being transferred in their current form. In that consideration, the proposal for a relatively small change to Clause 6 came forward. Clause 6 amends the requirement to review technical education qualifications and standards, and apprenticeship assessment plans, at regular and published intervals, by removing the requirement to publish information about the intervals at which reviews will be conducted.
The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, argued, rightly, that there is a need for review. The point about this clause is that there is no change to the broader review requirement. The Secretary of State and Skills England will still be required to maintain arrangements to review approved technical education qualifications and standards, and apprenticeship assessment plans, with a view to determining whether they should be revised, be withdrawn or continue to be approved. I wholeheartedly agree with noble Lords who have said that that is an important function, and it is absolutely right that that duty should remain.
Removing the requirement to publish information about the intervals at which reviews will be conducted will allow Skills England to determine when reviews of technical education qualifications and more than 700 high-quality occupational standards and apprenticeship assessment plans should be carried out, based on need rather than a fixed review point, as is currently the case. Originally, IfATE expected to carry out reviews every three years but, with the proliferation of standards, assessment plans and technical education qualifications to review, it has been unable to do so; nor was it able to do this by undertaking reviews on a route-by-route basis. It has since adopted a more risk-based approach. The current approach, which fixes review points, has been too rigid and fails to recognise the differences in starts and achievement rates and rapid changes in skills needs; for example, where occupations evolve quickly.
Clause 6 will ensure that standards, technical education qualifications and apprenticeship assessment plans are kept up to date, coherent and relevant, and are reviewed appropriately. The amendment would remove a statutory obligation and provide the Secretary of State flexibility that is in line with the current risk-based approach taken by IfATE to determine whether a review should be prioritised; in other words, we believe that IfATE has arrived at the right, flexible position, but that would not be reflected without this legislative change. It recognises that flexibility is needed to take a targeted approach to administering the significant volume of reviews based on whether there are specific issues with the performance of the standard and how widely used it is, rather than on meeting an arbitrary timetable.
Without this clause, standards, technical education qualifications and apprenticeship assessment plans would need to be reviewed at published intervals, rather than based on need, preventing resources being deployed effectively to ensure that standards, technical education qualifications and apprenticeship assessment plans are kept relevant and up to date as required.
Amendment 16, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, would remove the flexibility that we intend to create, and it would mean that the Secretary of State would be required to arrange for an independent third-party assessment for every new standard and assessment plan. Clause 7 amends the 2009 Act to substitute a requirement for independent third-party examination of all new standards and assessment plans with a discretionary power for the Secretary of State to make arrangements to do so. The default position will remain that the Secretary of State will make arrangements for independent third-party examination of new standards and assessment plans prior to their approval.
The clause will provide an alternative approach in certain circumstances where obtaining third-party examination is duplicative or not necessary. For example, the option not to arrange an independent third-party review might be deployed where employers place unequivocal high value in a professional body’s mandated qualification or key skills and behaviour learning outcomes, and where the occupational standard adopts that very closely, such as the CIPD and HR standards. In these cases, an external review would be nugatory.
In highly regulated occupations, such as the health sector, the regulatory requirements for occupational competence must be reflected in the occupational standard and assessment plan, and deviation from this is simply not possible. Again, the need for third-party review would be redundant.
Without Clause 7, examinations that do not improve standards and assessment plans but take time and resource to deliver would continue to be required. That would continue to place unnecessary burdens on those involved, slow down the process and make it excessively onerous.
For the reasons I have outlined, I hope the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, will feel able to withdraw his opposition to Clause 6 standing part of the Bill.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, I thank everybody who took part in this short debate. It is always quite exciting to see the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, describe herself as baffled—in my short career here, I have not seen that yet. The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and I talked about how there is no third-party examination and there is a conflict of interest. It looks like Skills England is not only marking its own homework but writing its own exams.
I did not join the Minister in her strength of feeling that she had got it absolutely right, because it is all based on need, but, again, who defines need? It is the Secretary of State. We are losing this clarity—this is a trust issue again. But I am sure that some conversations can be had between now and Report, so I withdraw my opposition to the clause standing part of the Bill.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, this group of amendments seeks greater clarity from the Government about how the different bodies involved in the regulation of technical education will work with the Secretary of State, given her new powers under the Bill, and, in turn, whether that impacts on the responsibilities and relationships between them. I was trying to think of what the collective noun might be for a group of regulators, and I could come up only with a “regime”. There are certainly several involved in this area, including, of course, IfATE currently, as well as the department itself, Ofqual and the Office for Students.
It will help to hear from the Minister her reflections on how the Government will set the strategic direction in this area and then bring clarity to the different—that word again—roles of each regulator and how they can contribute to that goal. Despite their best efforts, and with apologies to those drafting the Explanatory Notes, I am still not entirely clear about the impact of Clause 8 on Ofqual’s powers in this area. I have already raised this with the Minister and made absolutely clear that this is a probing amendment by which I merely seek to understand whether there would be any change in Ofqual’s powers as a result of these amendments to the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009. Although I have reread her comments at Second Reading, I very much hope she can set out for the Grand Committee the impact of Clause 8 in practice—ideally with a couple of examples—so that at least I, if I am the only one left standing, am completely clear on this point.
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
I was about to take this opportunity to ask for clarification, but it follows on from something that the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, said earlier, so perhaps he will follow up on it. We have a lot of regulators in this area, and I also am a little concerned. I cannot say that I understand the clause, by the way—I have just looked at it but cannot make head or tail of it—but I will try to get some clarity into my head. I know that, at the time that IfATE was set up, there was quite a lot of discussion between it and Ofqual about who was allowed to do what; the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, may be able to elucidate this.
My concern going forward is with the LLE, because the intention was always that these were not just standard university qualifications that one could take but that there would be a mechanism for approving high-quality qualifications at the right levels, for which you could also take a loan. That is critical, and I know that the OfS has been struggling with this on the regulatory side but it does not seem to have got very far. It is critical that we have a clear pattern here and do not inadvertently create obstacles to that approval process again.
It slightly worries me that, as I read it, the Secretary of State would have to give Ofqual instructions on a qualification-by-qualification basis. That again does not sound as though it will be very fast or flexible. I just ask the Minister, if she is totally clear about this, to give us a little lesson now; and, if she is not, whether she could seek clarification, perhaps from her higher education experts as well as from her apprenticeship experts, on whether we are inadvertently making this more difficult rather than easier.
Baroness McGregor-Smith (Non-Afl)
Once more, I will say a few words about process and reiterate to the Minister my words on speed. Any changes to any process will slow things down; it will not improve in the short term. Creating constant momentum and change is really important, as is simplification. The more I think about having four regulators, the more worried—traumatised, almost—I begin to feel.
Whether or not we like what the current system has done and whether or not things need changing, it is important for us all to appreciate that the speed point is critical. I have yet to see things speeding up as systems move within government; they tend to slow down. So let us be very careful and cautious. I am nervous about the unintended consequences of change. Through all of this, there should be a delivery plan that talks purely about building momentum for the skills system. At the moment, we do not have that.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, in responding to this part of the debate, I am confident that I will be able to explain to noble Lords the intention of Clause 8; however, given the broader questions about the roles of a range of regulators in this field, I may well write to noble Lords to set that out, because it goes broader than Clause 8.
The amendments in this group relate to proposals regarding quality assurance and the accreditation of apprenticeships and technical qualifications. Section 138 of the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009 allows Ofqual to set an accreditation requirement for individual qualifications or descriptions of qualifications. If it does that, any such qualification must be accredited before it is awarded.
Ofqual accredits a qualification submitted by an awarding organisation, first, if the awarding organisation has been recognised in respect of that qualification or type of qualification; and, secondly, if the qualification submitted meets the relevant criteria. This is a rigorous process that gives confidence in qualifications—our A-levels and GCSEs. However, since 2022, Ofqual has been prevented from making determinations on accreditation for technical qualifications. This means that, in respect of accreditation, technical qualifications are treated differently from academic qualifications and are prevented in all instances from benefiting from an important tool for ensuring quality.
Clause 8 will change that by enabling the Secretary of State to forge a route to technical qualifications being accredited. The clause provides the Secretary of State with the discretion to determine, should it be deemed appropriate, that an exception could be granted to the general prohibition on Ofqual being able to accredit both approved technical education qualifications and technical education qualifications that the Secretary of State is considering approving. This will mean that, where it is directed to do so by the Secretary of State, Ofqual could exercise its power to determine whether an accreditation requirement should apply to certain technical education qualifications, subject to appropriate consultation.
In some instances, the Secretary of State may deem it appropriate to ask Ofqual to consider whether imposing an accreditation requirement on the qualifications in question could help maintain their quality and signal to the wider system that they are broadly commensurate with other accredited qualifications in terms of rigour. For example, the Secretary of State could use this power in instances where it is important to ensure that students who opt into and successfully complete high-quality technical education qualifications are in no way disadvantaged as compared to their peers who pursue academic qualifications. They may consider, for example, whether a category of technical qualification provides a particularly important springboard for onward progression but where those who successfully complete the qualification may be competing with those who have studied other qualifications that have been accredited, such as GCSEs or A-levels.
It may also be the case that the Secretary of State therefore considers using this power where they are persuaded that a particular category of technical qualification is not subject to any broader review or has reached a certain level of maturity in delivery, and/or is being taken by a sizeable number of students. It is important that the potential for the accreditation of technical qualifications is reintroduced in the managed and considered way the clause allows. Here I come to the questions about why Ofqual does not have a complete permission and ability to consider technical qualifications.
The clause provides the Secretary of State with the discretion to determine, should it be deemed appropriate, that an exception could be granted to the general prohibition on Ofqual being able to accredit. This is because of the relative newness of many technical qualifications and is in order to consider carefully the interactions with the ongoing and vital reviews both of post-16 qualifications and of curriculum and assessment. These considerations are more significant for technical than non-technical qualifications. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, that we are doing this not because we necessarily have specific examples in mind but to enable them to be considered in response to some of the reviews, where it would seem appropriate.
Amendment 34, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, would impose a duty on the Secretary of State, within six months of Royal Assent, to lay before Parliament a report on the effect of this Act on the powers exercised by regulators, including the Office for Students and Ofqual. We are committed to ensuring transparency in the way that the Bill’s powers are discharged and the effects that their transfer and execution will have on regulators, other public bodies and parts of government. We intend to follow the usual methods for agreeing and making this information available publicly and to Parliament, and therefore consider the amendment to be unnecessary, notwithstanding my commitment to write to noble Lords with some more detail about the way that different regulators work.
Specifically, Skills England’s published framework document will govern the relationship between the body, the department and the rest of government. There is a further and pre-existing published framework document already governing the relationship between the Department for Education and the Office for Students, and an equivalent document is being developed between the department and Ofqual to support effective working arrangements.
IfATE currently has memorandums of understanding with Ofqual and the Office for Students, and we anticipate that equivalent documents will be developed and published in respect of Skills England in due course. These documents will set out the nature of the relationship between Skills England and the regulators it will work with, in line with their respective framework documents.
For the reasons I have outlined, I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, feels able not to press her amendment.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I thank noble Lords—or noble Baronesses—for their contributions to this short debate, and the Minister for her response and explanation of what Clause 8 intends to do, which, at least for the moment, I think I understand. What I heard her say is that the intent is to improve the rigour in the system and send a message to the system about rigour in relation to technical education qualifications, but that there are no current plans to use that power. That raised the question: if some qualifications are then accredited by Ofqual that have a particular status, what impact will that have on all the others? That is a little policy joy for her to consider. I very much look forward to her letter explaining the network of regulators and how this legislation will impact them, as I am sure other noble Lords do.
I very much support the comments from the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, on the importance of moving on as quickly as possible with the lifelong learning entitlement. I hear loud and clear my noble friend Lady McGregor-Smith’s comments about the need for speed. The slight concern many of us might feel is that agility and speed are not always the first words that come to mind when thinking about central government.
Lord Lucas
“Review: Chief Skills AdviserWithin six months of the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a review of the impact of this Act on the case for creating the role of Chief Skills Adviser, with responsibility for advising Government and reporting to Parliament on the state of skills needs in the economy.”
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I acknowledge that a great deal of the thinking behind Amendment 17 comes from the Edge Foundation. Skills England is a big change and a big opportunity. The Government’s ambitions to unify the skills landscape and respond to the skills need, which is very large and well acknowledged, will require impetus, which Skills England seems to have, but also connection—connection which allows competing interests, particularly between departments, to be resolved and common pathways to be evolved.
It does not seem to me that we can run a skills system by diktat. There is nothing about any department, except the Treasury, that allows it to impose diktat on others. My amendment suggests to the Government that they look at the success of the chief scientific adviser structure. Obviously, there would be the chief skills adviser in the DfE, but skills advisers should be in each department, as with the chief scientific adviser network. It is about evolving a combined understanding and having someone in each department for whom skills is their principal occupation, who has status in that department and who is intimately connected into the Department for Education’s network.
Every department has skills needs and its own understanding and ideas about them. Fragmentation impedes employer and provider engagement. Anyway, modern life needs cross-cutting skills and a lot of jobs require skills whose roots are in several departments, and these things need to work together. The Government’s missions are very much dependent on effective collaboration on skills.
Looking at the individual departments, we see that even within the DfE skills cross schools, FE and, notably, higher education. There is plenty of need for communication just within the one department. Having a chief skills adviser would help.
In other departments, one wishes that the Treasury would import some people who understand the real world a bit better, but it is also responsible for the evolution of skills in the financial and accounting space. Those are the kind of skills that spread into a lot of other careers.
The Foreign Office handles languages, history, geography and diplomacy. Diplomacy is not something that social media seem to cultivate; the Foreign Office must care where that skill is coming from.
The Home Office covers police and security but, above all, migration—bringing in the skills we have not generated here. I remember plenty of conflict with the Home Office in my 30 years here on whether particular skills would be allowed into this country and the speed at which that should be done.
The Department for Business and Trade obviously covers management and skills for business, but a huge skills effort is actively under way there under the heading of the industrial strategy. The people and skills division is trying to solve underinvestment in skills by industry and to improve management and tech use skills. A huge agenda is being actively pursued there, not as a subsidiary of the DfE but as a subsidiary of the industrial strategy.
The Department of Health and Social Care is a huge user of skills and a very big user of microcredentials. Really small bits of learning have evolved to be accepted by the particular employers at which they are aimed. When you have a bigger employer such as the Department of Health, that is really quite easy. So these skills qualifications are evolving in large numbers and at great speed not only in Health but in a lot of other departments.
DESNZ needs the green workforce, the MHCLG has construction and especially housing, DSIT uses the sciences, DCMS has creative skills, and the Cabinet Office needs skills for the Civil Service. If productivity is slipping back in the Civil Service, there is clearly a need for big skills investment. The MoJ needs legal skills and the Department for Work and Pensions is concerned with access to skills. What qualifications are available for people who are bottom of the heap when it comes to employment? The MoD has a huge range and depth of training, the DfT has skills from lorry driving to logistics, and Defra uses environmental skills.
Local government, through the LSIP network, has a real interest in how the skills agenda is delivered. The word I hear is that LSIPs have been a real success, as they are effective and flexible. It takes a couple of years for the DfE to evolve a qualification but LSIPs can do it in weeks, because they are so focused on the actual local employer need and work closely with a provider. The Minister for Women and Equalities brief is now in the DfE but it used to wander around Whitehall. It has a very strong interest in the skills agenda.
Every department in Whitehall is intimately linked to the skills agenda and needs to be bound to a common sense of progress. It is not possible to do that by pushing; it has to be by linking. A structure like that of the chief scientific advisers would help, and the DfE has experience of this. It has its own chief scientific adviser and a council of scientific advisers to go with it. This is a resource that the DfE is used to having.
By having a chief skills adviser network to feed into and get feedback from, the Government and the DfE will know and understand the skills challenges of all departments so that they can synthesise and co-ordinate. Individual departments would have immediate access to the DfE resource, so that they can plan and integrate. That would be a good way forward for a skills structure.
I would be very grateful if the Minister replied to the questions I asked at the end of my previous intervention. I have seen too many sets of relationships die when institutions change. Some of the sector skills councils had really good relationships with business and they were just trashed. Most relationships with local enterprise partnerships just ended; they went nowhere, because local authorities were not capable of maintaining them in the same way. I want to be sure that what IfATE has built will continue under the new arrangements. As I said, I would also be interested in how the Careers & Enterprise Company fits into this structure. I beg to move.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I added my name to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on the importance of a chief skills adviser. As I have said before, skills always need advocates within government because it has a predominantly university-educated membership. This role could be key to ensuring that skills changes will be enacted by someone who can take a view over the country of which skills are in short supply in which areas and need local support. The network of skills advisers in all departments that the noble Lord proposes would be a great way forward, and I support the amendment.
Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con)
My Lords, I shall speak briefly. I think that this amendment is worth very serious consideration. When I was Science Minister, I saw up close—as the whole country did during the pandemic—the value of the Chief Scientific Adviser and the network of scientific advisers across government departments. They play a really useful role in ensuring that policy is informed by the strongest possible understanding of science and in bringing the scientific method to policy-making. They have had a huge impact and made a huge contribution.
However, I would just flag that this raises an interesting question about what exactly the role of Skills England is. My understanding, from what the Government have said so far about Skills England, is that it was meant to be a body working across government and doing the difficult job of ensuring that all the different interests of different government departments in the skills agenda are given appropriate balance and focus. To my mind, that may be somewhat duplicative of what Skills England is itself seeking to do. In that sense, it may be a perfectly good alternative to Skills England if you have a chief skills adviser, informed by skills advisers in the various departments, feeding into the DfE; then, you may not need the horizon-scanning, policy-making function that Skills England is proposing to offer. I suggest that you have either one or the other; you probably do not need both.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Lucas for setting out so clearly the case for the appointment of a chief skills adviser and a network across government departments. However, I also have a lot of sympathy with the remarks from my noble friend Lord Johnson about the risk of duplication. In a way, this debate has made me feel like we are coming back to Clause 1 of the Bill, which I promised not to do, and to the appetite for understanding the Government’s thinking about how Skills England will work in practice. Clearly, this is a kind of alternative model.
I will make just a couple of brief points. In the previous Government, we benefited from the advice of Sir Michael Barber in his role as an adviser on skills policy delivery. My first point on that concerns the importance of the word “delivery”. His focus was on the delivery of skills policy. We all know that writing a great policy document is about 10% of the task while about 90% is effective delivery of that policy at scale, in real life. On behalf of my former colleagues in the department, I thank Sir Michael for his excellent advice in this regard; I had only one conversation with him but I have thought about it and used his advice many times since.
My second point is that Sir Michael reported not only to the Secretary of State for Education but to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I wonder whether that is something that the Minister might consider.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, Amendment 17, which makes up this sixth group, was tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. As he outlined, it points us towards considering the case for a new and separate chief skills adviser—or, as I think the noble Lord described it, a network of chief skills advisers across government. I certainly agree that we need champions of skills in this country in a broad sense. Earlier, my noble friend Lord Blunkett made the case for having to make that argument across government and the challenges in doing so over the years. I do not dispute that need. Harnessing the skills of all our people is crucial to unlocking growth and spreading opportunity.
As it stands, our skills system is fragmented and not meeting the skills needs of either the economy or our people, so I have some sympathy with the idea that we need a unifying force that can also have an impact across government. However, that unifying force, as the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, said, is Skills England. As this legislation paves the way for us to establish Skills England, it is not necessary, I would argue, to include consideration of a chief skills adviser in parallel; doing so would only add a further layer of complexity and, arguably, make it less clear where the accountability for delivering a step change in skills provision sits.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful for that reply. I completely understand that this is a direction in which the Government do not want to take at the moment, but I cannot recall, in my unexpectedly long time in this place, seeing any structure like that of the chief scientific advisers that really enabled collaboration between departments. It gives each department a sense of ownership of the policy, that it is in some way its own, rather than something that some other department is trying to impose on it.
Looking at long-running problems, such as how to care for the elderly, we see that the inability to get a few government departments to work in collaboration with each other causes immense problems, such as bed-blocking in hospitals, and questions about whose budget something is supposed to be on. The difficulties of working cross-departmentally are legendary and real. Clearly, Skills England is setting out to have cross-departmental impact. I wish the Government great fortune in that, but I hope that, if things start to prove sticky, they will turn their minds back to doing something, perhaps within Skills England, to produce a structure that makes collaboration work. The more we can do that within government, the more we will solve some of the big problems that have proved intractable in terms of making government work well. I am happy to withdraw the amendment; I do not expect to be here to bring it back.
Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL]
Tuesday 26th November 2024
(3 weeks, 4 days ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL] 2024-26 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 38-II Second marshalled list for Grand Committee - (22 Nov 2024)
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Ashton of Hyde) (Non-Afl)
Good afternoon, my Lords. If there is a Division in the Chamber while we are sitting, which I do not expect, this Committee will adjourn as soon as the Division Bells are rung and resume after 10 minutes.
Amendment 18
Lord Storey
“Report: functions transferred to the Secretary of StateWithin six months of the day on which this Act is passed and annually thereafter, the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a report, explaining how they have discharged the functions transferred to them by virtue of this Act.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires the Secretary of State to lay a report before Parliament at regular intervals detailing how they have used powers transferred to them by virtue of the Act.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I offer my apologies for not being able to be present at the first day in Committee, but I have read the Hansard of that day.
My amendment is very similar to lots of others in the various groups, and I think they all point to the same thing, really. The Minister talked about the “narrow IfATE model”. I would have thought an executive agency within her department is a very tight model, and I can perhaps see why from her point of view, whereas on these Benches we would prefer a wider, more inclusive model. Having said that, I understand and can see the driving force behind what the Minister wants to achieve from the comments she has made. She said that the Government want
“to move away from the current, narrow IfATE model. Creating any further requirement for parliamentary approval before Skills England operates fully would frustrate the intentions of the Bill to enable a smooth transfer and the delegation of functions to Skills England”.—[Official Report, 21/11/24; col. GC 96.]
I suppose we are all anxious for progress in this area. The skills shortages are frightening. You have only to look at any particular industry. I have spoken to the construction industry, and the number of job vacancies and areas where it just cannot get skilled labour are holding back not just that industry but the country.
Given that we are where we are, and that I, no doubt like my colleagues, trotted along to the Bill office and said, “I’d like to put an amendment down on this”, to be told, “Oh no, it’s not in the scope of the Bill”—the Bill is very tightly written, so we are frustrated in that we cannot talk about or suggest for improvement some of the things in the area of skills that we wanted to—mine is a simple amendment. It simply says that the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament at regular intervals how they have used the powers transferred to them. It is a supportive and helpful amendment because you do not want, in 12 months’ or two years’ time, to say, “Do you know what? I’ve been let down by my executive agency. It has not delivered”. But if you are able to report to Parliament on a regular basis—it does not specify a time—then we can share those successes and concerns and maybe, from time to time, we can make some helpful suggestions.
I should add that I added my name to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Knight, which I also support. I beg to move.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, this is part of a range of amendments all essentially about reporting and, as he accurately described, any number of us were wrestling with how to get something that looks like Skills England into the Bill. A way involved a reporting requirement— I was not allowed to mention Skills England in my amendment—in which I lifted some of the detail in paragraphs (a), (b), (c) and (d) from statements that the Government have made about Skills England and what they want it to be able to focus on and achieve. Hence the amendment lists:
“identification of skills gaps … the provision and funding of training to meet the skills needs of employers; … the development of occupational standards; …work with regional and local bodies to improve the skills of the workforce in England”.
I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, for managing to get in something around the green skills agenda, which I tried to get in in my amendment but failed to draft it as skilfully as he clearly was able to do in order to get that in. I also support having a specific mention of the responsibilities in climate legislation and its relationship to green skills.
As I understand it, IfATE has a requirement to report to Parliament annually. It does so well and has shown its success, so the capacity is there, assuming that IfATE’s capacity will successfully transfer into the executive agency. So I do not see this as onerous, and it is important that we as Parliament should receive a report on the additional things that IfATE does not currently cover that would be covered by Skills England.
It is, incidentally, important for Parliament to have an opportunity to scrutinise the really important work that Skills England will be able to do. The annual report is a common mechanism that we all use when we are trying to get a little more traction for Parliament, but I think it is merited in this case. I hope that, reflecting on this group and the next, which is also about reporting in slightly different ways, the Minister will be able to give some consideration as to whether this is a relatively straightforward crumb of comfort to give some of us who have been slightly anxious about the absence of Skills England in the legislation.
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 35 in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran, to which I have added my support. Although we have only just started this debate, the range of reporting requirements set out in amendments in the group and mentioned in the speeches we have already heard is because we are all concerned about the lack of detail and statutory underpinning for Skills England currently in the Bill. We share concern that there needs to be greater clarity and purpose for the organisation in the legislation. It is certainly that lack of detail about the way the Government will decide their strategic priorities and create new technical qualifications, where IfATE has previously acted independently and consulted with employers and businesses, that is the rationale behind the amendment I am speaking to now.
The amendment is an attempt to understand how the Government will make these decisions and mandate Skills England to publish the process it intends to follow. I hope that, in her reply, the Minister can provide some further detail and reassurance to the many in the sector who are rightly concerned by the uncertainty that the Bill is creating—about the lack of detail, in particular, on what were previously established and well-understood processes. In order for Skills England to have the effect that we all hope, the decision-making process it undertakes and uses to decide which sectors will receive new technical education qualifications needs to be transparent, robust and retain the confidence of employers, training providers and, of course, the students themselves.
I hope that, in addition to Amendment 35, the Minister will give careful consideration to Amendments 23, 31 and 36 in this group, which, if adopted as a whole, would bring some much needed further clarification and credibility to the work of Skills England from the outset and, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, just said, provide a suitable opportunity for parliamentary scrutiny of its work.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, it might be an appropriate time to mention my Amendment 22. There seems to be an unwritten law in Parliament that, if the noble Lord, Lord Addington, is taking part in an education debate, he has to mention special educational needs. Yet again, I remind the Committee of my interests in that area.
The opportunity for the cock-up school of history to strike has been pointed out here on numerous occasions. If you do not have an opportunity to write it in, it gets ignored and left behind. I am sure that a lawyer would be rubbing his hands at that, saying, “Yes, we have legislation that will mean you can get into it”, but, as we know, at the moment, special educational needs is an area that is a little too rich with lawyers and court cases. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell me that, in future, the Government will make sure that there is a clear and definable duty—and, indeed, limitations—for where special educational needs and disabilities have to be covered in getting qualifications, and that, where there are practical difficulties, we would find out what is going on.
The technology is moving on all the time. I thought the stuff that I was using for my day-to-day activity was cutting-edge 10 years ago and discovered that it is not, and that I should have an upgrade, often using stuff that is built into computers now. There is a need to address this. Exams are now so much easier to take by means other than pen and paper—indeed, it is the norm—but only if you make sure that the system works and is compatible with what is required out there, which means monitoring.
I hope the Minister will be able to give me an answer that means I can stop worrying, and that we can take the Pepper v Hart reference and use it in any future disputes. Unless we get somebody who is on the ball and being told they have to do it, history says that the aforementioned cock-up school of history will come in and we will make other lawyers happy and certain candidates unhappy.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I never know what the protocols are for when to speak in Committee, but since both the amendments that I have added my name to in this group have been introduced, I will leap in. I hope the Minister does not think I am stalking her, having attended her evidence session this morning with the Industry and Regulators Committee, which was very interesting. I also look forward to reading the Government’s new White Paper Get Britain Working.
I have added my name to Amendment 18 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which I see as a catch-all for some of the reporting required from the Secretary of State by many of the amendments tabled. Of the 22 amendments we are discussing today, 12 would require the Secretary of State to produce reports, so I very much welcome the idea of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, that an annual report might cover most if not all of those requirements.
I have also added my name to his Amendment 23, another reporting requirement, which focuses on many of the central functions of Skills England, identifying skills gaps and shortages and promoting ways of addressing them. It includes looking at training needs. One thing I would add to that is the education side of the picture, not just the training stage: making young people aware of the skills they need to find rewarding employment suited to their abilities and of the range of opportunities available to them.
I also welcome the inclusion in the amendment of working with regional and local bodies. I would expect to see Skills England, as I think the Minister mentioned this morning, playing an active role in consolidating local skills improvement plans, to ensure that, together, they properly address national as well as local needs and seek to forge a joined-up approach between the different government departments, which might otherwise be tempted, as they have been in the past, to develop their own skills policies that may not add up to a coherent whole. I am pleased to add my support for those two amendments.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
My Lords, I was pleased to add my name to Amendment 23 in the name of my noble friend Lord Knight, and I thank noble Lords who have supported Amendment 31 in my name. I said quite a lot last Thursday, which seems a lifetime ago—I was on so much medication I would have been disqualified from the Olympics—so I will try to keep it brief today.
Amendment 31 has elements which have already been overtaken by announcements by the Government, reinforced, at least as far as I can manage to access it, by the White Paper produced today. Thankfully, the foreword, signed by four Secretaries of State, mentions skills a lot and indicates the critical importance of the skills agenda to getting some of the 2.8 million people who are economically inactive back into work. It also mentions the youth guarantee and the reappraisal of priorities—for Skills England, I hope, but it is not entirely clear who is making decisions about what in terms of the growth and skills agenda and the new levy, and therefore who has actually made the decision in respect of what we are pressing for and what has been pressed for publicly in terms of prioritising entry-level and foundation apprenticeships.
Baroness McGregor-Smith (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I just want to give some context on IfATE being a statutory body, since I chair it. Statutory bodies take their responsibility very seriously when they issue reports to Parliament. First, when we go through that detail at IfATE annually, it is a rigorous and detailed process. It is absolutely evidenced and fact-checked. I would like to see that level of reporting, or even more, done in Skills England. I will not stand up and say that I am the expert on mechanisms, but I am concerned to think that that level and standard of reporting will not happen under a new, enhanced body.
Secondly, it is important that we do not lose sight, during the progress of the Bill, of what this transfer of powers is going to do. By transferring the powers of IfATE to the Secretary of State, we transfer the approval of technical qualifications as a whole—an end-to-end process that is understood and respected by employers and understood by colleges. Everyone must understand how qualifications will be arrived at and approved. I would like some assurances from the Minister that that process of end-to-end scrutiny with employers will continue and be enhanced in Skills England.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I am pleased to speak in support of my noble friend Lord Blunkett’s important Amendment 31 on apprenticeships and the growth and skills levy. Although it is important that apprenticeships are available to all age groups, thus ensuring that lifelong learning plays a key role in skills development in the years ahead, I am particularly keen that more young people should see them as a first step on a career ladder. That is clearly set out in Amendment 31.
Unfortunately, the bright new dawn that many of us expected when the apprenticeship levy was introduced in 2017 has failed to materialise. Noble Lords will be familiar with the analysis commissioned on behalf of the Association of Colleges earlier this year, which showed —I think this was for 2022-23—that some 160,000 fewer apprenticeships were started than in 2017. You might ask “How on earth can that possibly be the case?”, but it is. That decline was particularly alarming because it disproportionately impacted on those most in need of training, particularly younger people and those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
There were regional aspects to it as well, because the decline was particularly prevalent in regions of the country such as the north of England, which traditionally had high levels of apprenticeships, and among SMEs. There are particular structural issues with the levy for SMEs, but that is for another day. That decline in the apprenticeship statistics must be reversed and returned at least to the pre-2017 levels, so I was pleased to hear my noble friend the Minister say on Second Reading that foundation apprenticeships are to be developed as an alternative route for young people who may have faced barriers in the past.
The noble Lord, Lord Storey, recounted how difficult it had been to get some of his amendments tabled, because the words “Skills England” could not be used. In today’s Marshalled List, any time that “Skills England” is mentioned it is in quotation marks. It is almost as if it is some soiled rag that needs to be picked up with a glove and held at some distance from your body. It is astonishing. Why should we be so afraid to say that, when we all know what we are talking about here? Let us just be open about it.
Critical to the effectiveness of “Skills England” will be the reshaped growth and skills levy. That must be released from the straitjacket of its predecessor, whose unspent employer funds reverted to the Treasury rather than being retained in the education and training budget. I think that there was some disappointment across the House that the Chancellor had nothing to say about the growth and skills levy in the Budget. I am at a disadvantage because I have not had the opportunity to look at today’s White Paper, to which other noble Lords have referred, but I hope that my noble friend might be able to say something about the growth and skills levy in her reply in respect of this amendment, regarding the scope and level of investment that it might enjoy.
This must affect local priorities, of course, which is why the amendment stresses the role of local skills improvement plans in delivering the co-ordination needed to plug the skills gaps. LSIPs already play a role there and I retain my belief that Skills England should be established as a statutory body, rather than an executive agency, the better to co-ordinate efforts across departments to ensure that we have the most effective approach and that we develop the skills that the country needs going forward.
That said, it is encouraging that Skills England, still in skeletal form, has already published its first report. Its title, Driving Growth and Widening Opportunities, is one that it must live up to. The report to Parliament outlined in Amendment 31 should further concentrate minds in the DfE to set out the direction being pursued and to provide a clear delineation of Skills England’s role in that, having been given those tasks and—I say this only to be helpful, I hope, to my noble friend the Minister—looking to the outcome of a buoyant skills landscape, which the Government and every noble Lord here today want to see emerge.
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
My Lords, I support this amendment. Indeed, I express strong support for all the amendments that have managed to get themselves tabled in spite of the language of this Bill, which at this point are just calling for report. It seems quite extraordinary that, at a time when we have a Government who recognise the centrality of skills and have committed to a system-wide approach—as in today’s White Paper, for example—we are being asked to pass legislation that puts everything inside the department, reported to a DfE official, so that under this Bill there is not even a report for other government departments, never mind for the public at large and for Parliament. I cannot believe that this makes sense in terms of the Government’s expressed ambitions for Skills England: that it should be system-wide; that it should do something that goes beyond the remit of individual agencies and quangos; and that it should take in the whole scene effectively. I would very much prefer to see it as a statutory body, but I hope that, between now and Report, the Minister will at the very least take away this widely expressed request for us to have regular public reporting of what is going on, which everybody can use, so that we have documents in the public domain allowing us to see what is happening and how the Secretary of State’s new responsibilities are being carried out.
Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con)
My Lords, I add my support for Amendment 36 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. Like other amendments, it calls for—among other sensible things—a report, in this case on levels of investment in skills by employers.
If you have believed the CBI over the past few days, you would think that the investment climate for business had taken a turn for the worse in recent weeks, with what it is calling the “triple whammy” of increased employers’ national insurance contributions, the higher national minimum wage and various changes in labour market rules. The CBI feels that there is a palpable sense in the business community that the UK is becoming a more difficult environment for investment. Of course, skills are very much part of that picture. There is a clear risk that our levels of investment in skills, which are already running at half the levels of our peer group in the OECD, will suffer further if this climate of paralysis in the UK with respect to business investment is allowed to continue.
On the uncertainty that noble Lords have alluded to with respect to big government policy, notably the development of the growth and skills levy and the future of the LLE, these things may become compounding factors that risk current low levels of investment in skills dipping even further. Clearly, we cannot afford that as a country, so I believe it is vital that the Government take steps as rapidly as possible to lift the policy uncertainty that will potentially blight levels of investment in skills over the current year and accept the amendment, which will provide a healthy baseline against which we can measure progress in this respect in the months to come.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, I have a tactic nowadays of speaking towards the end, when everybody else has said it better than I can. I just want to add that I have put my name to Amendment 18, and I agree with Amendment 23 and pretty much everything that includes the word “reporting”.
I am slightly concerned that our positions became entrenched in the last day in Committee, and that nimbleness is seen as being reduced by reporting. There is a lot that we do not know and a lot that we need to know. In my own profession of teaching, we have to teach with the door open and, at any time, somebody senior could come in, observe your lesson and give you formal feedback. At the very least, you get one formal observation a fortnight and—let us face it—we all work better with that kind of incentive. Skills England needs to be held to account; otherwise, we are looking at it being held to account by Henry VIII.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I am also slightly uncertain about the order of speakers; I thought it was in the same order as the amendments.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Ashton of Hyde) (Non-Afl)
It can be in any order.
Baroness Barran (Con)
It can be in any order. I rise to speak to my Amendments 35 and 36 and to support Amendment 31 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. Before I talk to the amendments in detail, I will reflect briefly on some of the important points that were raised earlier in Committee and that have a bearing on the groups that we will be debating today.
In addition to the fundamental concerns raised about the abolition of IfATE, which we have heard again from your Lordships today, and the absorption of its powers by the Secretary of State, we heard concerns from my noble friend Lady McGregor-Smith about how long it takes for a new body to bed in and gain the trust of employers and, again from her, from my noble friend Lord Johnson and from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, about the risk that we lose momentum in implementing the Government’s skills reforms. Similarly, the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf of Dulwich, and the noble Lords, Lord Aberdare and Lord Knight of Weymouth, among others, expressed their doubts about the Government’s approach.
In particular, there was a real sense, as we have heard again today, that everybody wants Skills England to succeed but there is a worry that it will be swamped by the volume of technical work that it will have to do, which could prevent it from delivering on the changes that the nation needs to see. I absolutely echo the earlier words of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in hoping that the Government will bring forward their own amendments to address these concerns on Report.
My Amendments 35 and 36 seek to bring some focus and clarity to the work of Skills England by requiring regular reporting to Parliament. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, on the 12 different versions that he tracked in the Marshalled List. Without this, Skills England might disappear from view, buried under a mountain of technical processes. Importantly, critical accountability disappears with that; we will not be able to name who is accountable for different decisions.
I will first explain my Amendment 35. There are many people in the sector who are concerned by the uncertainty that the Bill creates surrounding previously established processes, such as the granting of new technical education qualifications. As your Lordships know, IfATE was an independent body and new qualifications were decided with the help of employers and businesses, informing them what skills were needed in the economy. However, with the arrival of Skills England we need to understand two things: first, how will the Government decide on its strategic priorities and, secondly, how will this be operationalised in the creation of new technical qualifications? With this transition, it is likely that the processes to decide which sectors receive new qualifications could change, so my Amendment 35 seeks to clarify how these decisions will be made and what will guide this decision-making. We need a level of transparency that retains the confidence of employers, training providers and, crucially, students for this approach to have a chance of success.
Next, I will give details on my Amendment 36, which seeks to place a duty on the Secretary of State to produce an annual report on various skills metrics. Your Lordships will have noted that this is a long list that reflects the complexity of this area. There may of course be better metrics and, ideally, a shorter list, but this is our starter for 10—or perhaps I should say 12, since the list stretches from paragraphs (a) to (l). I will go through these points individually—I apologise to your Lordships for the length of this, but it underlines how many areas we do not have clarity on where we need clarity.
Paragraph (a) in the proposed new clause seeks clarity on the level of need or skills gaps by sector, level of qualification and region. Without this, I fear we will get a generic report with broad-brush headings that might well reflect the national averages but does not give any actionable insight about where to focus or prioritise, or about the amount of progress made from year to year.
Paragraph (b) aims finally to bring some consistency to different qualifications across the sector, particularly as they apply to key core competencies. At the moment, we have a long and varied list of qualifications, and they are not really interoperable. For example, the standard of generic digital skills is not the same in two digital skills qualifications at the same level, and this contributes to the complexity of our system and is a blocker to streamlining it. This would be a key step to achieving the aims also mentioned in paragraph (i).
Paragraph (c) intends to give visibility to the earnings impact of completing different qualifications at different levels and in different regions. I do not think that we could answer that question today with solid data.
Paragraphs (d), (e) and (f) follow the same structure as paragraph (c) but in relation to how the Government are spending their budget in the area and how the landscape is evolving in terms of new qualifications, as well as the impact of both of these on trainees.
Paragraph (g) intends to explore whether the system is still meeting employer needs. We keep hearing from employers an urgent need for more clarity on what would happen if there were a gap in, say, engineers on Teesside, and what the Government, through Skills England, would do about it.
Paragraph (h) turns to the funding of skills training by employers. I thank my noble friend Lord Johnson for his comments on this. As he said, this is an area that we all know has declined significantly in real terms over the past 20 years, and we now lag badly behind other industrialised nations. We hope that there is some way that this can be measured annually to shine a light on this important area, both in financial terms and in relation to take-up by employers of new qualifications. Of course, this will be impacted by changes to the apprenticeship levy that the Government have proposed.
All these elements intend to create a far clearer picture of the impact of technical education qualifications on the people who take them, and the differences that happen through their learning. It also seeks to explore the way in which Skills England will work differently to IfATE and to provide an outcome-based framework by which its efficacy can be judged and adapted if necessary.
The letters after that intend to provide a framework to evaluate Skills England more generally, judged on the factors that matter to both employers and students. As noted above, paragraph (i) intends to ensure that this new system is created in a manner that is easy to understand for employers and students. For example, it is unclear how and where the Secretary of State will get advice on the content, accessibility, assessment and rigour of T-levels. This has much in common with Amendment 30 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett.
Paragraph (j) seeks to get regular updates on the impact of changes in the post-16 education strategy that the Government have committed to delivering, and its inclusion would commit the Government to detailing how they are delivering the objectives of the new strategy and what difference it is making on the ground.
I hope that, if my noble friend Lord Lucas reads the Hansard of this debate, he will be pleased to see paragraph (k), which looks at careers advice and seeks to ensure that there is a sufficiency—to be clear, I mean quality rather than just volume—of careers information, advice and guidance.
Paragraph (l) mirrors the wording in paragraphs (a) to (c) in subsection (1) of the proposed new clause to be inserted by Amendment 31 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. This would ensure that the Government’s reforms focus on the areas where there is the most urgent need for increased participation.
Finally, I want to touch briefly on Amendment 31 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, which I support; I have already spoken about its proposed subsection (1). The second subsection seeks to get a clearer sense of how the skills and growth levy will operate in practice and to build on the promising start that we have already seen from the local skills improvement partnerships.
I look forward to hearing the Minister’s comments on this, but I hope that she has heard the message from all noble Lords who have spoken this afternoon: there is a pressing need to build confidence in the Government’s approach. A commitment to putting Skills England on a statutory footing, linked to a rigorous reporting regime, would be a helpful step in that direction.
Lord Ravensdale (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register, including as a chief engineer working for AtkinsRéalis and as a director of Peers for the Planet. I shall speak to my Amendment 36A; I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for his earlier support. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Watson: I am a bit bemused that I was unable to mention Skills England in my amendments, but we are where we are.
The skills landscape in the UK is undergoing seismic change and gearing up for both the industries of the future and the energy transition. In my engineering business, we are recruiting as fast as we can to deliver the transition in clean energy that is currently working its way through the economy. Renewables, carbon capture, nuclear, hydrogen and grid expansion are all seeing bottlenecks in terms of the skills availability in the UK to deliver the Government’s aspirations in this area. Of course, net zero is much broader than just the energy system. It is interesting to note, perhaps, the success that we are having in reskilling engineers from other industries. For example, we have recruited from Dyson many engineers who have fallen victim to the recent job cuts there and reskilled them to work on clean energy projects. They have gone from designing vacuum cleaners to designing nuclear reactors—no problem.
In 2021, I worked on my first Bill, which became the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022. Following the excellent work of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and others, the Government agreed to include a climate duty in local skills improvement plans; this was a great step forward. Although that climate duty is very welcome for the development of LSIPs, what we have seen to date is quite a piecemeal approach in that area. I set out some of the issues with LSIPs at Second Reading, including the need for a greater, systems-level join-up of these plans in order to avoid duplication and ensure consistency.
At the heart of this is the fact that we are currently without a national picture of how the UK can prepare workforces to close the skills gaps related to our net-zero targets; to seize new net-zero opportunities; and, crucially, to address the challenges posed by transitioning from high-carbon sector roles, for example in the oil and gas industry. That last point is crucial in maintaining public support for this agenda.
Some really good work has been done at a sector level, which I think we can work from. I highlight the excellent work done by the Nuclear Skills Taskforce, which resulted in the National Nuclear Strategic Plan for Skills. Crucially, it recognised that a tailored approach to the UK regions was necessary; as a result, we now have a number of new regional skills hubs for nuclear that co-ordinate approaches across regions, all tied together through an overarching strategy. We can learn from that. In the Midlands, we are planning to expand this regional hub approach more broadly across clean energy. One of our offers to the Government includes working to set up regional skills hubs and to provide the skilled workforce that will be so important if we are to maximise the opportunity from the energy transition. But we do need that national plan.
It reminds me in some ways of the commonality here with how we are implementing clean energy. We have local area energy plans rolling up to regional plans and the national plan, which is the Strategic Spatial Energy Plan. In the same way, we need that roll-up through the skills system, as also brought out by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in his excellent Amendment 31.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)
My Lords, in speaking to amendments in this first group, I wholly recognise the point made by noble Lords that this is about the importance of accountability and reporting, and I begin by reassuring your Lordships that the department, in this legislation and all the work we have done so far, takes transparency, accountability and reporting very seriously, including to Parliament. As the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, said, I was accounting to the Industry and Regulators Committee just this morning on the inquiry that my noble friend Lord Blunkett referenced. Alongside my honourable friend the Minister for Employment, hopefully we both demonstrated cross-government working and gave a considerable amount of detail on a range of issues that have been raised during the course of this debate and were raised last week as well. In addition, the Government have today published the Get Britain Working White Paper that noble Lords have referenced.
I will just say, in response to the points made by my noble friend Lord Blunkett about the name of the Bill, that I remember, back in 1997, sitting on the Bill Committee for that piece of legislation. I was not clear at the time that the name had been as significant as my noble friend suggests, but I know that what was included not only in that legislation but in the commitment of that Government to make progress was what made such a difference to the education system under the leadership of my noble friend and that Labour Government.
All noble Lords have complained about how difficult it was to talk about Skills England, while talking at length about Skills England. Nevertheless, I would argue that there is a lot of information already in the public domain. In less than three months, this Government announced Skills England and ensured its first public report was delivered, which talks a lot about many of the questions that noble Lords have rightly identified as important: where are the current skills gaps; what will be the role of Skills England; how will Skills England work across government and with other stakeholders, including employers, trade unions and others? That was in less than three months after the start of the Government.
But we take accountability and reporting seriously and, as noble Lords have said, Amendments 18, 23, 31 and 36A, in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Storey, Lord Knight, Lord Blunkett and Lord Ravensdale, and Amendment 36 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, all touch on that issue.
Through this legislation specifically, as we discussed last week, functions currently held by IfATE will be transferred to the Secretary of State, who is already accountable to Parliament. This fundamental accountability to Parliament naturally includes the exercise of any functions that are transferred from IfATE through this legislation. However, I understand that we need to go further than that to reassure noble Lords about the public accountability of Skills England. These functions, having been transferred to the Secretary of State, will be exercised by Skills England where appropriate.
As already discussed, we intend for Skills England to operate as an executive agency of the Department for Education. I emphasise that we are establishing Skills England as a new arm’s-length body, not as a department within the DfE or, as one noble Lord suggested, in some corner of Sanctuary Buildings. In establishing it as a new arm’s-length body, the department will adhere to the requirements set out in guidance published by the Cabinet Office, which provide the highest standards of corporate governance. Once set up, Skills England will report on its functions and performance in publicly available documents. In response to several noble Lords who argued for Skills England producing an annual report, I absolutely commit to that. In response to the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, I assure her to the extent possible that equal care will be taken with that report to ensure that it is rigorous and accurate.
I can go even further than that. A sponsor Minister within the department will be accountable to Parliament on all matters concerning Skills England, including setting the policy framework in which it will operate. We will ensure that an annual letter from the Secretary of State sets the priorities on which Skills England will focus. That letter will also be publicly available.
As discussed at last week’s session, a framework document will be agreed between the Department for Education and Skills England in accordance with the Treasury’s handbook Managing Public Money. That publicly available document will set out matters including the governance and accountability framework within which Skills England will operate, Skills England’s core responsibilities and how the relationship between Skills England and the department will work in practice, including on financial matters. This will include setting out the responsibilities of the chief executive to the board and to the department. Once in place, the independent board will provide scrutiny of Skills England, ensure that it is operating effectively within this framework and provide assurance functions, as well as leadership and direction.
In response to the specific points made by noble Lords, particularly my noble friend Lord Watson, about progress on the growth and skills levy, first, we have committed to developing the growth and skills levy out of the apprenticeship levy precisely because we have heard calls from business for greater flexibility in our apprenticeships system and on how employers spend levy funds. It is true that fewer young people are starting apprenticeships now; there has been a 40% drop since 2015-16. That is why a key first step we announced back on 24 September was shorter-duration apprenticeships and new foundation apprenticeships for young people in targeted, growing sectors. These will help more people learn high-quality skills at work and fuel innovation in businesses across the country. The reformed growth and skills levy will also enable employers to fund training that meets priority skills needs identified by Skills England.
The noble Lord, Lord Johnson, rightly made an important point about the fall-off that we have also seen in employers’ investment in skills—an issue that we discussed at some length in the committee that I attended this morning. However, it is certainly the case that one of the things that would be likely to encourage employer investment is the flexibility and the listening to businesses that we have already done in order to ensure that the products available respond to the concerns of employers, both for more flexibility and for those changes to apprenticeships that will enable them to use them more freely.
This new offer will also be aligned with our industrial strategy, which I will return to in a moment, thereby creating routes into good skilled jobs in growing industries such as construction, digital and green skills. Skills England is currently engaging on the details of the growth and skills levy, and we expect to be able to say more about that when Skills England has completed that engagement in the spring next year.
I move on to the reporting requirements that the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, included in her Amendment 36, all of which I consider to be important to be in the public domain. Much of what the Secretary of State would be required to report on as a result of that amendment, however, is already publicly available, or will be available as a result of the establishment of Skills England. I hope that I can provide some reassurance to noble Lords about that. Skills England will consolidate different sources of data and insight to inform its assessments of national and regional skills needs, which it will publish regularly. As I have already alluded to, the shadow Skills England published the first such assessment in September this year.
Skills England will also publish further analysis, including the delivery of a standardised taxonomy for the UK and mapping of education pathways to understand the most common routes into priority professions. The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, is right to say that it is important to bring greater clarity for learners about the appropriate pathways and routes. It will continue to provide published assessments of skills analysis as needed in support of the industrial strategy and the growth and opportunity missions.
Alongside Skills England, the Department for Education publishes a comprehensive catalogue of data. There are currently 11 statistical summaries available relating to further education and a further 119 datasets publicly available to explain the statistics. These include the Employer Skills Survey, which provides information on the skills challenges that employers face within their workforce and when recruiting, the nature of any training provided, and awareness and involvement in various initiatives and programmes. They include apprenticeship data that includes starts, achievements and participation, as well as breakdowns by age, sex, ethnicity, subject, provider and geography, and they include statistics on the employment, earnings and learning outcomes of further education learners in the year after completion of their qualification, including national and regional breakdowns available, and are split by the level and sector subject area of qualification.
Given the significant amount of data already published and Skills England’s role as the single authoritative voice of skills analysis and its publication of data and insights, placing an additional requirement in statute on the Secretary of State to report on a long list of different skills metrics is not necessary. We are taking action through Skills England to ensure skills, data and insight are better used to identify skills gaps and to help determine how they should be addressed. We have been clear from the outset that this is central to its role within an improved skills system.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I listened with great interest to what the Minister said and will read Hansard carefully—particularly her comments about accountability and accessibility to all. But, at this stage, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Addington
“Report: effect on other Government departmentsWithin six months of the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a report on the impact of this Act on the remits of all government departments.”Member’s explanatory statement
The amendment requires the Secretary of State to lay before Parliament a report detailing the impact of the Act on the remits of all government departments.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, noble Lords will not be surprised to find this amendment in this group, which basically says, over and over again, “Tell us what you’re going to do in this new structure”. It starts by saying that, when the new structure is in place, we will find out how it will relate to the rest of government. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, tabled an amendment—to which I put my name—that mentions the departments. Either amendment would do, but, starting with government, at least government can talk to itself quite easily—or it should be able to. We all know that it does not often happen and that there are different agendas, but it should be able to happen. Other amendments in the group track different groups in a similar vein: they all want to know how we will structure this new arrangement for skills, which is necessary for growth going forward.
There is not much point in going on because, as the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare—who is a contributor to this—pointed out, everybody is in agreement that we do not have enough knowledge. When the Minister answers on these amendments, can she tell us how the Government intend to bridge this gap? If we just say that it is all published somewhere, that will not really do it. It should be published in a place where we can find it out and get hold of it, so that Parliament can discuss it. That is what we are about here.
I hope that, when the Minister responds, she will have an answer that addresses this basic point. We do not know how this body will relate or how it will work, and we do not know how to monitor it. We also do not know how to raise when something goes wrong. Everything goes wrong at some point or does not work as well as it should. I hope that, by having reports coming backwards and forwards, we will have a way to get in, see where the problems are, allow government to change it and allow the agenda to happen. Having said those words, I hope the Minister will give us a favourable response and I beg to move.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I have Amendment 20 in this group, and I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Hampton and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for adding their names to it. I apologise for any repetition that may creep into what I say.
The Labour manifesto states that Skills England will
“bring together business, training providers and unions with national and local government to ensure we have the highly trained workforce needed to deliver Labour’s Industrial Strategy. Skills England will formally work with the Migration Advisory Committee to make sure training in England accounts for the overall needs of the labour market. And we are committed to devolving adult skills funding to Combined Authorities”.
My Amendment 20 would require the Secretary of State to report on how it has engaged with these and other bodies in discharging the functions transferred under the Bill. Specifically, it includes the industrial strategy advisory council, since the industrial strategy will provide the overall context for skills policy. It includes the Migration Advisory Committee and mayoral combined authorities, in line with the commitment made in the manifesto. It includes employers through the industry sector skills bodies, as well as the employer representative bodies responsible for developing the 38 local skills improvement plans across all areas of England. It includes education and training providers at all levels, which will need to deliver the skills identified as needed. It also includes other government departments, most of which will have their own skills needs and challenges, as well as trade unions and the devolved Administrations.
Like others, the amendment seeks to spell out the tasks that Skills England should undertake by requiring the Secretary of State to report on them. Taken together, all these reporting amendments underline the breadth and extent of these tasks, from taking over IfATE’s existing functions—which it seems to be performing pretty well—to defining new technical education qualifications and defunding existing ones, and to a wide range of new strategic tasks requiring close engagement with employers, other government departments, local and regional bodies, and trade unions. The only omission I can find is Uncle Tom Cobbleigh.
I cannot help thinking that it might be better if the issues on which we are seeking reports from the Secretary of State were embodied in the Bill. The crucial purpose that the Bill seeks to promote—developing a skills system that will more effectively identify the skills we need and match them with the skills we produce through our education and training systems—will not be reliably met by abolishing IfATE and setting up Skills England as an agency within the Department for Education, with a hugely broad and important remit but no statutory basis and limited scope for parliamentary oversight.
As I have said, I strongly support the concept of Skills England as the key to addressing this purpose, but the Bill seems a somewhat underwhelming first step to establishing it on the right footing. Despite the Government’s laudable desire and commitment to tackle the systemic skills challenges we face, I am not convinced that it will—or about how it will—avoid the fate of so many unsuccessful previous attempts to resolve them.
I hope we may find a way on Report to encourage the Government and the Commons to think about whether the Bill should more clearly spell out the status of Skills England, ideally through a government amendment, as suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in his remarks on the previous group. Much of what the Minister said was extremely encouraging but none of it is in the Bill, which is where I would like to see at least some of it.
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 27 in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran, to which I add my support. It would require the Secretary of State to consult LSIPs, mayoral combined authorities and other relevant employer-related groups on the introduction and number of technical education qualifications before exercising her powers under the Act. Such consultation is vital to ensure that any technical education qualifications introduced align with local and regional skills needs—one of the priorities of Skills England—to ensure that the workforce is equipped with the skills required to support the improved economic growth that we all want to see.
I recognise that Skills England has the potential to play a crucial strategic and co-ordinating role in bringing together local and national skills agendas—the Minister touched on this in her comments on the previous group—but I again come back to the fact that the approach set out in the Bill, in terms of the centralisation of powers in the Secretary of State, jars with the Government’s stated intention that Skills England will
“bring together business, training providers and unions with national and local government to ensure we have the highly trained workforce needed”
to ensure that our regional and national skills systems are meeting skills needs. I am afraid the approach set out in the Bill raises questions that the Minister is hearing time and again around whether we can be truly confident that this is the approach that will be taken when there is nothing in legislation or out there to ensure that that happens. As the Learning and Work Institute has said, it is important that Skills England must
“not be primarily a creature of Whitehall”.
I hope that the Minister can set out again, in a bit more detail, how Skills England will engage and involve local areas, local leaders and employer groups from the outset; and the mechanisms that will be developed to ensure we can have confidence that Skills England will effectively and consistently ensure, through the technical education qualifications introduced, that our regional and national skills needs are met.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 28 and 29 in my name. Given my noble friend the Minister’s comprehensive and extremely thorough response to our debate on the first group, I will try not to fall into the trap of once again appealing to the Oscar Wilde agency that cannot speak its name. If we are to have a whole-system approach—the White Paper on getting people back to work, which was published today, mentions this—and we start with ensuring both that there is joined-up thinking in government and that that is translatable in terms of relationships with business, then we need to be reassured that we are clear on where decisions are being taken. Again, I mentioned this in our debate on the first group.
I declare an interest in this group because I have some interest in a major infrastructure project at the moment. The excellent contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, on the first group highlighted the issues around net zero and other environment-related issues, but there are major problems for us as a nation, as we know. HS2 has set us back. In this country we tend to look at what we are bad at rather than what we are good at, so we will obviously be affected by what has taken place with HS2 and by the massive mistakes that have been made, but there are other major infra- structure projects—some of which, in the nuclear industry, have been mentioned—where success has been substantial.
I had the privilege of going down to a college in Somerset to talk about Hinkley Point. I was deeply impressed with what has been done there but there seems to be a mismatch between the overall picture—the holistic picture, if you like—and the minutiae. I have written to my noble friend the Minister so I do not expect her to deal with this matter in detail this afternoon but, whatever we call boot camps in future and whatever immediate requirements on the ground are to be met by something such as one, if the decisions on funding them are to be devolved, how should an infrastructure project covering a substantial geographical area—as well as a sectoral one—deal with them?
I have another interest because, on Friday, I have the pleasure of initiating the new learning resource digital centre at the Northern College for Residential Adult Education. There are only two left in the country, and one is at Wentworth in Barnsley. That project has been funded because of the local schools improvement plan and the partnership that is arisen from it in terms of the digital needs of learners through lifelong learning. The reason why I am raising this and have touched on boot camps is that there is a real danger that, in our enthusiasm for devolution—I am an enthusiast for it—we start to create joins that did not exist. The Northern College has survived only because the elected Mayor of South Yorkshire has so far managed to find the resources but it was not possible to find resources joined up with West Yorkshire, which has students at the college because it is very much on the edge of South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire but does not fall within West Yorkshire—so it is not West Yorkshire’s concern any more.
With the best will in the world, the devolution that we are engaged in could disable unique things, where there is limited provision available and a holistic approach is difficult to achieve if people are not collaborating. With this Bill and the new executive agency, it would be possible to join things up if we knew where decisions were taken. It would be possible, if we accepted Amendment 29, to make sure that departments across government think and work together in order to ensure that the department responsible for housing, say—whatever it is called these days—understood what was needed to ensure that workers had a green card to get on site in the construction industry and be able to do the job.
Somehow, we have to put the bits back together while we are doing devolution where appropriate, either regionally or sectorally, and ensure that we do not by default end up with the department and Skills England, which will be part of the department, not being clear about who is doing what. In the example I gave in relation to infrastructure projects, it is not yet totally clear. I hope that, by raising the issue, we might be able to clarify it, but, at the moment, the embryo Skills England body will have to refer that to the department because nobody can give me an answer.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 30 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, partly because—I remind the Committee of this—I worked for City & Guilds for 20 years. I was working for it when national vocational qualifications were introduced—1990, I think—precisely to reduce the complexity in the qualification system. There are times when one feels that one has been around too long, but that was exactly it.
Those qualifications came in with levels 1 to 5 in order to be a simple way in which people could understand practical qualification levels. Levels 6 and 7, covering managerial and degree-level subjects, were then introduced as well. The qualifications were called “vocational” because we always wanted to include craft qualifications as well as technical ones. I worry now about what is happening to the encouragement of craft qualifications, which are vital to the economy of the country. I am not suggesting that we go back to NVQs again—they had their day and they went—but it worries me that memories are so short on this. It is a complex system because anything as complex as the myriad variations of employment inevitably will be so, but having a simple way in which one can measure levels of expertise seems to have some advantage to it.
This made me wonder how much discussion there has been with the awarding bodies. City & Guilds has been around for well over 100 years, as I say. Obviously, apprenticeships have been around since the Middle Ages, but I am not suggesting that we go back to then to find out what they did with them. The BTEC has been around for at least 50 or 60 years, I think. There is a mass of expertise there, yet they do not seem to be referenced or involved; I wonder why this is because they have some very useful skills to offer to this Bill.
I just felt that I needed to go down memory lane when I saw that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, had referred in his amendment to reducing
“the complexity of the qualifications system”.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I added my name to the important amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare. I was fascinated to hear that he actually read the Labour manifesto; that is very impressive. I also support my noble friend Lord Addington’s amendment.
It is quite important that the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, and the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, mentioned mayoral combined authorities—the noble Lord called them pan-regional partnerships, which I had not heard before—and local skills improvement partnerships. Can the Minister tell us how those will feed into the department or how she will consult them?
Lord Ravensdale (CB)
My Lords, my amendment follows on nicely from what the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said earlier. He put it very well: devolution is really good and something that we can all support, but it creates joins that we then have to knit back together. We have to consider carefully how we do that knitting together, which is what my Amendment 36B is aimed at.
I shamelessly copied Amendment 27 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, which I support, in order to do this. However, I made one slight tweak to include the regional perspective, which I mentioned in our debate on the previous group, so that pan-regional partnerships are consulted; that refers to partnerships such as the Midlands engine and the northern powerhouse.
At Second Reading, I set out my concern that local areas that are not part of a combined authority or have other devolution deals could lose out under the proposals that the Government are putting forward. I listened carefully to the Minister’s response at Second Reading, which allayed some of my concerns, but I would like to test this issue in some additional detail.
Taking the Midlands, where I live—I live in Derby—as an example, following welcome devolution in recent years, we are now blessed with two really good combined authorities. We have the West Midlands Combined Authority and, as of recently, the East Midlands Combined County Authority. Although these combined authorities cover areas of the west and east Midlands, they account for less than half the population in the Midlands region, which is around 11 million people.
As I said at the start, this highlights something of a problem with the devolution agenda. The combined authorities have been successful at working with governments to unlock additional funding for their areas, but this has meant that those living outside combined authorities have sometimes been left behind. As an example, for many years, the East Midlands has lagged behind the West Midlands on many indicators, for example when we look at transport spend per head or public investment per head of population. This will be partly remedied by the new East Midlands Combined County Authority, but many areas of the Midlands are not covered. I am concerned that the same pattern will follow with skills, so the question is: how will Skills England ensure that the approximately 6 million people in the Midlands who do not live in a combined authority area are considered?
The Minister has stated that Skills England will consult regional bodies but it would be helpful for her to clarify how that governance structure will operate; that is the subject of my amendment. Pan-regional partnerships such as the Midlands engine are set up to consider these regional issues. They would be well placed to pull together those plans and to co-ordinate combined authorities and other areas of local government in order to ensure that regional skills needs are met; they could also act as a focal point for regional skills needs in working with Skills England.
In this way, the Government can unlock the benefits of an integrated regional skills approach, flowing up from local areas to the regions and to the national view that Skills England will have, and ensure that no areas of the regions are left behind or inadequately represented. The Government could also benefit from the powerful data capabilities of pan-regional partnerships such as the Midlands Engine Observatory. This would align with the approach I set out in the previous group on regional skills hubs and the work already ongoing there. The pan-regional partnerships are helping to facilitate those regional skills efforts. It would also be a means of achieving the join-up of local skills improvement plans that the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, referred to on the previous group.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I was just looking through my noble friend Lord Blunkett’s Amendments 28, 29 and 30, to which I added my name. I am sure noble Lords will be aware that, since Skills England was announced, the DfE has been using a pretty coloured diagram in five sections to describe the planned functions of the new executive agency. One of the sections says that Skills England
“identifies priorities for and shapes technical education to respond to skills needs”.
Having done that, it will need to update the necessary technical standards and work with sectoral industry bodies to develop them. Indeed, the Government will need to set out which functions currently with IfATE will be delegated to sectoral organisations and regional bodies. That is what Amendment 28 seeks to achieve.
My noble friend the Minister said in Committee last week that there needs to be “a sectoral approach” to the way that skills are developed across the economy. Of course, that is right. With that in mind, it is necessary that the Government’s plans for the powers that they anticipate will be required are set out, and this amendment would facilitate that.
Another of the sections in that DfE diagram says that Skills England will ensure
“national and regional systems are meeting skills needs”,
explaining that this will entail:
“Working with Mayoral Combined Authorities, Employer Representative Bodies, and other regional organisations to align national and regional systems with each other and with skills needs”.
All that seems fairly straightforward, but it is not clear how Skills England will achieve that without the necessary powers and some resources. We do not as yet know what these might be, so it is important that criteria for national skills priorities are set out and that the expectations of departments other than the DfE are made clear. My noble friend the Minister stated on several occasions how important the effect of joined-up government will be for the involvement of a wide range of stakeholders. Amendment 29 offers the opportunity for that to be spelled out.
Finally, there is more than a little uncertainty as to how the plethora of qualifications to be transferred will be subject to oversight. My noble friend Lord Blunkett has covered this, but I will simply say that qualifications at levels 3 and 4 are crucial in allowing young people the opportunity to build their skills in an environment in which they are not intimidated by unrealistic expectations or other barriers to entry, as has been the case too often with apprenticeships. The unfortunate tangle—let me put it no less kindly than that—that we currently have involving the introduction of T-levels and the consequent often rash and sometimes reckless defunding of some BTECs must not be allowed to happen with the transfer of the many essential qualifications validated by IfATE in its short lifetime.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 27 and in support of Amendment 28 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. I start by noting that I support very much the spirit of the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and the aspiration of the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, although I have a certain sympathy with the Minister in trying to actually deliver on that.
My Amendment 27—I thank my noble friend Lady Evans of Bowes Park for adding her name to it—aims to ensure that the Government’s strategy is up to date and relevant for local areas and that the Government do this by consulting the relevant bodies. I suggest local skills improvement partnerships and mayoral combined authorities although, in his Amendment 36B and his extremely helpful, clear and practical explanation of it, the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, raises the relevance of other groups and the importance of making sure that we do not miss out significant parts of the population as we try to aggregate and understand these local views.
What we are trying to do is to balance technical education qualifications that can be tailored, to a degree, and that best support the needs of a local area, with the ability to aggregate and use the data and intelligence from them to inform national policy. That needs to then feed into an ability for the Government and those to whom they devolve their powers to understand where providers are delivering efficiently on these plans and where they are not, identifying gaps and seeking to address them.
I also want to speak to the importance of the Government setting out how they intend to delegate these powers that are being centralised. As my noble friend Lady Evans said, what the Government talk about and what is actually happening in terms of centralisation rather jars, so I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, has brought this forward through his Amendment 28. I do not think anyone is suggesting to the Minister that this is an easy task—if it was easy, somebody would have cracked it already—but it is clearly a very important task and the more she can say about how these different groups will interact with Skills England and how there will be lines of communication from the local to the national and back again, the more confident the Committee will feel.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, we have had a good discussion on this group of amendments about the importance of ensuring that there is both appropriate engagement across government and improved coherence of the qualifications system, alongside the challenges of ensuring that we get appropriate local and regional input into our skills system while maintaining some coherence across it.
The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, is right that some of these issues around devolution are not neat government, as I think I said in a committee this morning, but they are nevertheless important in ensuring that local employers can contribute and there can be differentiation depending on different needs in different parts of the country. I will return to that as I address the amendments, but I wholeheartedly agree that it is very important that we are clear about the way in which a range of different stakeholders will be engaged. Some of this is already very clear; other aspects—I will be honest—will be part of the work of developing Skills England in the building of those relationships.
I turn to Amendment 19 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and Amendment 20 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, regarding Skills England’s work with key bodies, in particular government departments. It is really important that we are able to work collaboratively with a whole range of different partners. Extensive work is already under way across departments to ensure that skills sit at the heart of joined-up decision-making across government.
As I probably said on the first day of Committee— I usually say it when talking about skills—Skills England and our improved skills infrastructure will play a key role in supporting the skilled workforce needed to deliver the Government’s five missions: driving economic growth, breaking down barriers to opportunity, supporting our NHS, delivering safer streets and the clean energy transition. Therefore, it is crucial that there is a cross-government approach and input into improving our skills provision.
Skills England will work closely with the industrial strategy advisory council. The chair of Skills England will sit on that council and, although I accept that that is not sufficient on its own to ensure join-up, it is an important signal. It will work closely with the Migration Advisory Committee, because it is important that we identify how to understand the analysis of where migration is needed as well as understand what more we need to do to boost the domestic pipeline of skills development. It will also work with the Department for Work and Pensions to ensure that the Government have the analysis and advice needed to inform a coherent approach to the labour market. The publication of the Get Britain Working White Paper, which we touched on, is an important example of that joint working.
In order to ensure that Skills England’s first report was informed and took in this need to look at skills needs across government, the report was informed by a skills audit across government departments. The cross-government approach will also be driven forward through the regular mission boards, which bring together Ministers from across government, helping to break down departmental silos and ensure a strategic approach to our mission priorities. Together, these connections are creating a coherent approach to skills, migration and labour market policy.
Amendment 27 was tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and Amendment 36B was tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale. Regarding consultation with contributors to local skills improvement plans on the introduction and number of new technical education qualifications, it is my view that local skills improvement plans are playing an important role in giving employers a voice in this area. When I was on a visit last Friday and heard from FE principals, one in particular had feared that the development of LSIPs would be just another quango, but she was actually finding it useful to have that engagement with local employers.
Mayoral combined authorities also have an important role to play, using the elements of skills funding that are devolved to them and their convening power, to bring together a clearer view of regional growth needs, through the regional growth plan, and to work alongside local skills improvement partnerships—as well as the other initiatives announced today in the Get Britain Working White Paper—to build a coherent approach to the labour market and to skills development at a regional level.
The assessment of skills needs set out in the first report by Skills England—published in September, as I said—drew strongly on evidence from LSIPs. Skills England has already begun to engage and gather evidence from mayoral combined authorities, employer representative bodies and others on skills needs. This will inform decisions on where standards and, therefore, technical qualifications or apprenticeships are required.
Several noble Lords talked about the challenges of devolution, as I suggested at the beginning. Supporting a more joined-up approach to decision-making on skills at regional and national levels will be central to Skills England’s role, putting the bits back together, as my noble friend Lord Blunkett described it. I accept that there is a challenge, as the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, identified. While there is a very clear remit for those areas that are mayoral combined authorities, those that are not have less devolution of skills funding. However, the Government are preparing a devolution White Paper and we will want to encourage further devolution. We will also want to support local authorities in carrying out their role to input into skills discussions in those non-mayoral combined authority areas. I share the noble Lord’s interest in this, living as I do in the Midlands, in an area without a mayoral combined authority.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, the Minister has made many encouraging statements about how the system will work. I still do not entirely understand why none of this can be in the Bill and why we are totally reliant, it seems, on the Secretary of State for Education as the only point of accountability to Parliament or indeed anybody else. It seems that something is missing here in terms of how Parliament in particular can hold Skills England to account.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I went on at some length in my response to the previous set of amendments to spell out what the accountability mechanisms to both the public and Parliament will be for Skills England, both directly in its publication of an annual report and, via the sponsoring department, to Parliament. In respect of specific amendments, the concern is that what we are trying to do here is create a strategic body that brings together the data analysis and insights with the ability then to inform efficiently, effectively and agilely—if that is the proper word—the development of occupational standards, assessment plans and the technical qualifications that employers tell us they need. Creating legislative requirements in advance of it being able to do so will, the Government believe, limit that flexibility, when we really intend to improve it. That is one of the criticisms that employers have made of the current IfATE process.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I have two points. First, if I heard correctly, the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, was asking why none of that could be in the Bill. Secondly, what the Minister just said might be a starter for 10, for the drafters, on what could go in the Bill. Of course, if you are incredibly precise about exactly what would be reported on, that limits you, but if something in the Bill says that this spirit will be aligned, it retains a degree of flexibility. With the level of flexibility that the Bill now affords the Government or any future Government, flexibility trumps accountability squarely, as the Minister has heard. I wonder whether she could reflect on that.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I understand why the amendments are formulated as they are, but most of them would create not just the requirement to describe but a condition that would be inserted into the process and that would therefore limit the flexibility and speed with which qualifications and occupational standards could be developed. I contend the suggestion that there is no public or parliamentary accountability in the way we are setting up Skills England. I went through at some length the routes through which both of those forms of accountability will be delivered to Parliament and, more widely, the public—while conceding the point about the requirement for an annual report, for example, and outlining the accountability through the sponsor Minister to Parliament to account for the progress and success in a whole range of areas that noble Lords have talked about.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, as nobody else wants to come in, I will try to bring the discussion to a close. I think the Minister effectively just opened up what the consideration is. I remember saying, in the briefing that the Minister courteously arranged for us, that she would be testing our ability for probing amendments here. I think we have come up with a reasonable pass grade on that. We have found out that, yes, there will be some reporting, but it is complicated, we do not know exactly where to find it and somebody new coming to the field might miss it. That happens all the time. Do the right people know about it? Do you have to be an expert to find out about it? That is one of the problems we have in going through this.
Before I withdraw my amendment, I will say that, if you do not allow us to get at this information easily, certain things will be missed. That is a guarantee. It tends to be that things are missed that it may even be helpful for the Government to address and correct. I hope that, by the time we get to the next stage, the Government will have had a little more time to think about how they can start to address this, because we all wish that Skills England—or what becomes Skills England, or the dark secret that is Skills England—becomes known to the public and functions properly. We just need to know, because that is what we are here for. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Barran
“Report: approval of new technical education qualifications Within six months of the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a report on mechanisms for employers to apply for the approval of new technical education qualifications and to appeal the removal of any technical education qualifications.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment clarifies the route employers will take to approve new technical education qualifications.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, in moving Amendment 24, I will also speak to my Amendments 25 and 26. As we heard on earlier groups, there is a lot of concern among experts in the sector about how the Government’s plans will work in practice and whether the proposed changes in the governance of the skills sector will result in confusion and delay—obviously to the detriment of the Government’s growth agenda. My amendments seek to bring clarity to this confusion.
My Amendment 24 seeks to place a duty on the Secretary of State to explain to employers the way in which they will be able to approve new technical education qualifications and appeal where qualifications are planned to lose funding. It is, obviously, essential that employers know how to get new qualifications approved so that our qualifications can remain up to date and relevant to the needs of businesses, and that the Government can receive the input from businesses on what skills our economy is lacking.
My Amendments 25 and 26 seek to address the delays that will happen when these powers are transferred from IfATE to the Secretary of State, as laid out in the impact assessment that the Government published alongside the Bill. The impact assessment lays out details of how the creation of end-point assessments and the approval of new technical education qualifications will both be delayed. In order to minimise the impact that this has on students who are seeking to undertake a technical qualification, students who are midway through their course and businesses that are seeking to introduce qualifications, I felt it necessary to encourage the Government to give details as to how long this delay will be and the steps they are taking to ensure that it is as short as possible. It is important that businesses and students have certainty about the extent to which any delays will impact them. These amendments propose a timetable, when the Bill is passed, by which the Secretary of State must report on how long these delays will last and what the Government are doing to ensure as minimum a disruption as possible to the qualifications and to the students seeking to undertake them.
I hope the Minister will agree that these amendments are not controversial and may come back on Report with government amendments that look like mine. I beg to move.
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)
My Lords, I rise briefly to support Amendments 25 and 26, tabled by my noble friend, because the policy impact assessment also notes that mature students, learners with disabilities, ethnic minority learners and disadvantaged learners are likely to be disproportionately impacted by the delays she is talking about, which is obviously of concern. I just wanted to add that, because clarity on the delays, as would be addressed by the amendments of my noble friend, would be extremely reassuring, particularly when one looks at the groups that the Government’s policy impact assessment says may be disproportionately disadvantaged.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, quite rightly, the noble Baronesses have raised the issue of how we can ensure continuity of provision while transferring functions under the auspices of this Bill.
I reflect that coming back 14 years—probably 16 years —after the last time when I was responsible for doing any government legislation directly, there are some important improvements in the way in which Governments are expected to lay out the impact of their legislation, with the development of impact assessments. Of course, such things also provide grist to the mill for those who look at them and say, “Well, you’ve identified that there is potential concern about delay, and that must mean that the delay is going to happen”. The point of an impact assessment is that it enables, quite rightly, the Government pre-emptively to identify potential risks that could result from the transfer of functions and property from IfATE to the Secretary of State and think about how those risks can be mitigated. We are confident that that they can be, so I hope I can provide noble Lords with some reassurance about that.
I should also like at the outset to repeat assurances that I provided to noble Lords at last week’s session. We will ensure that the practical transition of functions from IfATE to the Secretary of State will be designed so that standards or apprenticeship assessment plans that are in the process of preparation or approval at the point of transition will continue. Similarly, approval decisions for technical qualifications that are part way through the process will also continue. It is our intention that employers and other stakeholders and, as rightly identified by the noble Baronesses opposite, learners perceive no interruption. The transition scheme that is being developed will be designed to ensure the minimum possible disruption for stakeholders.
I note that Amendments 25 and 26 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seek to place on the Secretary of State a duty to lay before Parliament a report on the timetable for the creation of, respectively, endpoint assessment and new technical education qualifications. As the noble Baroness said, Amendment 24 seeks to place on the Secretary of State a duty to lay before Parliament, within six months of Royal Assent, a report on mechanisms for employers to apply for the approval of new technical education qualifications and to appeal the removal of approved status for existing technical qualifications.
Skills England will undertake ongoing engagement with employers and other key stakeholders to identify skills needs that are not being met through the existing suite of technical qualifications and apprenticeships. This engagement will help identify where new standards should be produced and where existing standards and/or apprenticeship assessment plans should be updated, ensuring that the system responds quickly. With that in mind, Amendment 25 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, would, to some extent, frustrate the Bill in enabling more effective prioritisation of the preparation and updating of apprenticeship assessment plans. We intend for the functions transferred to the Secretary of State to focus on where there is greatest need for a new or updated plan, informed by feedback from employers and other key stakeholders.
We also anticipate that plans in development at the point at which the functions transfer will continue and be finalised by the Secretary of State. Standards approved by the Secretary of State will be published, as is the case in the current system, as the basis for new technical qualifications to be developed. Awarding bodies will then, as now, submit applications for new technical qualifications to be approved in line with standards and reflecting employer demand. IfATE is currently responsible for the approval of technical qualifications; its function is being transferred through this Bill. Responsibility for decisions on the withdrawal of approval from technical qualifications will also transfer through this Bill, which includes a duty to publish information about matters taken into account when deciding whether or not to withdraw approval.
We would argue that Amendment 26 is also unnecessary as it would duplicate existing transparency, which will occur as a matter of course through the Secretary of State’s routine engagement with Parliament and through the establishment of Skills England as an arm’s-length body. As I have outlined previously, Skills England will report on delivery in line with standard practice, including as set out in its framework document and in a manner consistent with other executive agencies.
I turn to Amendment 24 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. Placing on the Secretary of State a requirement to report on mechanisms for employers to apply for the approval of new technical education qualifications and to appeal the removal of approved status for existing technical qualifications is unnecessary. It would give employers an additional role in the approval of technical qualifications, which would risk undermining their central focus on highlighting skills needs and, as appropriate, preparing standards that reflect those needs. Where there was clear evidence of continued employer demand, it would be unlikely in practice that approval status would be removed—unless, for example, other significant issues had been identified in relation to the successful delivery of the qualification.
I hope I have provided some assurance that we do not expect a delay due to the transfer of functions in this Bill. We have already put mitigations in place and we will, in relation to the approval of—and the withdrawal of approval of—technical qualifications, continue to follow the current arrangements.
Lord Hampton (CB)
Before the Minister sits down, can I ask for a bit of clarification here? The Minister has described Skills England as an arm’s-length body a couple of times today. I apologise if everybody else knows this, but can you have an arm’s-length body within a department? I thought that the definition of an arm’s-length body was that you cannot.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
Yes, you can. There is a whole range of different types of arm’s-length bodies. Executive agencies are one such type. They are governed by a governance document—the framework document that I have previously described—and by a set of requirements and relationships that I would be happy to spell out for noble Lords.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for highlighting the impact on the groups and communities that could be most affected by delays, as set out in the impact assessment.
I am honestly a bit puzzled by the Minister’s response. She said that my Amendment 24 is unnecessary, but employers are telling us that it is necessary. There is obviously a gap between what the Minister knows and what is being understood, so the more clarity the Government can bring to those specific points, the better.
Similarly, the Minister spoke very confidently about minimal delays—my words, not hers—in approving endpoint assessments and new qualifications. We do not want to frustrate the Government’s plans, but if it is so clear to the Minister that this is a very low-risk area then perhaps she can put that and the exact timescales she expects formally on the record on Report.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I commit to providing to the Committee more detail about the process for transition and some reassurance, which I suspect I have not sufficiently provided, on how that will mitigate some of the risks identified in the impact assessment.
Baroness Barran (Con)
When the Minister does that, which would be much appreciated, I request that, in addition to more detail about the process, she includes a sense of timescale, which would be most helpful. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)
My Lords, I inform the Committee that, were Amendment 37 to be agreed, I would not be able to call Amendments 38 or 39 by reason of pre-emption.
Clause 9: Power to make consequential provision
Amendment 37
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment removes the power for consequential changes to be made by delegated legislation to Acts other than those specified in the provisions of the Act.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, Amendment 37 in my name, which is supported by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, would remove the Government’s power to introduce regulations that make consequential changes to Acts beyond the scope of this Bill. Like so much in the Bill, this represents a classic Henry VIII power. As we have highlighted elsewhere in our discussions on the Bill, it facilitates an Executive power grab and gives far too much power to the Secretary of State, who, as I have said before, may be someone with no interest or understanding of colleges and further education. We are lucky in our current Minister and I hope she lasts a long time, but Ministers can be moved without rhyme or reason.
The power in this clause would undermine parliamentary scrutiny and allow significant changes to be made without proper oversight. The amendment is a small safeguard in a potentially dangerous Bill. I also support Amendments 40 and 41 in this group in the name of my noble friend Lord Addington. I beg to move.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment, inspired by what might be described as the crusade of our much-missed former convener, Lord Judge, to root out unjustified Henry VIII clauses wherever possible. I considered putting down an amendment to make it clear in the Bill that the power under this clause could be exercised only where the provisions to be made by such regulations relate specifically to functions previously exercised by IfATE that are to be transferred under the Bill. However, Amendment 37 from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, addresses this point in a more straightforward way, so I have willingly added my name to it. I look forward to hearing from the Minister why she feels the power in Clause 9 to be necessary.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I hope to be as quick as I can. My amendments suggest that everything should be under the affirmative procedure when it is reported back. That is just to make sure that Parliament gets a real look and a chance not to have those reports buried in the huge piles of SIs that are brought forward. We should guarantee that we are all looking at what happens in this new body.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, despite the Minister’s dismissal of my concerns about the Henry VIII powers at Second Reading, I have brought two amendments in this group to make sure that the scope of those powers is less broad.
Amendment 38 seeks to restrict the Secretary of State’s powers to amend only the Acts that are already listed in Schedule 3, so that both Houses can appropriately scrutinise the way in which these powers are being used. Surely it is the job of the Government and the department to identify all the Acts to which these powers apply. I cannot see the need for such a clause, unless the Bill has been rushed and the Government are worried that they have failed to capture all the legislation that requires amending with the abolition of IfATE. If this is indeed the case, perhaps there is more redrafting to do than we have already attempted.
My Amendment 39 is focused on the same issue but, rather than restricting the Secretary of State’s powers specifically, it simply removes the power to amend future legislation. Again, I note that all Bills which name IfATE as the body for apprenticeships and technical education have already been passed, so there should be no need to amend future legislation, unless the Government have plans to refer to IfATE in any future legislation that they intend to draft. Given that this seems unlikely, I am once again left with the question as to why this is necessary. I urge the Minister to reconsider this.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, I begin on this group of amendments by reassuring the Committee that the department recognises and takes very seriously the important role that Parliament has in scrutinising consequential amendments. For this reason, we have made every effort to identify all the consequential amendments to primary legislation that are necessary, and to include them as Schedules 1 and 3 to the Bill.
Despite those extensive efforts, there is a risk that in the future we may uncover Acts which need amending because of provisions in this Bill. I reassure the Committee that this is a very limited and narrow power and that any use would be subject to parliamentary scrutiny. We have carefully considered the power and believe that it is entirely justified in this case. In fact, the inclusion of similar powers as a safeguard is well precedented in legislation. Our delegated powers memorandum has been considered by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which has confirmed that there is nothing in the Bill which it would wish to highlight to the House.
Therefore, the amendment, and Amendments 38 and 39 in the name of the noble Baronesses, Lady Barran and Lady Garden, would remove the delegated power to make consequential amendments to primary legislation. If this were accepted, it would be unnecessarily burdensome on Parliament and require greater amounts of parliamentary time should we uncover Acts that needed minor and genuinely consequential amendments to be made as a result of the Bill. It would, of course, require all those changes then to be made through primary legislation.
Depending on the nature of the issue, and to go back to the previous group of amendments, we might see an increased risk of disruption in the functioning of the skills system for learners and employers. I hope it might provide some reassurance to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, although perhaps not to the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, that previous legislation, including legislation passed by the previous Government, has included a power such as this because it provides that important safety net should future amendments be identified.
The power is limited to consequential amendments to previous Acts and Acts passed later in the same parliamentary Session. It does not encompass all future legislation, as the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seemed to suggest. The amendments would limit consequential amendments to those Acts specified in Schedules 1 and 3 to the Bill, but our approach in relation to amending Acts passed later in the same Session is not unusual, notwithstanding the challenge from the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. We have reviewed legislation and identified that including a power to amend primary legislation passed in the same parliamentary Session has been done in at least 20 other Acts since 2020. It may well be that the noble Baroness has now seen the light, but I suspect it is more likely that this is a sensible, narrow and reasonable provision to put into this legislation. That was why the previous Government decided to do it at least 20 times.
Amendments 40 and 41, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, would require regulations making consequential provisions that are subject to the negative procedure by virtue of Clause 9(5) to instead be subject to the affirmative procedure for a period of six months. As is customary, any consequential amendments to legislation other than primary legislation, which would be subject to the affirmative procedure, will be subject to the negative procedure. The limited and uncontroversial nature of such changes means that this procedure provides sufficient parliamentary oversight while enabling changes to be made without unduly taking up parliamentary time.
Consequential amendments to secondary legislation are not included in the Bill as the power to make or amend such legislation is held by the Secretary of State by virtue of the passing of that legislation previously. We have already identified the amendments to secondary legislation that are needed; these are of a similar nature to those included in Schedules 1 and 3 to the Bill. There is a strong precedent for delegated legislation under the negative procedure to be used to make consequential amendments to delegated legislation. Therefore, the amendment seeking affirmative resolution is not necessary.
I have set out in a letter to the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, the chair of the Constitution Committee, how the clause is inherently narrow in scope as it is limited to making amendments that are genuinely consequential on the provisions in the Bill.
Therefore, for the reasons that I have outlined, I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, will feel able to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, the noble Baroness is doing a mighty job in trying to convince us that this is a helpful Bill. Sadly, some of us still have concerns but, for now, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.