Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 12th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise to find myself in the slightly unusual position of warmly welcoming a government amendment. I thank the Minister for the meeting on Friday and the Bill team for the briefing that she provided. I welcome her to her post and offer congratulations to her predecessor.

I do not know whether this is the result of your Lordships’ House making the case so clearly in Committee, of the young climate strikers who were in Parliament Square after our debate finished, or of the young people who have so clearly been delivering the message that they want climate change and the nature crisis at the centre of every aspect of their education—perhaps it is a combination of all those—but this is a real demonstration that campaigning works.

I congratulate all the Members of your Lordships’ House, led by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who have helped to get us to this point. Had there been space, I would have attached my name to all these amendments, but I agree with all the other speakers who said that, except for Amendment 64, they have now been supplanted by the government amendment.

I will make one small point about how this government proposal should be interpreted. Sometimes, when we think about green skills, a lot of hard hats and yellow jackets are involved. Green skills and preparing to tackle the climate emergency we are now in takes a lot more than simply technical and physical skills. We also need an enormous amount of social innovation.

I was just thinking about my visit to Lancaster after the very big floods up there about six years ago. A couple of years later, I heard how local communities had got together, preparing flood resilience plans and for the next flood, which is very likely coming. Those communities had organised together to make sure that vulnerable residents would be rescued, cared for and supported to make sure that they were ready to do whatever they could to stop the floods. All of that was the community organising. This might not be what you think of as green skills, but it is absolutely crucial to adaptation and mitigation of the climate emergency.

This brings me to Amendment 64, which is about a “Skills Strategy”. Lots of people were talking about green jobs, but we need to think much more broadly than just about jobs. We are also talking very much about preparing our society for living in an age of shocks.

I finish by again commending the Minister and her team. We are making great progress but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said, the next step in the scale of our progress will be when we open a government Bill and the climate emergency and the nature crisis are addressed in Committee and we can then say, “Well, how do we make this better?”

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, as a member of the Parliament Choir I am happy to join the chorus of welcome for the Minister in her new role, which is at least as important to the issues I care about as her previous one. I also thank her for helpfully including me in one of the very many meetings she has obviously been having in the last few days, along with members of the Bill team. I shall speak mainly to the Government’s Amendment 49 and very briefly in support of the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman.

I do not quite know what to make of Amendment 49, despite the Minister’s helpful introduction. I very much welcome what she said about the Government’s support for independent training providers, but I remain concerned that they are sometimes viewed mainly as gap-fillers in the training system, as being of secondary importance to colleges and other statutory providers, and as having an unfortunate propensity to abandon their learners, which, in reality, happens only very rarely. As a result, they often seem to be at the back of the queue for the allocation of government funding for skills training, and they may have to cut the amount of training they are able to offer.

I understand that Amendment 49 aims to ensure that conditions specified for inclusion in the list of relevant providers allow some flexibility in determining whether they have been met. This is welcome if it gives independent training providers some wiggle room in meeting conditions, but less so if it results in judgments—for example, on the quality of the student support plans the Minister mentioned—which could have a degree of unpredictability or subjectivity.

Apart from that, independent training providers have continuing concerns about the implications of the list and the conditions for inclusion in it, such as the suggested requirement for a form of professional indemnity insurance which does not currently exist, and about the fees and other costs involved, which may restrict access to the market for smaller providers. West Midlands Combined Authority has also expressed the concern that mayors of combined authorities may be prevented from funding providers they deem suitable but which are not on the centrally approved list.

I welcome the Government’s intention to ensure that this measure does not impose an unreasonable barrier to market for training providers while protecting the interests of learners, and their commitment to continuing to engage and consult with a wide range of stakeholders. I hope the Minister can give some reassurance that the discretion allowed by this amendment will be used wherever possible to facilitate inclusion for ITPs in the list, and that their contribution will be duly recognised in the new arrangements under the Bill, including within LSIPs and in the allocation of funding for skills training.

Finally, I add my support particularly to Amendments 17 and 64 in this group, in the name of my noble friend Lady Hayman and others, which require the Secretary of State to report on how each published LSIP takes account of any national skills strategy and aligns with UK climate change and biodiversity targets. This is the sort of joined-up thinking needed to ensure that the different parts of the new system operate in a coherent way to deliver the skills and training needed by the nation as a whole, as well as in the local areas covered by LSIPs.

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Moved by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

9: Clause 1, after paragraph (d) insert—
“(da) the food system,(db) ecosystem management, and”

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to move Amendment 9, which could be described as a friendly amendment to Amendment 8; I hope its mover will agree. Proposed new paragraph (db) has already been supplanted by government Amendment 6, but I will speak to proposed new paragraph (da) on the food system, because the kind of shortages that the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, identified in areas such as engineering and technical skills are also very much reflected in our food system.

We recently heard the Prime Minister say that it is not the job of government to feed people and that it is up to business, but I hope the Minister will acknowledge that it is crucial in this age of shocks—where, as we see from our empty shelves, we cannot be guaranteed that the market will feed us—for the Government to see that we have the skills available right through our food system. The obvious area for this is farming, but we must also think about training people, in schools and communities, how to cook; that is why I used the term “food system”, which is something the Dimbleby report identified. We have many faults in our current food system which need to be fixed, and lack of skills is certainly one.

It is now obvious that the market on its own will not guarantee food security; it has also not guaranteed a healthy supply of food, and we need to think not just about the supply of calories but about a healthy food supply and healthy food preparation. Of course, we have the problem that, in our current food system, one in six workers is not paid enough money to be food-secure themselves. Upskilling the food system and providing those skills in local plans is absolutely crucial. I beg to move.

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I hope that my remarks have provided your Lordships with some reassurance on the important issues about how local skills improvement plans will work in practice, how different key stakeholders will be involved in their delivery and how the delivery of our local and national plans will be linked. I therefore ask my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe if she would be able to withdraw her amendment, and other noble Lords not to move theirs.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, three days off my second anniversary in your Lordships’ House, I occasionally think that I am on top of procedure and am then comprehensively disabused of that fact. I thank the noble Lord the Deputy Speaker for his advance guidance on this matter; I was not aware that my modest little Amendment 9 would put me in this position, for which I feel particularly ill equipped, given the distinguished nature and level of experience of so many people contributing to this debate.

However, I shall do my best, briefly, and begin by thanking the Minister for her comprehensive wrap-up of this long group. If we look at the group’s nature, it makes some kind of sense despite its large size. Amendments 8 and 9 are addressing the gaps in the matter—the skills needed—and, as the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, said, we need to prioritise the jobs that need doing. Many of the other amendments—I particularly highlight those from the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, and the right reverend Prelate—address the need to ensure that all humans in our society are able to contribute to the fullest extent, to meet the needs of our society and develop their own human potential.

I should declare my position here as a vice-president of the LGA and the NALC. I will briefly address the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and Amendment 11. I agree with him that there was lots of criticism of the apprenticeship levy, but where there is hope is that this is working through the local level and local steps. I had a debate with the Minister in her kind meeting last week about which decisions should be made at a local level and which at a national level. There is a green economic theory about bio-regions; different regions have different skills needs, and Amendment 11 addresses the way in which local government fits together in making these decisions.

In saying that briefly, I have one final sentence. I am going to keep to the battle by saying that skills are not just about jobs; skills are about providing the individuals in our communities with preparation for life in our difficult world. I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 9.

Amendment 9 (to Amendment 8) withdrawn.