Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[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.