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

Debate between Lord Addington and Baroness Wolf of Dulwich

Report stage
Wednesday 5th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when a framework Bill comes before the House, you expect to have a series of amendments such as these, asking for more information. I thank the Minister for answering some of those questions, but the fact of the matter is that this is still a framework Bill. I hope that we will get a little more detail when she responds to this group, but we really need a bit more information before we assess a piece of legislation. I thank her for what she has done, but I hope she will take back to her department that the original approach on this really was not good enough.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I echo much of what has been said already, including appreciating everything the Minister has done to meet some of the points and criticisms raised in Committee. However, Amendments 1, 2, 4 and 5 are important because it is very important to have employers and representative bodies in the Bill.

I would like to look back in history to the period in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, when apprenticeships in this country were in raging decline and the quality of much of what was being called an apprenticeship was very low. All three major parties have been involved in turning that around, and we are in a much better place than we were in the early 2000s, let alone the 1990s.

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

Debate between Lord Addington and Baroness Wolf of Dulwich

Committee stage
Thursday 21st November 2024 Grand Committee

[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”.