Pub Companies

Debate between Adrian Bailey and Baroness Primarolo

Wednesday 9th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Adrian Bailey (West Bromwich West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker—

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. I beg your pardon, Mr Bailey. We need to be sure what we are talking about. The original Question is on the Order Paper, since when an amendment has been proposed, as on the Order Paper. The Question is that the original words stand part of the Question. In my haste to get the debate started, I omitted to say that.

[Mr Bailey]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will do my best to ensure that I know what I am talking about.

I welcome the debate and thank the Secretary of State for his letter to me yesterday and for his statement to the House. I want to clarify why we have reached this position and to give the House the history of the matter. There have been four Select Committee reports on this issue since 2004, and the one produced by my predecessor, the hon. Member for Mid Worcestershire (Peter Luff), was key to our reaching the current position. It stated that the industry was not making the progress to which it had previously committed itself to making, that it should be given a further year and that, if it had not made sufficient progress after that time, we should introduce a statutory code that would include provisions for the free-of-tie option and the open market rent review.

Apprenticeships

Debate between Adrian Bailey and Baroness Primarolo

Monday 19th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bailey]

I was not going to make that claim. In fact, the Minister raises an important point. I would not in any way decry the upskilling of existing workers, and Train to Gain was very successful in doing that, but whether we want to call it “apprenticeships” is debateable. Perhaps we do, perhaps we do not, but statistics cannot be traded with the previous Government’s apprenticeship statistics when such people were not included in them. That is my essential point. I am not decrying in any way the benefits of in-work training, but there is a genuine issue with measuring the enhanced employability of people who have undergone that training and the amount of money invested in it.

Let me consider the Government’s approach to the education maintenance allowance. One reason for scrapping it was the alleged deadweight cost of the fact that many young people would have taken courses irrespective of whether that allowance had been paid. The same sort of detailed scrutiny must take place of some of the post-24 training to ensure that we are not spending a vast sum of money—there is a lot of money involved—on providing people with training that they would have had anyway. A secondary issue is the fact that if we can retain the level of skills enhancement we have already and refocus some of the money that would be spent on it on other areas, we might well be able to enhance other apprenticeship provision in other areas, which is equally important.

I could go on for a very long time about this—[Interruption.] But not today. My Committee will carry out a detailed inquiry, but I conclude by saying that we should get away from the rhetoric of apprenticeships and talk about general skills. There are a range of skill packages for different groups of different ages and different skill levels and we must ensure that they are supported rather than talk all the time about apprenticeships—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order.