Apprenticeships

Andrew Gwynne Excerpts

Thursday 10th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nick Boles]

Yes, and this provides an opportunity to put on record my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), who is unfortunately not able to be with us today, but who is the Prime Minister’s adviser on apprenticeships. He has a great deal of experience in business of leading major technology projects. He has been immensely helpful in working with the Skills Funding Agency and officials in my Department to create a system that will be simple and user-friendly for businesses, providing them with absolute transparency over how much money they have contributed and what they can spend it on. This will also enable training providers to continue to take responsibility for ensuring that the training they have promised to deliver is in fact delivered.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

As the Member responsible for the Apprenticeships and Skills (Public Procurement Contracts) Bill in 2013, let me welcome the Government’s conversion to using the benefits of public procurement to secure additional apprenticeships. I note that it was Conservative Back-Bench Members who talked out my Bill when it was going through the House of Commons. The Minister said in his statement that the public procurement rules now stipulate that bidders for Government contracts must demonstrate their “commitment to apprenticeships”. Precisely what does that mean?

[Nick Boles]

I would like to pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman’s leadership on this issue. Sometimes Government Members take a while to be persuaded of the merits of an intervention, but once persuaded, we are absolutely determined to fulfil it. The hon. Gentleman is right to ask about the mechanics. We have been advised—not least by Terry Morgan, the chairman of Crossrail, who led the way by instituting a similar sort of expectation for all subcontractors to Crossrail— that given the variety of public procurement such as infrastructure projects and services, it was dangerous to impose a single mechanism of either a number of apprentices per £1 million-worth of spend or a percentage of employers on a project. We thus decided to mix and match to make the right requirement depending on what the procurement process is. We will be transparent about how we are going to achieve that.