Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, following on from the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, I feel I should declare my FE experience, which was shorthand at Wagga Wagga College in Australia and a very brief, and perhaps best glossed over, experience of farm mechanics a long time ago.

I will start with some older history, however: human history, or rather prehistory. Some 400,000 years ago, in the East African Rift Valley, the human species faced a huge threat: a massive ecological change. The very foundations of their world had shifted. Archaeological evidence shows that those ancient humans—individuals just like you and me—developed new skills and technology, and used their creativity to develop new forms of communication, all remarkably quickly. That is an account drawn from a major study in the journal Science Advances, published last year. I hope your Lordships’ House will see the parallels with what we face today.

We face a climate emergency, the state of our nature is dire and our current growth-driven economic model has left us in a crisis of poverty and inequality. Massive change is needed—yet, for all the Bill’s talk of the future and the need for transition, neither it nor the policy summary make any mention of climate or nature. There is only a brief mention of them in the impact assessment. Your Lordships’ House has found itself in this situation with multiple recent Bills, and other Bills have left here only after the addition of at least some reference to climate and nature. I hope that we can do that again. As the country that is the chair of COP, with a Government who like to attach the words “world leading” to “green”, it is quite astonishing that we should find ourselves in this position again.

I point noble Lords to the excellent Peers for the Planet briefing on these issues, which goes into far greater depth than I have time to do today. However, I will tick off some points. First, the global economy has to be green, and, even in the Government’s own terms, there is a significant competitive advantage in enabling UK workers to upskill in green areas. Secondly, the Government have, or are promising, a whole range of sector-specific strategies, but we see no sign of how these will be joined up with the local skills improvement plans. Thirdly, we get from the Government a very narrow idea of what future skills are needed—there seem to be a lot of hard hats involved and, of course, the ubiquitous digital skills. Of course we need a huge amount of improvement in those areas, but equally urgent are skills in sustainable land management, nature-based solutions and ecosystem management—hard-toed boots perhaps, but caked in healthy life-rich soil rather than hard concrete. Fourthly, we see no way in which the Bill feeds into the need for a just transition for individuals and communities, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, powerfully illuminated.

Young people are demanding that their education include far more information about climate and sustainability. They understand that it is central to every part of their future life—so why are the Government not able to consider this in every part of education in our society? The sustainable development goals to which the Government signed up and the systems thinking that underlies them should be in every part and level of education.

That brings me to some points about what is in the Bill. I begin with the expert remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox of Newport. I would associate myself with everything that she said but focus particularly on one point: she said that the local skills improvement plans need to be coproduced by communities, politicians, educators, students and businesses. From the Government, we are hearing very much a sole focus on business, and we know that the loud business voices are likely to be the big ones, which are not the major part of our economy. As the excellent University and College Union briefing on this Bill notes, the educator voice is missing from the Government’s plans. I want to focus on and extend the noble Baroness’s point about students, for if students are not at the heart of designing courses, they are unlikely to meet their needs, not just for a narrow set of technical competencies but for life in a fast-transforming world.

We now come to the big issue: what is education for? The majority of today’s speakers have focused on employment, but we all need lifelong learning and continuing education in varying forms and fitting various places in the Government’s classifications, from level 2 upwards. We need to function in society as community members, voters, parents and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, noted, users of the financial sector. In a society with an epidemic of mental ill-health, we should not underplay the value of learning new skills, finding new places in society for public health, as the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, noted.

The Minister said in her introduction that 34% of working-age graduates are not in high-skilled employment. I really hope she will acknowledge that that does not mean they are not using the skills they obtained from that education. Employment is not the only place those skills are needed. That is where I find myself, considerably to my surprise, in agreement with the noble Lords, Lord Willetts and Lord Johnson. Setting further and higher education against each other, even in opposition to each other, and suggesting that funding should not be available to those with higher qualifications for so-called lower-level courses further hardens what is already an extraordinarily hierarchical system.

I fear that the Minister, in response, may say I am drawing the brush too widely, that these are matters for other Bills and other days. I go back to the first words of the Bill:

“A Bill to make provision about local skills improvement plans; to make provision relating to further education”.


Education is not and cannot be just about jobs or serving the economy.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 6th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I declare an interest as editor of The Good Schools Guide and a member of City & Guilds Council.

I welcome the local skills improvement plans. A strong link between local business and local skills provision for local people is a very good idea; it will build a set of relationships which will be long-lasting and much valued. However, how exactly do the Government think this process is going to work? I hope that the Minister will be able to give us an outline of how the Government now see the local skills improvement plans actually working. Are they intended to be comprehensive, covering the entire needs of an area, or are they sector-specific, as I understand some of the bids for the pilots are? Are they intended to be inclusive of independent training providers? Will the local FE college be the dominant force or just a part? Is it intended that funds will be channelled through the local skills improvement plans? If they will, at what sort of level and with what sort of scope? How do the Government see this working in terms of local relationships? How exactly will the local skills improvement plans be held to account for their results? Will the decisions they reach be easily open to challenge, and if so, how? What is the interface locally with careers information advice and guidance and the Careers & Enterprise Company? There are a lot of things I would like to understand better about the direction in which the Government are intending to take us.

Whatever those answers, there is one big thing missing from the Bill: the interests of potential students, and that is what my amendment addresses. I want to see a reference to what local people need, from their point of view. The young people in Eastbourne, where I live, are pretty average—they are not in any way lacking compared to the national average. Business in Eastbourne, however, which is a coastal community, is typically very skewed. There are some areas in which we are very strong—hospitality, obviously, building and allied trades, education—but when it comes to cyber-security, IT generally, engineering, writing, creative careers, and management and science-based careers, all of which go on in London, there is really not much around. This is not surprising or unusual, but many of these are the growth areas of the economy. It is absolutely in the best interests of our people here—not only the young people, but career-changers and others—that they have good access to the skills necessary to those parts of the economy, not least because it will encourage such businesses to move down here or, in the new fashion of remote working, employ people here. That way, we as a community will have access to the more prosperous, higher growth, higher wage parts of the economy that we do not currently have.

The interests of individual people, potential students, are not congruent with those of employers and providers. In the interests of our people, we must offer training locally in the main growth areas of the economy. I do not mind whether it is through independent training providers or remote training, but it must be substantially good.

I will not speak at length to the other amendments in this group, many of which I have a lot of sympathy for, except to mention that in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, on getting people a base level of skills in maths and English. That is absolutely key to raising the level of the economy locally. Somebody locally must have responsibility for that. We need something better than GCSEs here. GCSEs are aimed at the requirements of an academic curriculum; what we need is a test aimed at the base skills needed by employers. Those are two different things. We test English competence extremely well when students come to this country or want to be employed as doctors, for example. We have skills-centred tests aimed at establishing competence. We need something like that for our own people in English and maths, so that everybody has a chance of getting through and we do not continue to suffer the comparable outcomes system, which condemns 40% of our young people to having substandard English and maths qualifications. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the very clear introduction to this group from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. Having listened to his explanation, I rather regret not having attached my name to his amendment, as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, did. He really has nailed the key problem with this Bill and the reason for many of these amendments: the Government’s focus on employers, presumably existing employers, fails to explain how a local skills improvement plan can actually help an area to improve. By focusing on potential students, Amendment 1 really helps us to think about how people might also want to get the skills to be part of communities, to run community groups, to be involved in cultural activities or to be voters or parents. All of these are areas in which people might want to improve their skills. It would also help communities that are subject to the Government’s levelling-up agenda, which are often lacking in social capital. We are talking about skills that pretty well every community is short of. Any community group that any noble Lord has ever known has had to find a treasurer—someone who is prepared to take on doing the books, even if there is not much money in those books. These are skills that every community needs, but they might not actually be a business need.

However, I shall speak chiefly to Amendment 2, which is in my name. It tries to get at another aspect of the Bill addressing the so-called economy by adding in to consult in the skills improvement plans

“potential employers, start-up businesses and the self-employed.”

Looking at recent figures from the pre-Covid time, there were 5 million self-employed in the UK, up from 3.2 million in 2000. They are a very major part of our workforce and, if they are running a business, what they may need to help them find work, and improve the work that they find, is not necessarily going to be reflected by the employers in a town. I think here of a very old-fashioned term, perhaps—the “company town”.

A few years ago, I visited Barrow-in-Furness where the top employer, by a scale of many thousands, is of course the shipyards. The next two biggest employers, of around 1,000 each, are the largest supermarket and the local hospital. Barrow-in-Furness, as I said when I was there, clearly needs to diversify its economy and develop things such as local food-growing and tourism businesses, through all kinds of objectives. How are those three top employers going to provide advice on the skills needed for that?

At the moment, the Bill feels really half baked. I am in a difficult position in speaking before many of these amendments have been explained, but I support the sentiments behind them all. I shall pick out a couple briefly. As the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said about the two amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker—particularly, perhaps, Amendment 81, which has broad support—the focus on the attainment gap is crucial. There are many people whom schooling has failed in the past; they need support with the right kind of courses, the right way to improve and lift their skills, not just for their jobs but for their lives.

I also particularly support Amendments 20 and 21, both of which address, in different ways, distance learning. We are not going to be able to put into every village and town every course that might be of use to everyone. It is crucial that we have, in the Open University, a very successful and important structure; something that people can use to advance their knowledge, as well as their skills, and get into the practice of lifelong learning. That is such a crucial skill that we are going to need for the coming decades. The number of amendments tabled to this clause really shows that the Government need to go away, having listened to today’s debate, and think about how they can improve not just the Bill, but their thinking about how we provide the skills needed for a very different age.

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 11 and 81. I also support the first three amendments spoken to, and I am grateful for the support of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for my amendments. I declare interests as a fellow and former chair of the Working Men’s College, chair of the education department’s stakeholders’ group and other relevant interests as in the register.

The rationale of my amendments is that this potentially most useful Bill will not have the national impact it might, unless more provision is made to get a very large number of young people and others to the starting block. Amendments 11 and 81 are designed to do just that. I am most grateful for the support of the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. The reason they are not speaking is entirely due to the complexity of arrangements, which I fervently hope will be simplified in September. They all tried to put their names forward. I also thank the Association of Colleges for its helpful advice.

At Second Reading, I set out the fact that more than one-third of young people in secondary school do not achieve the requisite GCSE grades in English and maths to qualify for entry to the further education and training so enticingly proposed in the Bill. I asked the Minister what provision had been or could be made for this very large number who, for various reasons, among which lack of innate ability has not been cited, could not access the educational opportunities in the Bill. She was not able to give me an answer, nor did one appear in the letter she helpfully sent to Peers after Second Reading, and nor have I had a reply to a request I made to her team for an answer. As this is unusual for the noble Baroness, I conclude that there is no answer and there are no such comprehensive arrangements in place.

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Moved by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

4: At end insert “and the United Kingdom’s international and national legal commitments to biodiversity targets,”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would ensure that when considering whether post-16 technical education or training is “material” to a specified area, consideration must also be given as to whether such future skills, capabilities and expertise align with biodiversity targets.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is a very great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who is doing such spectacularly fine work personally and through Peers for the Planet, of which I am also a member. I rise to move Amendment 4 and to speak to Amendment 10, and I shall also speak in favour of all the others in this group.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, referred to the important report released yesterday by Onward on green jobs. I have scratched out a lot of what I was going to say about that, as the noble Baroness covered it comprehensively, but it is worth restating the conclusion that she highlighted: net zero, the Government’s legally binding target, is not deliverable without a massive increase in relevant skills.

Speaking second in this very large group, with the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, having outlined the detailed structure of her amendments and with others yet to explain theirs, in the interests of time I will speak generally to express support for all these amendments, many of which I have attached my name to. I particularly thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, and the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for their work, which I have stepped behind to support. I note particularly Amendments 3, 9 and 25, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, which have attracted broad cross-party and non-party support, including from the government Benches, and to which I would have attached my name had there been space. Then I will get to the detail of Amendments 4 and 10, which appear in my name.

All these amendments, in different ways and in different sections of the Bill, seek to mainstream attention to the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis in the skills agenda in every community. I am using the word “mainstream” because where we are today is reminding me very much of the mid-1990s, when I was working in international development. There was a great debate then, when bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF had discovered the importance of women to societies and even—shock-horror—economies. The great debate was whether to separate women’s programmes or whether women’s issues, concerns and rights should be put into every programme. It feels like, in terms of the environment, we are somewhere in that stage of debate now. We have got to a situation where recent Finance Bills, after lots of hard work in your Lordships’ House, have finally included at least the climate emergency. But I am afraid that the lack in this Bill of that, of biodiversity and of our busting of planetary boundaries in multiple directions is a demonstration that the Government still really do not get it, which is particularly disturbing for the chair of COP 26.

So I was thinking about this group and wondering how I might help the Government to understand, and how to build that understanding into action. I thought about that magic phrase “the economy” and how often we hear from the Government that everything needs to be done for “the economy”. I want to suggest to Ministers and civil servants that, every time they hear themselves saying that phrase or thinking that thought, they put “the environment” in front of it, acknowledging that the economy is a complete subset of the environment and that every single element and every penny is dependent on the air we breathe, the ground we rest on and the soil and water that produce our food. When we are thinking about local economies, we need to be thinking about local environments. To complete the set, we need an understanding that communities—people individually and collectively—and their well-being are the foundation of our economies. This is systems thinking expressed in concrete terms.

When will we know whether we have succeeded? It will be when we no longer have large groups of amendments like this merely introducing climate and other environment goals into Bills. When we move on to strengthening what the Government have proposed, then we will know that some progress has been made.

I have been talking in abstract terms but, thinking briefly about the practicalities of the skills needed, food growing is one obvious and much underconsidered area for climate mitigation and adaptation, looking to the urgent issue of food security. On home energy efficiency, I have referred previously in your Lordships’ House to how the building industry is frantically wondering where it will find the skilled staff that it will need should the Government finally manage to sort out the funding in this crucial area. Engineering, particularly for public transport schemes, is another huge area of shortage.

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)]

My Lords, I have received no requests to speak after the Minister, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, to conclude the discussion of Amendment 4.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I thank everyone who has taken part in this very long and extremely important debate. I will carefully look at what the Minister said about this being covered in other ways and not needed in the Bill, but I think the passion and desire, along with the understanding in the House of the need for systems thinking, is clear. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment now, but this is certainly something we will come back to.

Amendment 4 (to Amendment 3) withdrawn.

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[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

I hope that the Minister will not, in her reply, dismiss this amendment out of hand and say it is totally unacceptable, because I suspect that, as the procedures develop for local skills plans, extra help will be needed. I speak as someone who, for the last 12 years, has had to involve local companies actively in the running of the schools that I have been promoting: university technical colleges. I can assure noble Lords it takes a long time to persuade companies to do this. It takes many meetings, and many companies look on it as a burden and an expense. So there is not a huge number of companies lining up to become members of the employment body.

I hope the Minister is listening to what I am saying and not reading her notes, because I think she would benefit from what I am saying. I suspect that the Government are going to have to change their policy in this respect. She expects the chambers of commerce, where the chambers of commerce exist, to be the employer representative bodies. Could I take her through the complexity of that? First, chambers of commerce will look on it as an extra expense, which it is going to be. They have to balance the interests of their own members as to whether they should listen to the big or small companies, the ones which are expanding or declining, and the ones which are loquacious or silent. The proposals they may make may offend several of their members. So it will involve a series of meetings, and probably visits to the companies. That is my experience from the last 12 years.

I ask the Minister: where there is not a chamber of commerce, who is going to institute the examination to determine the numbers on the local employer representative body? Who is going to do it? Have the Government yet thought this through? Who is physically going to do it? Who is going to then make a list of all the companies? Who is going to know about the companies? Who is going to visit the companies and persuade them to take an interest? Because it is a continuing interest: they will have to appoint somebody to serve on the body, and that is an expense to the company. Are the companies going to get a benefit from this? I have gone through this for the last 12 years, and I do not think the Government have an answer to that.

The Government may find that they need the assistance of local authorities, which know a lot of companies. They may also need the assistance of the LEPs. The LEPs do not appear in this Bill at all, but the LEPs have a statutory duty for vocational skills, and some of them have policies on vocational skills, and they know about the companies in their area, and they know about the companies in several towns in their area. In the Select Committee of which the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and I are members, we took evidence from the North East LEP. A lady called Michelle Rainbow turned up, and she obviously had taken a big interest in education. The North East LEP had a big scheme involving 70 primary schools. The LEPs might have all sorts of schemes the Government do not really follow, or that the Department for Education does not follow or know about, and in secondary education as well. They have this knowledge. Therefore, I hope that the Minister appreciates that there will have to be assistances in the whole procedure of establishing local skills plans. Certainly, the Government should listen to the LEPs in addition to the local mayors and the mayoral authorities as well.

One other voice that has not been heard in any clause in the Bill is that of the unemployed. I suspect that no one who has drafted the Bill in the Department for Education has talked to groups of unemployed young people and nor have many Ministers. The committee that the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and I sit on has now held meetings in Bolton and Nottingham, and this morning in London, talking to unemployed young people. The group that I talked to were six black young men and women, all of whom were unemployed, or trying to get employment, and their voices were remarkable. They answer a lot of the questions raised by this Bill. We asked them all why they were unemployed, and they explained that they had never been given information about employability at their ordinary schools. These are not people who have been to FE colleges and things of that sort. They left their ordinary secondary schools with no understanding of how industry and commerce work and with no employability skills because they had just been doing academic subjects. They were very passionate this morning. They said, “We left with no employer skills, no data skills.” I asked whether any of them had learned about computing in their schools, and they said, “No, we didn’t have lessons on computing at all.” Many of them left with no communication skills, but they certainly developed them in applying for jobs. They have no experience of working in teams, but they are often asked by employers whether they have worked in teams.

These voices should be listened to. If you are replanning the whole basis of technical education in our country, then listen to people like this. They have a voice, they are concerned, and they are the victims of our failure to educate them adequately to get jobs. I hope that the department will perhaps take some knowledge of that. I urge the Government not to dismiss this amendment too lightly because what it proposes is likely to be needed.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, today’s debate has not progressed very fast in terms of groups, but we have covered a great deal of ground and, through the debate, have almost developed a shadow Bill, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, suggested. I agree with much of what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, said, as I often do. It is clear that the structure of the Bill needs to be rethought. One crucial area is the place for local authorities and regional and city mayors in making skills plans, which a large number of amendments in this group address.

Although the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, talked about the economic strategy of the region, I would rather talk about a transformation strategy for a region. Levelling up is about much more than just the economy. It is not even about just the environment and the economy; it is about the well-being and social capital of the region contributing to every aspect of life, the community and family. You might even call it a public health approach to skills and post-16 education. If we are thinking about public health on that broad scale, this is something that clearly needs to be democratically decided. Elected people should be leading the development of skills development plans, or perhaps, as an alternative suggestion, we might want to think about drawing up a people’s assembly approach, something to put on the table at least, and something that the Minister might like to talk about to her colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, because I know that she has had very good experience with such direct, deliberative democracy.

The term “employer representative body” reminds me, very uncomfortably, of local enterprise partnerships. Some noble Lords have spoken of them with great approval and, in some places, undoubtedly some good work has been done, but they are not in any way representative of the people or the community. They are, by definition, the status quo in an area. They are invested in the way things are, in our current, unequal, poverty-stricken, planet-destroying system.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 15th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan. Like her, I will speak briefly in support of Amendments 15 and 33 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal. I agree with the comment on those by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, that the Bill still very much lacks a clear vision of the structure that we are trying to create.

I will speak mainly in favour of Amendment 85 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman, Lady Blackstone and Lady Sheehan, noting that it has full cross-party and non-party support. Indeed, I would have added my name had there been space available to do so.

It is interesting that the last national skills audit was more than a decade ago but, even then, conservation and environmental protection officers were at the top of the list of a growing area of demand. Town planners were also high on the list. Since then, of course, austerity has hit local government extremely hard and, as we were discussing yesterday on the Environment Bill, they are not currently funded adequately to meet their existing responsibilities, let alone their upcoming responsibilities under the Bill, which has undoubtedly had an impact on the demand for jobs.

I note that this debate is particularly timely, given that it comes the day after the release of the Green Jobs Taskforce report, which does at least some of the job that the amendment proposes. Although it focuses purely on the climate emergency, not the biodiversity crisis or the way in which a systems approach shows how these problems link to many of the other issues in our society, it is also very much a report that reflects a business-as-usual-with-added-technology approach, failing to acknowledge the need for economic and social innovation and the skills that go with those. It talks about engineers and construction workers for offshore wind farms and nuclear plants, retrofitters for homes to make them energy-efficient and comfortable and car mechanics servicing electric vehicles and vans. There are many other jobs that we clearly need that are not covered by that.

With this Bill, I find myself thinking yet again that the narrow focus on jobs is a dangerous mistake. The amendment talks about a strategic audit, but what does the country actually need? Thinking of some examples off the top of my head, we need far more gardening skills for growing food and managing the home gardens that will be so crucial to our biodiversity and the survival and thriving of so many of our species. We need community-building skills for resilience and climate adaptation. I think of the city of Lancaster where, a few years ago, I chaired for the Green House think tank a session examining the experience of the disastrous floods there in 2015 and the community response. A training session based on what Lancaster learned the hard way for every community in this land would be a very good idea. For the kind of resilience that the future is going to demand of us—I point noble Lords to the tragic events happening in Germany as we speak—we clearly need community-building skills. The divisions in our society and the social issues that have come to the fore in recent weeks are real barriers to tackling the climate emergency and the nature crisis. Something else very practical that comes to mind is first aid. These are skills that we need for every community and just about every person in this land.

I am not sure that even this amendment is as broad as it needs to be, but it is a good start as an acknowledgment that we need our skills for jobs, at least, in many different areas and we need to think much more broadly in a systematic, comprehensive kind of way.

[Baroness Hayman (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I am glad to have the opportunity to speak in support of Amendment 85 in particular, to which I have added my name.

We had a long debate on the first day of Committee about issues relating to the economy of the future, the new industrial landscape and the overwhelming need to ensure that workers have the skills necessary for the jobs of the future, and that workers who will have to transition from their current employment are given the opportunity to reskill in order to do so. In her response, the Minister was very helpful in assuring us of the Government’s recognition of those priorities, the important role that they will play in future and how they will need to form part of the background—if I can put it that way—to local skills improvement plans.

However, as many others have said already, we do not yet join up the dots in this Bill. We do not respond to the recommendations of the Green Jobs Taskforce, which were just highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, nor those of the Climate Change Committee, which in its recent progress report to Parliament recommended that the Government

“develop a strategy for a Net Zero workforce that ensures a just transition for workers transitioning from high-carbon to … climate-resilient jobs”

and

“integrates relevant skills into the UK’s education framework”.

We do not see the way in which that will be done; nor, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, do we see how we can ensure that local skills improvement plans look to the future, not just the present. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, we do not see how they fit in or how to ensure that national priorities are understood and integrated into those plans in locally relevant ways.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, spoke about the ecosystem for skills and post-16 education and training. I do not think that we can get the ecosystem right unless we ensure that the national priorities—they are accepted by the Government in the 10-point plan, in all their documentation and in the words of Ministers all the time—have a proper way of filtering down, not by framing it as “a man in Whitehall knows best” and dictating what happens at local level but by providing a coherent national framework in which the essentially local work that takes account of place, as we spoke about last week, can be undertaken.

I very much hope that the Minister will understand our need for mechanisms in the Bill to ensure that this national framework is clearly in place, and that it will support and underpin the work that is done at the local level.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I begin by making a general comment in expressing concern about the way in which this Government and others have sought to judge and rank higher education institutions and have directed the Office for Students to do so. I associate myself with the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, about universities being penalised for welcoming students who have succeeded in their school and college studies despite the socioeconomic odds.

I want to add a more general concern about the ranking of institutions by the level of pay or classification of jobs that graduates attain. Education should be for life, not just for jobs. We know that there is often an inverse relationship between the levels of pay in a role and the contribution that it makes to society. An anthropology graduate who goes into community organising, say, might never earn much at all but is making a huge contribution to our society in a highly fulfilling role.

However, it is encouraging to see that the amendments all seek in some way to make judgments fairer, so they are to be welcomed. I shall go through them in turn. Speakers have already concentrated quite a lot on Amendment 63 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and backed by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal. In this context, it is worth pointing to an important report from the British Psychological Society in 2019 entitled Mental Health and Wellbeing in Higher and Further Education. I should perhaps preface what I am about to say by saying that this contains some disturbing material.

At least 95 university students took their own lives in 2016-17—and while the rate of suicide is lower than in the general population, it is a serious concern for the sector—and one-third of students experience a serious psychological issue that requires professional help. Some 94% of higher education providers reported an increase in demand for counselling services. And of course that was in 2019, while all the evidence and anecdotes that we have suggest that the situation is likely to be significantly worse now. The professional report says that all higher and further education institutions should make mental health and well-being a strategic priority. I think it particularly focuses on the need to train all staff and on how to assist them in signposting to the right support. There is also an important note in the report about UCAS needing to update the application process to reduce stigma, removing the need for applicants to disclose mental health conditions as a disability.

Let us think about the practicalities of this. The report cites Student Minds research that found that many academics feel ill equipped to assist students when they encounter difficulties or are approached by them. This is a pretty obvious problem when you think about it: a PhD or postgraduate studies in physics or medieval history do not necessarily equip you to deal with situations that you might face. This has a substantive negative impact on the well-being of academics as well.

I turn to the series of amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, although I am slightly handicapped by the fact that they have not really been properly introduced. I am not going to cover them in great detail, except to note that Amendment 65, which calls for consultation with providers over the way in which these assessments are made, is essential. The assessment needs to be embedded in real-world experience and practical possibilities of what is deliverable.

I come to Amendment 66, also in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, to which I have attached my name and for which the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, expressed support. It seeks to ensure that the OfS reflects in its outputs

“differences in student characteristics, different institutions or types of institution, different subjects or courses, or any other such factor.”

I am drawing here on my experience as a school governor. Of course, in schools, we have increasingly sought to look at what value has been added, acknowledging that students start from many different starting points. That is true at all levels of our school system, but it is also very much true of our higher education sector. A university that caters particularly well to students who perhaps have not had a great experience at school or college deserves to have its successes acknowledged fairly in the assessment.

Amendment 68, also in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, makes the related point that it must

“ensure that the … measure of student outcomes does not jeopardize widening participation for students from disadvantaged and underrepresented groups.”

Finally, I will mention Amendment 70, also in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, which says that

“The OfS must work together with the devolved authorities”.


I somewhat feel that I should have a hymn-book, because I speak on this in practically every Bill that we discuss, but it is clearly in the interests of prospective students and employers that these assessments are conducted fairly.

[The Lord Bishop of Durham [V]]

My Lords, I particularly want to support Amendment 63, but also the others in the group. Just last month, in June 2021, the DfE itself published a report, Student Mental Health and Wellbeing, based on research done before the pandemic. It points out that 96% of institutions ask their students about their mental health but only 41% ask them about their general well-being. It also notes that only 52% of universities would say that they have a “dedicated strategy” for the mental health and well-being of their students. So the DfE’s own report, from last month, highlights that there is plenty of work to be done on universities having proper, dedicated strategies around mental health and well-being—particularly on the well-being side.

We know that Covid has highlighted the issues further, particularly around loneliness. Just today, the head of the OfS, Nicola Dandridge, spoke of her concern that more than half of the student population feels that their mental well-being has not been supported enough this year. I have not had time to explore her comments more fully, but it is notable that she made them today, when we are having this debate.

Well-being has to be covered by a whole range of services, and I note here the value—which you certainly cannot put into legislation—of universities having chaplaincy teams. During the pandemic, the chaplaincy team at Durham University was given an award for being the most important group of people in the university over the last few months. In the University of Sunderland, the vice-chancellor decided that the chaplaincy team should be awarded extra money so that it could do further work in the future, on the basis of how significant its input had been to student well-being during this time. So when we look at mental health and well-being, we need to look at counselling services and all sorts of other support, but it should include the work and role of chaplaincies.

I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, with the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, has raised a really important point in suggesting that this is put in the Bill. The overall well-being of students really matters as much as their academic outcomes. This needs to be known, seen and observed. I also support the amendments, and particularly their probing nature, of the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and the intent of those of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, to look at other social outcomes. They are significant and should be in the Bill.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 21st July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I must first apologise for my absence from this Committee on Monday, particularly to the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, whose amendments I had signed. It was entirely due to an administrative foul-up on my part.

I speak today in support of the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, which in some ways reflects what is happening now in an ad hoc way. Back in 2018, Philip Augar was asked to review what was happening with student fees. In January, we had an interim response from the Government on that, but, according to the Guardian at the start of this month, we are going to get the Government’s full response soon—we are looking at a four or five-year time period, the same as is proposed in this amendment.

What we are hearing about the debate going on behind the scenes before we get that response is talk of tuition fee cuts, a cap on student numbers for certain courses and minimum qualifications, which are all designed to lower the cost to the Government of financing the student loan system. The fact is that, when tuition fees were set at £9,000 in 2012, the intention was to have inflationary increases at regular intervals. But since being raised to £9,250 in 2016, the fees have remained at that level while the real value has declined by 12%. It is notable in this context, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said, that this is an intensely political issue and decisions are very likely to be made in an ad hoc, highly political way.

It is interesting that apparently the report suggests that the Treasury is seeking to directly cut fees and increase repayments, while other parts of government favour more indirect means, such as minimum entry requirements and course caps. We really have to think about that latter approach in the context of the Bill we are debating now; it is focused on the need for more skills and education, yet we are expecting sometime soon a proposal from the Government that will squeeze down and reduce people’s access.

We have to look at where we are: more than £17 billion is being loaned to students each year. The value of outstanding loans has reached £160 billion, and this is expected to be £560 billion by the middle of this century, at 2020 prices. Some 75% of students will not repay their loans. That means half the people in a single generation going through life for 30 years with that weight resting on their shoulders. We are in a situation now where we are stressing the need for this review. Think about Covid; it descended on us and society changed enormously, and in this age of shocks, we do not know what changes will arrive in future.

The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, reflected that the Government would probably not welcome this amendment, because the issue of fees is so difficult and controversial. However, I agree with the noble Lord that this magnifies the need for a systematic, planned, guaranteed measure of review. We could even argue that it would make it easier for Ministers, because by being on the face of the Bill, it would be a review that had to happen, and it would be set in the government timetable.

The practical reality is that what we have now is a fantasy. These are called loans, but most of the money will never be paid back. We as a society need to reflect on the fact that education is a public good, and it should be paid for from general progressive taxation, not weighted on to the shoulders of individuals, in a system whereby those who earn the most can, by paying off their loans fast, repay the least. We need change. The amendment will not achieve that, but it would at least create a pause, a chance to think—indeed, a requirement to think—about what we are doing to our young people and their future.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, for introducing his amendment, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for her reflections—and for her courteous but quite unnecessary apology. The current arrangements for student loans are now quite complicated. A recent House of Commons Library brief gave a lovely timeline of all the changes from 1990, when the first loans were introduced for student support—then at just £420 a year. It then tracked the developments, as loans gradually replaced grants for maintenance, and there was a shift from mortgage-style loans to income-contingent repayment schemes. Then loans for fees started, and some maintenance grants came back.

The big shift came in 2012, when fees trebled and the current system was in put in place. The effect of this pattern showed up when I was chatting recently to a member of our small opposition staff team. She had compared notes with a couple of colleagues in the office, and realised that although the three of them had graduated not so many years apart, each had a different package of debt and repayments.

Part of the reason for the complexity is that the system has so many moving parts. A Government wanting to save money have a range of ways to do it. They can change the size of the original debt, as they did dramatically in 2012. They can change the repayment threshold, as they did in 2016, when they decided to stop tracking earnings and freeze the threshold until 2021—although that went down so badly that they changed it again, not just unfreezing the threshold but raising it to £25,000 from 2018. They can change the contribution period; indeed, Augar recommends raising it to 40 years. They can change the contribution rate. That is still 9% for undergraduate degrees, but loans for master’s programmes were introduced in 2016, and for PhDs in 2018. That rate could now go up to 15% of earnings above the threshold for postgrads. Or they could change the interest rates. Indeed, they are spoilt for choice here: they could change the rate while studying or the rate when repaying, or they could change one or both of the lower and upper thresholds. Each of those changes or combinations would have a different distributional effect.

I take it from his introduction that the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, wants a periodic systematic review, and he made his case for that. But does his amendment mean that changes could be made only then? I suspect that the answer to that might affect the Government’s interest in the idea.

One benefit of the systematic approach would be the opportunity to ensure that factual information about the impact of changes to the system was gathered and disseminated. Does the Minister agree that work is needed to ensure that the student loans system is widely understood? After all, if Governments are to make changes to student finance, it is vital that it is not done by sleight of hand, or by banking on the HE version of a fiscal drag. It is crucial that the differential impact on people with different likely lifetime earnings is made crystal clear. After all, if the state is advancing £17 billion a year to higher education students in England and the value of outstanding loans is some £160 billion this year, the least the Government owe the country is transparency, and a good public debate. Does the Minister agree?

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[Baroness Greengross (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I support the intentions of these three amendments. In essence, they would allow people on universal credit to engage in study without being financially disadvantaged.

The current situation creates a perverse disincentive, whereby those wishing to upskill and gain qualifications that may make them more employable find themselves financially worse off as they no longer receive universal credit payments. Allowing people to study and gain new skills improves their chances of getting off benefits and into employment. Whatever short-term savings the Government make by not paying benefits to people who enrol in training courses, they are lost if the system incentivises people to stay on universal credit rather than participating in education.

One understands completely the desire to limit benefit numbers and, further, to encourage those who can work while studying to do so. However, this needs to be carefully balanced with the need to encourage upskilling at a time when our workforce is changing rapidly—and will continue to do so, in my view.

This is an area that the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education need to work together to solve. Can the Government outline what work has been done to date by both departments on this important policy area? What steps will they take to ensure that universal credit policy is not inadvertently discouraging people from participating in crucial skills training?

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. This group of amendments has already been outlined clearly by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham. To sum up his contribution, he asked how people could better use their time while unemployed than by upskilling. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, said that it would be an absurdity not to encourage the unemployed to improve their skills.

On day one of our debates, we talked a great deal about the need, in our climate emergency and nature crisis, to increase our skills. There is simply so much that we need. People who are unemployed are obviously at a potential point where we can start to fill some of those gaps.

The noble Baroness, Lady Janke, made an important point: that unemployed people are of all ages, from those just leaving school to those in their 70s and beyond who still need, or want, to work. They often have commitments, for example to children, to rent, to a mortgage or to supporting older relatives. We cannot assume that they are just a unit of labour that can be shifted around at will.

What we have seen is decades of wretched economic change in many parts of the country, which has only been amplified by Covid. It is worth looking at a study from the Institute for Employment Studies, published in June. It attempts to explain the current conundrum where we have a recruitment crisis yet in parts of the country there are as many as 10 jobseekers for each vacancy. According to the study, the average number of people across the country claiming unemployment benefit and competing for each vacancy is 2.2, and almost 100 local authorities have five jobseekers going for each available role.

People have to be able to make choices in their own interests and in the interests of the country. Leaving people trapped, applying—pointlessly, they know—for scores and scores of jobs that they know they are not going to get is profoundly dispiriting and damaging. We need to give people the option of finding another path forward in life instead of being trapped in that situation.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken to air these important issues.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham identified some of the major barriers placed in the way of people who want to take up education and training to improve their skills. Did the Minister see the recent report from the Association of Colleges? It concluded that the current social security rules

“actively discourage people from getting the skills they need”—

a point reinforced by the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. The report argues that, if this is not fixed, it will result in

“fewer people in stable and meaningful jobs … slower economic growth … reduced opportunity to meet employers’ skills needs; and … bigger tax burdens.”

It is crucial that government policy is joined up, with skills, employment and social security policy properly aligned. Indeed, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, pointed out, all these must be aligned with our overriding plans to deal with the climate emergency. Amendment 98 in my name is designed to probe whether the Government have any plans to do this, in terms of alignment, by changing the rules on universal credit to support skills development.

Most people who are studying full-time cannot get universal credit. There are exceptions, such as for young people who are doing A-levels or other non-advanced courses and do not have parental support, for those who are responsible for children and for some disabled people with a limited capacity for work. Otherwise, people on UC face the kind of conditionality requirements mentioned by the right reverend Prelate, the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, and others. Specifically, unless they have an easement of some kind, UC claimants are meant to spend 35 hours a week looking for work, and to provide evidence. This can result in some pretty dispiriting things of the kind mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. The claimants are allowed to do part-time education or training, but only if they can fit it in in their spare time—in other words, fit it in around a full week’s job search.

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Moved by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

90C: After Clause 25, insert the following new Clause—
“Assessment of local skills gaps for life skills
Within two months of the passing of this Act, the Secretary of State must prepare and lay before Parliament a means to assess local skills gaps for non-academic skills, including, but not limited to—(a) parenting,(b) budgeting,(c) mental and physical first aid,(d) financial management,(e) practical skills in maintenance and gardening,(f) community organising, and(g) community participation.”

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 90C in my name. I apologise to the Committee that this is a rather late arrival and very large in scope. It arose from reflections on the earlier stages of the Committee’s deliberations about the narrow focus of the contributors to local skills improvement plans, particularly existing employers who are likely to be larger employers. As I listened to that debate, I was forced to reflect on how very old-fashioned and mid-20th century it all felt, even as we were talking about trying to get a wider range of the self-employed and others into the development plans.

We were talking about getting qualifications for work in a very direct, obvious way. Of course, for many roles in society that may still be the case. Brain surgeons inevitably spring to mind—pun unintended—here, but also if you are likely to be, say, a technician maintaining a complicated piece of medical technology, a Passivhaus qualified building designer or a permaculture garden planner, you may go directly to a course and get the job that follows on, but most jobs are not like that, even if we are thinking of this Bill as being only about employment. Most jobs and most lives require a range of technical and soft skills acquired by a mixture of education, training, employment and life experience.

I draw here the example of someone I know from the Green Party—I am going to anonymise this because I did not check with them about using it. They started as a volunteer with a set of technical skills—design skills for leaflets and graphics—but through their voluntary involvement they were drawn into the management of volunteers, fund-raising, administration and management. That eventually led that person into a very different professional job using all those skills. That is what life is like now in employment and well beyond.

On the community side of this amendment, particularly following a decade of austerity, many provisions and services in communities are now provided by volunteers. In the interests of politics, I shall park that to one side while I think about it, but the fact is that often volunteer-run, volunteer-led and voluntarily provided services need people with skills, and with the increasing pension age and the high levels of employment for women, many of the traditional sources of volunteer skills have been closed off. Having been at the centre of a wide range of community groups in some very different communities, I know how deprived, disadvantaged communities, which exist in central London as much as in the north of England, may not have those skills and urgently need them and need local skills providers to be able to help with them.

It is not my intention to press this amendment at this stage. It is a small gesture towards making the Bill about something more comprehensive: skills for life. I hope that the Government will reflect before we reach Report on their approach to the Bill and its very narrow, outdated view of the dividing line between life skills and employment skills, as though they are two separate categories.

My list—I agree that it is somewhat scattergun—includes parenting, which is a skill. One might perhaps include child and older care because those are roles that all of us may well have to fulfil at some stage. Budgeting reflects what we often hear in your Lordships’ House about the need for financial literacy in our increasingly complex world. Mental and physical first aid and practical skills in gardening and maintenance are things that people need in their lives. The last two sections of this amendment—community organising and community participation—focus on the idea of people as part of a community, as all of us are. It is not my intention to press this amendment, but I look forward to the discussion and the Minister’s response. I hope it will be fruitful.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, it has always seemed odd to me that so many of us complete our education with extensive knowledge of maths, English language and literature, history, languages, the sciences and other academic subjects—in my case including Latin and Greek, much to my benefit—but with few, if any, of the skills listed in Amendment 90C from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, nor other rather fundamental skills such as cooking and household maintenance, generic skills such as communications, teamwork and self-presentation, or even typing and map-reading, which may still prove to be not entirely redundant, despite the impact of technology. Yet these are all valuable life skills that schools should be well placed to teach.

One of the skills listed in the amendment, first aid, could even be a matter of life and death. The figures I have, which may not be wholly up to date, indicate that 60,000 people suffer cardiac arrests out of hospital every year in the UK. Almost half of those that occur in public places are witnessed by bystanders, not infrequently children. With every minute that passes, their chances of survival decrease by about 10%, so teaching children quite straightforward first aid techniques at school, such as how to give CPR or use a defibrillator, can literally save lives, as well as being fun for the learners. The many countries in which such teaching is compulsory have significantly better survival rates from shockable cardiac arrest than the UK—as high as 52% in Norway, for example, against 2% to 12% in the UK, depending on where you live.

I will not labour this specific hobby-horse of mine, except to say that, in my view, it is just one of many strong arguments in support of the need for an assessment of current gaps in the teaching of non-academic but highly valuable life skills and how those gaps might be addressed, as suggested in Amendment 90C. I look forward to the Minister’s comments on how that might be achieved.

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I therefore hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is able to withdraw her amendment and takes some comfort from the fact that the Government acknowledge the importance of the kinds of skills she has set out in her amendment and are seeking to address them both within existing provisions in this Bill but also crucially elsewhere in our policy and agenda.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her response and all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate. The contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, made me think of an incident when an old man collapsed outside Sheffield Town Hall, obviously extremely ill. I happened to be the first one to reach him and the first to call an ambulance, but I was very relieved when another passer-by announced that he had first-aid training. I acted as a liaison for the ambulance while he took practical action. It was obvious that most of the bystanders wanted to help but had no idea what to do. I note some figures from 2018 from the British Heart Foundation, which I doubt have improved, sadly: nearly one-third of UK adults were not likely to perform CPR if they saw someone suffer a cardiac arrest.

The noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, mentioned social solidarity. I think that phrase is highly apt. These are necessary skills to glue societies together. I also welcome his comments on arts and culture subjects, reflecting the financial value of the creative industries. I also reflect on the value of these to the quality of life for all of us, to well-being and to mental health. We should value creativity as providing challenging, critical ideas. That perhaps give us an idea of why the Government might not be so keen on these subjects. I also note that we have a huge lack of public art in the UK. We could be doing a lot more to fund that in Covid recovery.

I am pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, acknowledged the way in which skills and training in these kinds of subjects can lead to further study and employment, if not in a direct way. I very much agree with her that decisions about what is needed need to be made at a local level, working with the wider community. This provokes reflections on other debates we have had in this Committee about the role local government and regional and city mayors should have in these local skills improvement plans.

I will go away and read all the contributions carefully, particularly those from the Minister, and will think about where we might go with this on Report. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw this amendment.

Amendment 90C withdrawn.

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[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I am sorry that I am out from the subs’ bench here. This amendment is quite straightforward and an act of unprecedented generosity from the Liberal Democrats because it was a clear commitment in our 2019 election manifesto. It is a practical way of dealing with some of the problems that we are looking at here. We would create a personal education and skills account, or a skills wallet. We can go through the amendment in fine detail, but I think my noble friend Lady Janke will be in a much better position to do that than I will. The principle behind this is that you have a degree of money that you are in control of to help you update or change your skills.

Anybody of my age who looks at the various changes in the work environment will know that you not only had to upgrade your skills, you had to change them. The world is a very different place. Let us face it—everything we hear at the moment suggests that the world of work and the skills required for it are liable to change rapidly over the next few years. There is the technical revolution and the digital revolution. Will they continue? Will they evolve? There is also the green revolution going on in the world of work.

The level of possible change required within those ideas is massive. Having the ability to say, “Yes, I have at certain times the ability to change my skill set,” must have some attraction to all those listening. When the Minister responds, I would like her to let us know the Government’s thinking on that idea.

We have given the Government a series of options here; whether they will decide to pay us the ultimate compliment by taking our ideas, I do not know. The ones that we have down here are that you can upgrade, you can change and you are in charge. Maybe you could argue about the times at which you might intervene, but not by much. They are reasonably well paced throughout somebody’s working life. There is an initial stage, then a few years in, then a few years more and then towards the end, as—we are told—we will all be working longer. Surely, that is about right.

I think the fact that you have good careers guidance going in with this is very important. These are components that have to be involved to keep somebody working productively for longer. They come in together and the person has a greater degree of control. There is less bureaucracy as you can choose where you go. You can go to regular employers and trainers, who are identified as being of a certain standard. That is the idea behind this.

I hope that the Government will be quite open to these ideas—and possibly this amendment. Who knows? I am not putting a great deal of money on that but, hey, we live in hope. If we could find out the Government’s thinking on this, we would all be slightly better informed for the next stage of Bill. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords it is a pleasure to follow—if unexpectedly—the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and to express support for the intention of this amendment. In a way, it is an acknowledgement that individuals gaining skills is to the benefit of all us. We should acknowledge that we are not talking here about narrow, financial cost-benefit calculations, but rather acknowledging that skills have a wide range of advantages for us all, embedded as they are in individuals.

I will be brief and I shall resist, with some difficulty, the urge for a cheap political shot about student fees. I have to note, however, that this amendment provides one way to ensure that people can access courses for free. There is an obvious, much simpler way to do that, which would be to abolish student fees and ensure that we are not, as the Bill is currently doing, expanding the burden of debt weighing on individuals in our society.

I look forward to the Minister’s response anyway. The question I am really asking is: do the Government acknowledge that skills are not something just acquired by individuals—I go back to the reference to social solidarity from the noble Lord, Lord Watson—but something that we all benefit from and should all help to pay for?

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Brougham and Vaux) (Con)]

I call Lord Janke.

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How and when will Parliament get to scrutinise all these moving parts of the Government’s plan for higher education? The limited scrutiny offered of spending decisions or pieces of secondary legislation taken piecemeal is no substitute for the ability of this House to train its laser gaze on legislation in the Committee stage of a Bill. I hope that the Minister can give us some answers today and that, by the time we get to Report, we will have more information still.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is a very great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and to express my awe at the—to use her phrase—“laser gaze” she applied to the government amendments, which I will not attempt to emulate.

I will focus on the amendments in this group that are not government amendments. For convenience, I will go through them in numerical order, beginning with Amendment 92 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Johnson of Marylebone, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, which—as the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, noted—has some similarities to Amendment 95, which appears in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and myself. Somewhat to my surprise, I again find myself agreeing with a very large amount of what the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, said, particularly the reflection that earnings data cannot be the be-all and end-all of judging the value of qualifications, and his points on the value of creative subjects, reflecting what many other noble Lords have said in this debate. However, I strongly disagree with his suggestion that lowering the earnings threshold for student loan repayment starting is some kind of solution to the current mess the Government are in. The fact is that we have generations—particularly but not solely—of young people finding it extremely hard to find a secure economic place in the world, and making them more insecure, creating more difficulties and putting further economic pressure on them, very often through those three decades of life when they would normally expect to perhaps settle down, have children or even buy a house, would have widespread effects reaching far beyond the educational impacts.

I move now to Amendments 94 and 95 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, and myself. It is a pity that he has not yet introduced these, but their meaning and intention is fairly clear. We are aiming here to introduce more flexibility and to acknowledge, as I said on an earlier group, that we are not in the 20th century, where people’s lives started by perhaps doing a course of study or an apprenticeship, working for 30 or 40 years and then collecting their gold carriage clock at the end of it. That is not how the world works; people move in many different directions. I have to say, I was rather attracted by the suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, of taking up bookbinding; that sounds a rather attractive option. But people move in all kinds of different directions in all kinds of ways, and the idea that they could have some linear, progressive, straight-line course currently mars the Bill, and these amendments seek to acknowledge this. I look at Amendment 94 in particular: life happens. A third to a half of pregnancies in the UK are unplanned; people never know what life will throw at them, and they need flexibility to have the lifelong learning entitlement to work for whatever life throws at them. That perhaps applies even more to Amendment 96. We talked earlier about the possibility of people being able to receive universal credit while studying along their life course, and this is an alternative way of approaching the problem by allowing for maintenance grants—indeed, those two things might well go together, given the nature and cost of living these days.

Coming to Amendment 97, I feel I am picking up a subject on which many other noble Lords are vastly more qualified and have been working on for a long time, but we really have to highlight the utter government failure that this proposed new clause reflects on and, indeed, seeks to ensure is not extended. It is acknowledged that 9% of the student population currently are Muslim—I think that is a higher education figure rather than a further education one—but it should be higher. In 2013, David Cameron promised to provide an alternative student finance option to comply with sharia law, which prohibits riba, or interest. The following year there was a consultation to provide a takaful system that would fit within the existing structures. In 2017, the Higher Education and Research Act was granted Royal Assent and gave the Government the power to introduce such a system—yet we are still waiting. I would very much value any news the Minister might be able to give us on progress in this area. Covid really is no excuse; this has been going on and continuing and was an area of failure far before Covid. I note that in the other place there is an Early Day Motion calling for the introduction of this form of finance for students, which is receiving wide support.

Finally, on Amendment 99—and, indeed, Amendment 99B—I do not feel that I can add anything to what the noble Lord, Lord Addington, who is so extremely knowledgeable in this area, said, except to offer support.

This is my last contribution in this Committee. I join many others in offering the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, the very best wishes for the coming month or two in particular. I thank everyone who has contributed to this Committee. We have been a rather small and select band, which seems to be the case with many of the Bills before your Lordships’ House. I hope that we might see a broader level of engagement when we get to Report, but, in the meantime, I thank noble Lords.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a lively debate. To echo some of the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, I say that this is welcome, because there has been much less engagement than some of us had anticipated with the Bill in Committee. I hope that some of that will be put right on Report.

In this group of amendments, there is a huge opportunity, if the lifelong loan entitlement is designed well, for it to support opportunity around the country by revitalising flexible higher education and reversing the catastrophic decline in the number of adults in England aged 21 and over accessing undergraduate higher education. Yet, as my noble friend Lady Sherlock set out in detail, we still know far too little about the specific design features of the lifelong loan entitlement and how it will work in practice. Like much of this Bill, although urgently needed, the legislation has been laid before the policy detail has been proposed and consulted on.

It is disappointing to say the least that the Government tabled their amendments just a week ago and that further amendments on Report are necessary. I think it is fair to say that the coruscating criticism a few minutes ago by my noble friend Lady Sherlock brilliantly illustrated why we expect the Minister to withdraw and not move the amendments to allow the House time for the proposals to be fleshed out, so that noble Lords can give them the critical analysis necessary to enable the successful implementation that, in fairness, we all want.

We have said before that we believe that 2025 is too long to wait and that the lifelong loan entitlement system, or interim arrangements, must be put in place sooner. Can the Minister clarify whether all adults will be able to access support through the lifelong loan entitlement from its introduction, whenever it does appear, or whether it will be introduced gradually for different age cohorts?

The government amendments tabled on the entitlement provide the building blocks of a modular and potentially credit-based loan funding and fee limit system. We welcome the flexibility for the entitlement to incorporate modular funding and recognise that this presents both opportunities and, given the complexity, significant challenges. We know that details on the funding of courses will need to await the comprehensive spending review in the autumn, but can the Minister confirm whether there will be a fee limit for modules? Will this be proportionate to their credits towards a qualification? In the current arrangements, not all credits attract the same fees; short courses are generally more expensive per credit than full degree courses. The Government’s approach to this will be telling because it matters to potential students who would need to access loans in order to study.

Our Amendment 95 is similar to Amendment 92 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, which we support. I have to say, I much enjoyed his contribution, even if it is slightly odd to be on the same side as him, given our jousting on what became the Higher Education and Research Act in 2017. It is odd but none the less welcome.

Our Amendment 95 would remove the equivalent or lower qualification exemption rules for the lifelong loan entitlement to ensure eligibility for student loan funding for another qualification at that level or a lower level to make career changes as simple as possible. It would also ensure that eligibility is not restricted in any way that would prevent those seeking to use the entitlement in a manner that fits their lifestyle. Many people will have chosen at 18 a degree that has taken them down a different career path to that intended when they studied. It may be that their industry or sector has since contracted or disappeared completely, and the need to reskill becomes even more apparent.

This is why my Amendment 85 would remove the ELQ exemption rule for the lifelong loan entitlement. The equivalent or lower qualification rules prevent someone with a degree or a lower qualification, such as an HND, receiving a student loan for another qualification at that level or lower. We believe that this is a mistake because some in that position will already be in work and seeking to change career. In a loan system, the equivalent or lower qualification rules should be removed to prevent this block on changing careers. It provides a disincentive to do so.

Amendment 95 also aims to ensure that anyone wanting to undertake modular study can do so in all subject areas and that, when doing so, they are able to access the same support for fees and living costs regardless of how they choose to study, including through modules or full qualifications, part-time or full-time, face to face or at a distance.

The lifelong loan entitlement offers up to four years’ equivalent funding for levels 4 to 6. While this may be enough for some people, for others, it simply will not be. Undertaking a foundation or access year plus a three-year bachelor’s degree, which is a pretty common route, would swallow it in one go. This is why Amendment 94 would require the Secretary of State to consult on extending the eligibility to six years to give a bit more flexibility. As I said, for some, four years is not long enough. This will be of particular value to those studying part-time and key to the success of encouraging adult learners to take up an offer to study and reskill.

The Government’s stated aim is to encourage as many people as possible to prepare for the skills demanded by an ever-changing economy. Amendment 94 supports that aim.

It is also worth emphasising that the vast majority of part-time students in England are ineligible for maintenance loans, which are currently restricted to full-time students and part-time students on degree courses at face-to-face providers. This illustrates why the lifelong loan entitlement needs to support all modes of study. In fact, this is highlighted on page 42 of the Department for Education’s own impact assessment, as the noble Lord, Lord Flight, pointed out. The cost of study, including living costs, is very important yet, as drafted, the entitlement covers tuition costs only. Why have the Government ignored their own impact assessment in this regard? They must introduce a system of loans and means-tested grants that enables everyone to live well while studying or training at college across both the further education and higher education sectors.

Maintenance support will be crucial in preventing further hurdles being placed in the path of learners from disadvantaged backgrounds taking up studies. Otherwise, many adults will be unable to take up these opportunities, frustrating their aim—and that of the Government—of transforming their life chances and being part of the skilled workforce that employers and the economy need. Many will have existing debts and financial commitments, as well as caring needs for children or elderly relatives. If lifelong learning is to succeed, the system simply must recognise these differences and provide solutions.

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.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage
Thursday 21st October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I have also added my name to Amendment 45A from the noble Lord, Lord Watson. During the first day of Report, the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, spoke about previous unsuccessful skills improvement initiatives and asked,

“why will it be different this time?”—[Official Report, 12/10/21; col. 1765.]

Why will the Government’s new skills system, as embodied in the Bill, work better than its predecessors? In my view, one of the answers will need to be a really vigorous and well thought-through approach to reporting, monitoring and evaluating the different elements of the strategy and how they all work together. The lifelong learning entitlement and the lifetime skills guarantee—I think I have those the right way around—are essential elements of the strategy but need to be transformed from slogans into realities. A crucial part of achieving that will be review, review, review.

I might prefer this amendment if proposed new subsection (1) ended slightly differently, to read, “a report on the impact on the overall levels of skills in England and Wales of all the provisions of this Act”, rather than confining itself to

“the rules regarding eligibility for funding for those undertaking further or higher education courses.”

In the meantime, I will content myself with supporting the noble Lord’s amendment as it stands—with its effect of ensuring that the impact of the equivalent or lower qualification rule is at least reviewed and assessed on a regular annual basis—while encouraging the Minister to look at beefing up further the process of reviewing the overall progress of the skills strategy, beyond the performance monitoring and review of designated employer representative bodies described in her letter to us.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I slightly unexpectedly find myself to be the first person to speak to Amendment 40 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, also signed by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and me. Amendment 45A calls for a review to look at the issues around a restriction on allowing people to study at a level below that which they already possess. Amendment 40 goes further in removing restrictions.

I would have thought that naturally the Conservative position would be a belief that the person best placed to decide their best course of study would be the individual concerned rather than the state. This is a question of individual choice, about people knowing best their own situation. Therefore, while I very much support Amendment 45A, which at least calls for a review, I would go back to the more fundamental change in Amendment 40.

I am also in favour of Amendment 36 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey. Education is a public good. We hear a lot of talk about investment for levelling up. Well, investment in people is the most fundamental investment of all. It is flexible, it enables people to make choices for themselves. A new or improved railway line or better school facilities are there and accessible to people, but people making their own choices is what investment in education is all about.

I am also in favour of Amendment 48, not yet addressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock. I will leave her to fully explain this, but it is worth stressing that what does not get measured and focused on does not get funded or supported. That is the principle behind that amendment.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, as this is my first speech on Report, I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to her new ministerial role, and place on record my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for her hard work on the Bill and her openness and willingness to engage with those of us on this side.

I speak specifically to the government amendments in this group. My noble friend Lady Wilcox will talk about the others in this group. We would have preferred them to be de-grouped, but time is short. However, the Government were planning to bring back for Report detailed amendments on the lifelong loan entitlement. Since they have now decided not to do that, we are left with several questions which I must ask. I apologise for doing so on Report, but we have not had an opportunity to do so otherwise.

In Committee, the Government tabled some amendments which were presented as providing some of the wiring in the basement of higher education that would be needed when Ministers unveiled their renovation plans in the form of the LLE. However, since those plans must wait until another day and, we are told, until more primary legislation, because Ministers want to wait for the consultation first, we are left with some big questions. One obvious question is: when will the consultation happen? Indeed, why is it not already out there? What is holding it up?

Ministers have brought back some parts of the wiring amendments on Report. The LLE is meant to cover courses and modules in FE and HE. Clause 14 amends the Teaching and Higher Education Act to allow for the funding of courses in FE and modules in FE and HE, a lifetime funding limit and for funding not just for an academic year. Clause 15 amends HERA to change the definition of a “higher education course” to make it clear that the regulatory regime applies to modules. Government Amendment 39 defines what a course and a module are. However, at the risk of being nerdy, I point out that the Government have not brought back the parts of an amendment that they tabled in Committee which required the Office for Students to specify fee limits for modules as well as courses. We are told offline that the Government will provide for modular fee limits after the consultation. Will that require primary legislation? Does any other aspect of the LLE require primary legislation? If so, can we have a timescale for it? If not, can the Minister say how and when Parliament will have a full debate on the shape and scope of the LLE absent primary legislation?

Where does that leave us in the gap between the Bill taking effect and the new regime being brought forward? If THEA will now permit student loan funding to cover modules which are not taken as part of a full course, does that mean that a provider could do that now but with no fee limits, or would that require regulations to be made, perhaps under THEA? If so, can the Minister assure the House that no such regulations will be brought forward ahead of the debate on the primary legislation promised to enable LLE?

I have three other questions. First, does the same definition of a module in the Bill, as it will be amended, apply for all purposes—funding and regulation—in both HERA and THEA? I ask because Clause 15 as amended by government Amendment 39 offers a definition of a module, which I mentioned in Committee. However, new subsection (1)(e) in Clause 14(1) provides that regulations under Section 28A of HERA may prescribe the meaning of “module” in relation to HE or FE. Can the Minister clarify that distinction? Secondly, on funding, irrespective of how LLE develops, does it mean that a module can be funded via the student loan book only if it is part of a full course? In other words, would the Bill as amended exclude a module which was not part of a qualification?

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[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 62 from the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and I seem to have added my speech to his as well, because I very much echo what he said. I was involved in delivering a rather similar previous scheme, the Future Jobs Fund, to young unemployed Londoners. Based on that, I entirely agree with the noble Lord that Kickstart has the potential to become a really valuable programme. I emphasise the word “potential” because I do not think it has got there yet, but it offers substantial benefits to the young participants it focuses on and to the employers who take them on.

For the participants—most, if not all, of whom are at risk of long-term unemployment—six months is long enough for them to become acclimatised to working life and to develop the employability skills they need for their Kickstart placement and for future jobs. The employers can fill short-term vacancies at a low cost, which might even lead to some Kickstarters being taken into permanent roles at the end of the placement, having proved their capability and worth.

Importantly, the scheme also recognises the need for many Kickstarters to receive extra support and training when they start by providing £1,500 for so-called wrap- around support, which is much needed for those who not only are new to the world of work but might often come from chaotic living circumstances. We used to have to send taxis to pick up some of ours to take them to their work, until they realised that they had to be up and dressed at a certain time in order to be there.

However, despite its excellent intentions, the scheme seems to be falling short of expectations, with only about two-fifths of available Kickstart jobs having been taken up by September, including in sectors heavily hit by the pandemic and now much in need of extra staff, such as hospitality, travel, retail and care. Many of the reasons for this disappointing performance, as described by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, sound rather familiar to me, including delays, bureaucracy and complexity. It can take several weeks for a business, and indeed the specific jobs within that business, to be approved for Kickstart; only then does the rather unreliable process of identifying and recruiting candidates start. These must be referred by jobcentre work coaches, and it might take considerable time for them to come up with enough suitable candidates for employers to interview and recruit.

Again echoing the noble Lord, small businesses in particular, many of which could and do offer highly worthwhile Kickstart places, are often put off by the time, effort and bureaucracy involved. They are no longer required to use gateway providers to get involved in the scheme, but many of them continue to do so to reduce the burden on themselves of the complex administration involved.

It also seems that Kickstart is not as well integrated with other skills programmes, such as the apprenticeships programme, as it could be. Ideally, every successfully completed Kickstart placement should lead to clear pathways to further development whenever possible, including one or more apprenticeship options.

It would indeed be a pity if, just as some of these issues with Kickstart are beginning to be ironed out, and with numbers and outcomes picking up momentum, the scheme came to an end on 31 December—what I thought was its current cut-off date of, but it sounds as if that has possibly been extended. The noble Lord’s amendment would require the Secretary of State to review the scheme’s operation and consider whether its lifetime should be extended, with or without further modifications; for example, relating to eligibility and the link to universal credit. Surely such a review should be seen as an absolute necessity to learn the lessons of the scheme so far and consider whether or how it could be built on or improved.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise with great pleasure to offer my support to Amendment 45 in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, to which I have attached my name. It is, in a way, the reverse of Amendment 63: Amendment 45 says that adult learners should be able to get universal credit; Amendment 63 says that you should be able to become an adult learner while on universal credit. I am not sure which is the best way round, but I am not sure that it matters or will make much practical difference. Both the right reverend Prelate and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, have clearly outlined the Kafkaesque complications that arise, and the unreasonable unintended traps people can find themselves in when they seek to study and find that the system simply does not allow them to.

I want to come from the other point of view very briefly and think about the overall good of the country. As I was contemplating these amendments, I thought back to hearing an economist talk about how, slightly counterintuitively, having a very short period between people becoming unemployed and finding a new job might not be the best thing, because if you have very low levels of unemployment benefits, as we do in the UK compared to many continental countries, people have to grab the first job they can secure—the first job that comes along. That means that you get an awful lot of square pegs in round holes. You get people who are not best for the job. They are not good for the employer and it is not good for them to be in a job for which they are not suited. If you have a longer period, people are able to assess and improve their skills and then find the right job, stay in that job for longer, advance in it and make real progress. We need to move towards a system that allows that to happen. When we talk about the economy, we talk about how we can solve our productivity problem. These are the base issues that we need to think about. Amendments 45 and 63 address them.

On Amendment 62, I want to offer the Green group’s support. The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, said nearly everything I was going to say, so I am not going repeat it. It was reminiscent of some of the reports you hear of the green homes grant and employers struggling to get paid. If we are talking about small employers, their cash flow can become a serious problem.

I note one figure that says that the north-east—the region with the highest unemployment in England—is the area with the lowest rate of take up of Kickstart. That is obviously a concern, and it should be looked at in a review, particularly in the light of the Government’s levelling-up agenda.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and all noble Lords who have spoken. In Committee, we had a good debate about universal credit and the various ways in which people are discouraged by the rules from getting the skills that they need. I think the issue is that government policy is not properly joined up. We need to have skills, employment and social security policy fully aligned to make this work.

What is going wrong? I suspect that, at heart, it is an issue of departmental responsibility. DfE basically wants people to get training to increase their skills so that they can engage in productive, sustainable work, but most people cannot afford to train or retrain without financial support. I suspect DfE would quite like them to be able to get benefits while they do it. However, DWP does not think its benefit system is there to support students in education and training; it thinks that is DfE’s job. In general, that works. Most students are supported by loans or grants, and a lot of people on universal credit want to get back into work and universal credit supports them while they do. But there are clearly people who may struggle to get back into sustainable jobs unless they increase, update or change their skills, and it is likely that there will be more of them in the future than there have been in the past.

In Committee, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and other noble Lords identified a number of barriers that get in the way of people wanting to do that. The Minister’s defence was basically twofold. She said, first, that DfE and DWP are working together on it and there is a trial under way for six months. She said that there is flexibility on conditionality, so that if you get universal credit and are part of the intensive work search scheme, you can study full time for 12 weeks, with boot camps and so on—the lot.

Secondly, she said that the benefit system may not be there for education and training for most people, but some people can get help. The Minister mentioned Regulation 14 of the Universal Credit Regulations 2013. I went back and refreshed my memory of that regulation. It lists the exceptions, but the only exceptions are young people doing A-levels or the like who are not living with their parents, those who have kids and some disabled people with limited capacity for work. As I read on—the Minister can correct me—I thought that all Regulation 14 does is remove the blanket requirement that you must not be in education to qualify for universal credit at all. I do not think it stops people—even in those groups—having conditionality requirements placed on them in the way that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham described, which might make it impossible for them to take on a training course. Can the Minister clarify that?

It is really quite hard to work out who can get universal credit for training, at what level and where. To that end, can the Minister tell the House whether any or all people wishing to carry out study necessary for a course leading to the lifetime skills guarantee could get universal credit while they do it, as Amendment 63 suggests? If not, how should they support themselves while they do that?

Amendment 45 from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham makes a broader point about the needs of people who are unemployed and need training to get secure, sustainable employment. There is a balance here. The benefits system is not there to fund everybody wanting to retrain, but this amendment could pick up some of those people who are long-term unemployed or may have gone from one low-paid, insecure job to another, perhaps with periods on benefits in between. Might not they and the taxpayer be better served if they could afford to get trained for a secure and sustainable career? How could they be helped under the Government’s current approach?

I turn now to Amendment 62, which would require the Government to reconsider how long Kickstart runs and who is eligible for it. When we debated Kickstart in Committee on 19 July, the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, said:

“I cannot say that we will extend the duration of the Kickstart scheme or change its eligibility”.—[Official Report, 19/7/21; col. 103.]

A summer is a long time in politics because, as we have heard, a Written Ministerial Statement has now announced that Kickstart is running until the end of March. Who knows? By the time we get to Third Reading, maybe eligibility will have been reviewed as well—you never know.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the decision to extend the timescale was driven less by the rhetorical powers of noble Lords—marvellous though those are—and rather more by the fact that Kickstart is nowhere near hitting its targets. There were meant to be 250,000 placements by December. The latest figures I could find were in a Written Answer to my noble friend Lady Wilcox on 21 September in which the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, said that 69,000 young people had started Kickstart jobs as of 8 September. Does the Minister have more recent figures? That Answer also said that more than 281,000 jobs had been approved. If 281,000 jobs have been approved and only 69,000 people have started work, that is worse.

The regional position, raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is really significant. I have raised the positions of the north and north-east before—not just because I live in Durham—but that Written Answer said that in the whole north-east of England only 3,170 people had started Kickstart jobs. Something is going wrong.

Can the Minister tell the House what the Government are doing to rescue this scheme? In particular, why is there this lag between jobs created and jobs filled? What is happening to get young people into these jobs? Do the Government expect to meet their 250,000 target by December, March or another date? I look forward to the Minister’s reply.