Enterprise Bill [HL]

Baroness Corston Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2015 Grand Committee

I have raised a number of problems. I do not want to go on much longer but, given the importance of this issue and the size of the targets that the Government have set themselves, it was worth it. My final point is to reiterate something that my noble friend Lord Stevenson drew to the Committee’s attention. The Government are still resisting making it a requirement for apprenticeships to be part of public contracts. I am still waiting for a satisfactory response from the Government as to why they will not do that. I know that they say that they are in favour of the voluntary approach, but why should we be parting with significant sums of public money—we are not talking about very small contracts but contracts worth millions of pounds—without the stipulation that, as part of tendering for those contracts, companies should include their commitment to training and to a specific number of apprenticeships? If the Government are serious about trying to meet this target, and a target for high-quality apprenticeships, they seem to be missing an important part of that process.

[Baroness Corston (Lab)]

My Lords, I am currently chairing the Select Committee on Social Mobility and the transition from school to work. Last week, the committee met a number of young people who are either trying to get apprenticeships or going through apprenticeships. I would recommend that to anyone who wants to know what is going on.

When I left school—admittedly, in what some would now think of as the dark ages—apprenticeships were in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, plastering, joinery and carpentry, and normally they were a few years in duration. I accept that the world of work has changed, but I was deeply shocked to hear young people say that they had had apprenticeships in putting flowers in bunches for a supermarket for six weeks, sweeping a stable floor for six weeks, wrapping vegetables for the same length of time, and working in a fish and chip shop—I accept that there is some encounter with the public there and you could say it is a branch of retail—also for six weeks. I was told of a company where the managing director is the only person who could be called an employee and everyone else is an apprentice who is there for a few weeks.

This practice is an abuse of the term “apprentice”. What it does is massage unemployment figures so that people are seen to be doing something, but those young people were deeply dispirited at what was being offered to them. I am also told that it is now possible to have something called an apprenticeship in plastering for six weeks. You cannot learn to be a plasterer in six weeks and those people are presumably now going out and offering themselves as competent plasters to unsuspecting householders. That is not in anyone’s interests.

I would be very grateful if the Minister would address the question of quality because these young people certainly did not think that they were recipients of anything approaching the term “quality”.