Chuka Umunna
Main Page: Chuka Umunna (Liberal Democrat - Streatham)Department Debates - View all Chuka Umunna's debates with the Department for Education
(9 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House believes that more high-quality apprenticeships are essential to the future prospects of young people and future success of the economy; notes with concern that the number of 19 to 24-year-olds starting an apprenticeship has fallen by 6,270 in the last year, that 24 per cent of these apprentices are receiving no formal training, and around one in five are not receiving the appropriate minimum wage; calls on the Government to institute a ten-year national goal to grow the number of apprenticeships for young people and boost the standing and value of technical and vocational education so that the same number of young people that go to university undertake a high-quality apprenticeship; and further calls on the Government to use the money it already spends on procurement to require suppliers for large Government contracts to offer new apprenticeship opportunities, safeguard apprenticeship quality with new standards so that all apprenticeships are at at least level three and last a minimum of two years, ensure Government plays its part by creating thousands more apprenticeships in the civil service, give city and country regions a role by devolving money for adult skills and give a central role to business through sector bodies to drive up standards and increase apprenticeship places.
I note what you have said about time, Madam Deputy Speaker. I shall try not to drone on for too long.
I want to put this debate in context. It is not simply a debate on apprenticeships. The issue of apprenticeships is central to a wider debate about our economy and whether it is fit for purpose. The changing nature of the world is full of opportunity for Britain. Technology is transforming the way we live. New emerging economies with ballooning middle classes are providing a mass of opportunity for our businesses, but these forces of change are also bringing challenges: how do we deliver the goods for our people when the uncertainty which follows from all this creates insecurity for many?
As I have said before, the answer is to shape these forces of change and do all we can to ensure that everyone can access the opportunities available—in short, to ensure that everyone is connected to the new global economy and has a stake in the future. That requires an economy producing good, decent jobs that are fulfilling, afford a level of dignity, respect and security, and, above all, pay a wage that people can live off. Sadly, that vision is but a dream for too many in Britain today. Under the current Government, average wages have fallen by £1,600 a year on average. They have fallen by more than £3,200 in my constituency. Almost 5 million people are not earning a wage that they can live off. We are seeing rising insecurity, with 1.4 million zero-hour contracts. There are 3.5 million people in work who say they want extra hours.
As a result of all this, our fiscal deficit remains stubbornly high at £91 billion. The Office for Budget Responsibility was clear in its autumn outlook published with the autumn statement that the Government have failed to meet their two fiscal mandates in this Parliament because stagnating wages have led to a fall in national insurance and income tax receipts. However, the living standards crisis that I refer to and the persistence of the deficit are symptoms of a bigger problem: the failure of Government to help raise productivity across our economy.
Sure, Britain leads in aerospace, the automotive industry, business services, chemicals, the creative and digital industries, food, green tech and pharmaceuticals, among other industries. We should celebrate the success in these sectors, but across the economy overall, the gap between UK productivity per hour worked and the rest of the G7 grew to 17% in 2013, the largest difference since 1992. So on average it now takes a British worker until the end of Friday to produce what a German or French worker has finished before they clock off on Thursday.
Mr Jonathan Djanogly (Huntingdon) (Con)
I am sure the hon. Gentleman will want to remark on the success in my constituency under this Government, with apprenticeships doubling to 1,500 a year. It is not just a matter of problems; it is also a matter of dealing with success. In many parts of the country where there is high growth and unemployment is falling—in Huntingdon it has fallen to 1%— we need better training so that employers can invest in their staff to deal with the lack of skills that exists as our economy improves.
Mr Umunna
I agree that quality is important, but apprenticeships in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency have fallen by 11%. Many apprenticeships are not the high-quality apprenticeships that I think he refers to. Many of them are level 2.
There has been much debate in economic circles as to why we have gone backwards on productivity so fast under this Government. People have pointed to the lack of business investment, which is compounded by the problems that businesses have faced in getting access to finance, but skills shortages in our economy are also holding Britain back. Too many young people in particular do not have the skills our businesses require when they leave secondary education, and even among those who do have skills and qualifications, there is a mismatch between their skills and the demand for technician-level competency, particularly for jobs requiring people with science, technology, engineering and maths skills—the STEM skills.
To address this we need a major expansion of high-quality vocational and technical education, in particular apprenticeships for young people, offering more and better work-and-train opportunities in all sectors of the economy, giving them those skills which employers say are lacking.
Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)
On the number of apprenticeship starts in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, will he comment on the fact that in 2010 340 people started apprenticeships and last year 880 people started them. Why does he think the number of apprenticeships has doubled in his constituency?
Mr Djanogly
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The hon. Gentleman said that the number of apprenticeships in my constituency had fallen, but I am looking at the House of Commons published figures—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)
Order. Mr Djanogly, you are continuing the debate; that is not a point of order for the Chair. We are pressed for time, and we need to make sure we hear the opening speeches from both sides and have the debate. You have not indicated that you want to speak, whereas others have. We need to get on to the debate, so I call Chuka Umunna.
Richard Graham
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. My one point is simply to ask the shadow Business Secretary whether he has considered what the impact of 2 million apprentices is on the wages of the lower earners, and whether it is not natural that a substantial increase in the number of apprenticeships will lead to more people not earning quite as much as they will in the future when they are better trained.
Andrew Gwynne
May I thank my hon. Friend for the support that he and the Labour Front-Bench team gave to my private Member’s Bill in the previous Session? The Government talked it out, and does he not think that that was a wasted opportunity, because for every £1 million of capital investment in public procurement, we could have secured an additional apprenticeship?
Mr Umunna
My hon. Friend is absolutely right about that. I congratulated him at the time on his Bill, and we should continue to remind this House of the efforts that were made then and the wasted opportunity to which he refers. The reason he introduced that Bill was clearly because he read the OECD’s review of vocational education and training, which found that few countries achieve strong engagement in vocational education and training without a strong apprenticeship system. Now, that will not automatically happen on its own. Government must play an active role, not in a top-down, command-control fashion, but by using their convening power in an enterprising, entrepreneurial way, working in partnership with business to address the problem and to increase productivity. Before I explain how we aim to achieve that and consider what the Government have done during this Parliament, when I will touch on that 2 million figure, I want to say something about our record, because I am sure it will be referred to.
I accept that when Labour left office there was an outstanding need to increase the number and improve the quality of apprenticeships in our country, but before Government Members get too excited, I should say that it would be wrong to claim we did not make any progress. In government, we more than quadrupled the number of apprenticeship starts from a woeful 65,000 under the previous Major Government in 1996-1997 to 280,000 starts in our final year in office. Apprenticeships were simply not on the radar when we entered office; they were very much on the radar when we left office. We used the weight of government to begin the culture change we need. So from the 2012 Olympics to Building Schools for the Future projects up and down the country, we linked the creation of apprenticeships to public procurement across a number of Departments. We set up a dedicated National Apprenticeship Service to support and expand apprenticeships. I speak to many young people who tell me that they were signposted to the apprenticeship they are now doing by visiting the service’s website. Of course, it was also Labour in government that established national apprenticeship week in 2008, and the week is now an annual event in the national calendar. I am proud of our record. I am proud that this Labour party rescued apprenticeships from the scrapheap.
The current Government have sought to build on the foundations we put in place. They say that since we left office they have overseen the creation of 2 million new apprenticeship starts, and the hon. Member for Gloucester referred to those. I do not think there is any point boasting about numbers if the apprenticeships are not of sufficient quality. I will come to that in a moment, but first let us look at their claimed numbers. How many of the 2 million apprenticeships are really new apprenticeships and how many have emerged as a result of rebadging—in other words, re-labelling existing work a person is already doing in the workplace as an apprenticeship? A very large proportion of additional apprenticeship places created by this Government have come in the post-25 age brackets. The largest percentage rise in apprenticeships under this Government has actually been among the over-60s, where the increase has been 520%. According to the 2014 apprenticeship pay survey, 93% of adult apprentices already worked for their existing employer before starting their apprenticeship. That would suggest that many existing training schemes, such as those delivered under the old Train to Gain programme, have simply been rebadged and re-labelled as apprenticeships.
That is the situation on apprenticeships for adults. The shortage is perhaps most acute among young people, so what is happening to apprenticeship starts there? The number of 19 to 24-year-olds starting an apprenticeship has fallen by more than 6,000 in the past year. In fact, the number of 19 to 24 apprenticeship starts is currently falling in every single region outside London. Overall, the share of apprentices who are under 25 has fallen from 84% in 2009-10 to 64%, and the share of apprentices who are under 19 has fallen from 43% in the last year of the Labour Government to 28% under this one. So the simple fact is this: for all the boasts, there has been some jiggery-pokery with the numbers. The bottom line is that we need many more apprenticeships and we need to raise employer demand for them. Half our large employers do not offer any apprenticeships at all in Britain today—that is totally unacceptable. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne), the shadow skills Minister, has said previously, when it is harder to get an apprenticeship with Jaguar Land Rover than it is to get into an Oxford college, it is pretty obvious that more needs to be done.
The numbers are one thing, but I said that I would say something about quality. In most other northern European countries apprenticeships are level 3 qualifications lasting between two and five years, and they include at least one day a week of off-the-job learning, as well as significant on-the-job training. In England, most of the growth of apprenticeships in recent years has been at a level that would simply not be recognised in those countries. Just 35% of our apprenticeships are at level 3 or above, and just 2% are at level 4. In fact, according to the Department’s own figures, published in its apprenticeship pay survey, one in five apprentices does not even receive any formal training at the moment. The figure increases to almost a quarter of those in the 19 to 24 age bracket, who are not being properly trained. If we truly want to ensure more parity of esteem between the academic and the non-academic—between the way people view university degrees and the way they view these types of vocational and technical qualifications—how can we hope to do that when they are not of sufficiently good quality? We have got to raise standards. Even where apprentices are receiving training, far too many of them are still not receiving the appropriate minimum wage—15% are paid below the appropriate national minimum wage, with the figure rising to 20% for 19 to 20-year-olds.
I will come on to address how we intend to encourage more private sector employers to provide more and better quality apprenticeships appropriate to their needs, but surely government, as one of the biggest employers in the country, should be setting an example, both in recruiting as many apprentices as possible and in providing good-quality apprenticeships. The civil service apprenticeship scheme hired just 200 apprentices in 2014. That is 200 out of more than 400,000 civil servants, which is just not good enough. Never mind the Departments themselves, Government should be doing more in this area. They should use their clout as a procurer of goods and services to get more employers in the private sector to provide apprenticeships.
Our Labour colleagues in local government have already been leading the way in utilising procurement to boost apprenticeship numbers. Newham, Knowsley, Sheffield and Manchester have all developed strategies to use procurement contracts to create apprenticeship opportunities for young people locally. Central Government should do the same, as those opportunities are simply not happening to the degree and on the scale required.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
My hon. Friend makes the point about the importance of using the procurement system and Government money to drive improvement in apprenticeships. Does he agree that we need do that all the way through the supply chain so that smaller businesses, and not just larger ones, can and do take on apprentices?
Mr Umunna
We should do everything that we can to encourage all businesses to take on apprenticeships. We need to be mindful of the fact that sometimes that can be a bit more challenging for smaller businesses, and we should think how we can better support them to take on apprentices. It seems to me that, if there were fewer frameworks and more sector-driven apprenticeship frameworks, we could make the system less bureaucratic. But, absolutely, we should do as much as we can to make it easy for businesses to take on apprentices.
Jake Berry
On a point of interest, I have recruited an apprentice to work for me in my parliamentary office. When the hon. Gentleman says that we should do all that we can to recruit apprentices, I just wondered whether he has done so himself.
Mr Umunna
My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) says that he has. I have not been able to because I am right up to my limit on my staff allowance, but I would very much like to. One challenge in representing an inner-London seat is the amount of casework that is involved, but I would love to take on an apprentice if we could all convince the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority to provide us with more money to do so.
I have talked about what our record was and what this Government are doing, but what do we plan to do in the future? At the Labour party conference in 2014, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition outlined our ambitious six national goals for Britain in 2025, which included ensuring that as many school leavers go on to apprenticeships as go to university. That will require a dramatic increase in numbers. To achieve that, we will work in partnership with employers to ensure that apprenticeships are appropriate to their needs, which in turn will boost employer demand for them.
We will give employers, through sector and industry bodies, a greater role, ensuring that courses reflect their skills needs and that rigorous standards are set. The aim is for a skills system that is better aligned to the needs of employers and that delivers a pipeline of talented employees. We will also look to boost take-up by employers locally, which is best done by colleagues in local government working with their businesses locally and by those coming together to form combined authorities. We need to see more of such practice. Just look at the incredible progress that has been made by the Labour-run authority in Leeds under the leadership of Sir Keith Wakefield. The city’s new apprenticeship hub has doubled the number of apprentices in the city, especially among small and medium-sized businesses. Labour colleagues in Plymouth, Bury and Reading are actively engaging with local employers to boost apprenticeship opportunities, too, and we want to see lots more of that.
Alongside such practice, we would use the money that the Government already spend on procurement to require major suppliers on Government contracts to offer new apprenticeships. In that way, we can create thousands of new apprenticeship opportunities. That builds on the successful approach of the previous Labour Government. It is an approach that has been backed by the cross-party Business Innovation and Skills Committee, which has suggested that a minimum of one new apprenticeship place could be created for each £l million spent on public procurement. So a major project such as HS2 could, under Labour’s plans, lead to the creation of as many as 33,000 new apprenticeships.
As I said earlier, quality matters. Under Labour’s plans, all apprenticeships would last a minimum of two years and be level 3 qualifications to safeguard the trusted and historic apprenticeship brand, which has been tarnished in recent years. Those new rigorous standards would ensure that apprenticeships are, once again, a trusted gold standard and address the way they have been downgraded under this Government.
We were attacked for setting high standards by the Deputy Prime Minister in a frankly embarrassing and cack-handed response by him at Deputy Prime Minister’s questions last March. He lambasted us for apparently wanting to halve the numbers of apprenticeships by requiring that all apprenticeships be set at level 3 and last for at least two years. The truth is that we want to rename intermediate apprenticeships to protect the “apprenticeship” brand. Apprenticeships that do not currently meet the criteria will continue but under a different name.
The Deputy Prime Minister also got very excited about the use of the word “deadweight” in the independent report into apprenticeships that was produced for us. Chaired by the Institute of Education’s Professor Chris Husbands, the report recommended that we adopt those criteria. What the Deputy Prime Minister failed to notice when he got himself so excited about the use of the word “deadweight” is that the Business Secretary had published a report in 2012 with the title “Assessing the Deadweight Loss Associated with Public Investment in Further Education and Skills.” Clearly, the sooner the Business Secretary successfully carries out his coup of his party, the better.
Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (LD)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that a key reason for retaining level 1 as an entry for apprenticeships, is that apprenticeships offer an opportunity for lots of young people who do not have the education or the academic skills? If we do not let them in through a level 1, they will not have the opportunity to go up the apprenticeship ladder. That is a profoundly important point.
Mr Umunna
I am talking about not doing away with the qualifications of levels 1 and 2, but calling those levels something different and maintaining the badge of quality for apprenticeships by having them at level 3 and above. That will bring us in line with many other European countries.
Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is absolutely right about protecting the apprenticeship brand. Level 1 is a pre-apprenticeship entry qualification. Levels 2 and 3 are recognised by the industry. A person cannot go on to a building site with a level 1, but they can with levels 2 and 3.
Mr Umunna
I agree with my hon. Friend.
I have already talked about compliance with the national minimum wage. To tackle non-compliance and non-payment, Labour would give local authorities new powers to investigate and enforce the minimum wage. Hopefully, that will reduce the 15% of apprentices—[Interruption.] There will be headlines about how I cannot pronounce the word “apprenticeship”. Perhaps I should go back to school myself, but, to be honest, people mess up my name all the time. But, yes, we should be giving local authorities more of a role in identifying companies that are not complying with the requirements under the national minimum wage regulations.
Finally, we will make it very clear that we expect Departments across Government to provide apprenticeship opportunities. If we are elected in 91 days’ time and I am given a job by Prime Minister Miliband, I will be working with colleagues in the Labour Cabinet to ensure that we increase the number of apprenticeship opportunities across Whitehall.
I am mindful of the time, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I will conclude. I do not think that there is a huge difference in views across the House, but it all comes down to competent, determined delivery of policy across Government. We are determined, across all Government Departments, to do all we can to reform and grow our economy. The provision of more and better quality apprenticeship is a key part of that and will help us to ensure that more people can achieve their aspirations and dreams. It is for that reason that I commend this motion to the House. I am clear that there is only one thing to do this May and that is to vote Labour.
Vince Cable
It is certainly possible, as I think we shall see when we get the 2014-15 figures. I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that we should be investing more in apprenticeships, not less. That is certainly my clear objective. He might not have noticed, but the autumn statement included a commitment to £40 million extra for higher and advanced apprenticeships over the next two financial years, so we have every reason to be optimistic about achieving continued growth.
The figures I have cited, which I do not think are disputed, actually understate the improvement achieved, and for precisely the reason that the shadow Secretary of State emphasised: the necessary shift to longer apprenticeships and higher level apprenticeships. When we came into government, the share of level 1 was above 40% for that age group, and it is now only 10%. We decided in 2012 not to include level 1 within the definition of an apprenticeship. As the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) pointed out, that was entry level. We now call those traineeships, so there is progression. It is valuable to have level 1, but we no longer describe it as an apprenticeship. If we take out the very short courses, in particular, which tended to dominate in the earlier period, we see that the number of people in the 19-to-24 age group has actually doubled, because of the preponderance of very short courses in the apprenticeship programmes we inherited.
Let us look at the higher level apprenticeships. For level 3 the number of starts has doubled. For higher—level 4, foundation degree and above—we have seen a tenfold increase since we came into government, from 1,700, which was negligible, to 18,000. There is an important point to make about levels. I think that the hon. Member for Streatham dismissed too easily the value of level 2 apprenticeships.
Vince Cable
Well, he seemed to imply that they were not quite apprenticeships. Actually, there is a lot of statistical evidence that people who do a level 2 apprenticeship and no more have significantly higher earnings than those who do not—about 11% or 12% over a three to five-year period. There are many important trades, such as bricklaying, in which a level 2 qualification offers valuable progression into a badly needed occupation. The hon. Gentleman is right that we should be moving up the level chain, which we are doing, but I do not want him or anybody else to devalue level 2 qualifications or to seek to eliminate them.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)
Order. Mr Graham is not taking part in this exchange. Just make your intervention, Mr Umunna.
Vince Cable
I hope that is a clarification that level 2 will not be removed from the hon. Gentleman’s definition of an apprenticeship, should he find himself in government. I hope that the Deputy Prime Minister is not right that this is some kind of ploy to reduce the numbers and save money.
Vince Cable
That is very helpful. The hon. Gentleman clearly speaks from experience and knowledge, and we respect that.
The figures are very clear: we have seen a big increase in volume and a big increase in quality. That did not happen by accident. It is important to talk through the constraints on the public finances that I inherited, and on which the hon. Member for Streatham elaborated with regard to the problems that will face the next Government. When I came into office, I was told that the previous Government had planned to cut the Department’s budget by 25% had they returned to office. That was clear and explicit. Indeed, we have had to confront that in office. Let us be clear that it would have been no different had he been doing my job.
The Department’s budget is dominated by two items: higher education, including teaching and student support, and adult skills. There are other, smaller items such as industrial support and science. We were therefore faced, in office, with some very painful and difficult decisions. The advice I got from the Opposition, in a particularly shrill and angry way, was that we must give priority to university undergraduates—future graduates. We did the calculations and found that had we followed the advice from the Opposition, and had we introduced the policy that I think—it is not totally clear—they are now considering introducing on tuition fees, we would have had to cut the adult skills budget by about 40%. Within that, we would have had to cut apprenticeships by even more, because, being of higher quality, they are more expensive than other forms of training. Apprenticeships, which the hon. Gentleman described as growing steadily throughout the time of the Labour Government, as they did, would have been emasculated as a result of the public spending cuts that I think his party would have made had it been in government, and that I was being advised to make.
I then made a decision, which I think was one of my better ones, to listen to the advice, to reject it, and to do the exact opposite. We took a serious political hit on higher education, but we did the right thing in ensuring that universities were properly funded and that we got a fair repayment system. We also made the decision to invest more, not less, in apprenticeships. That is how we have got to where we are, with not only the volume but the quality. That is because we followed up getting the volume by taking short apprenticeships of below one year out of the system; by significantly supporting advanced and higher level apprenticeships; and, perhaps most importantly—the hon. Gentleman did not mention this at all—by introducing employer ownership through giving business a greater say in how these funds are allocated. In all those ways, we have improved quality.
Let me deal with some of the other critical comments in the hon. Gentleman’s speech and motion. First, he quoted the figure, as he did when he was on television with me the other day, regarding what he calls the lack of formal training—[Interruption.] Indeed, there was a survey that suggested that some apprentices—
Vince Cable
There were a substantial number of surveys; I am quoting the one that the hon. Gentleman has highlighted.
Vince Cable
We have published a survey in which 24% of apprentices said that they had not received formal training. The hon. Gentleman has built his criticism around that.
Vince Cable
I am not disowning the report; it clearly exists. [Interruption.] Perhaps the Opposition could be a little less silly and just try to follow the argument. The key is in the word “formal”. Many people do good apprenticeships in business that involve informal work in the workplace, and many people define good training in that way. The survey that we conducted, which the hon. Gentleman is having a little giggle about, tells us very clearly that 90% of those trainees are satisfied with their apprenticeships, while 72% are very satisfied. Ninety-seven per cent. said that they had been trained—sometimes informally, sometimes formally—and 90% got a job. Perhaps most crucially, there is a very high earnings premium. I have quoted the figure for level 2, and for level 3 it is significantly higher—about 16% three to five years after graduation. The proof of the pudding in is in the eating: these apprenticeships do provide satisfaction, jobs and higher salaries for the people who do them.
Let me address the minimum wage. The survey shows that 15% of people are not being paid the minimum wage. That figure is clearly too high, and unacceptable. The motion says that it is “one in five”. I am not sure who did the maths on this, but one in five is not 15%. Perhaps we need compulsory maths for Opposition Front Benchers as well as apprentices. The key point is that 15% is way down on the 30% figure that we inherited. As the hon. Gentleman knows, because he has been part of these debates during the past year, we have significantly improved enforcement measures. We have increased penalties from £5,000 per firm to £20,000 per person, we have introduced naming and shaming, and we have increased the enforcement budget by 30%. We do take the minimum wage seriously. We believe that it must be enforced and that it should apply to apprentices as it should to anyone else.
The hon. Gentleman is right that procurement is a lever for the public sector to employ. We already have many examples of good practice in public sector procurement. Crossrail is a company that has really committed itself to high levels of apprenticeships. There are a couple of practical problems, as I hope he recognises; I think he hinted at one of them. First, for small and medium-sized enterprises and social enterprises, where we are trying to increase the share of public procurement, there is a conflict of objectives. Do we regard getting SMEs into procurement as more important than increasing their number of apprenticeships? There is no clear answer to that. Secondly, companies that are required to introduce apprenticeships would simply add that to the cost and it would be passed on to the public sector, so instead of a direct subsidy through our 50:50 payment system we would be providing indirect subsidies. These are not crippling objections. We need to reflect on how we can better use public procurement, but crude legislation and compulsion is probably not the best way. I accept that public procurement is a good vehicle, and we have to work on this.
Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)
In my constituency of Basingstoke, the number of apprenticeships this year is double the number in 2009 under the last Government. Over the past four years, there have been more than 6,000 apprenticeships—1,600 in the last year alone.
I thank all the businesses who take on apprentices and the colleges that work so hard to make apprenticeships such a success. I am sure that the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna), did not want to suggest that those businesses were simply rebadging existing training programmes, because that would belittle the incredible work that the many hundreds of businesses in my constituency that take part in the schemes put into making them a success.
I welcome the announcement by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister that a future Conservative Government will make a £1 billion commitment to delivering 3 million more apprenticeships by 2020. That is the sort of commitment that businesses in my constituency want to see.
Why do I think that apprenticeships are so successful in my part of Hampshire? It is for three reasons. First, apprenticeships are part of the culture. We have one of the longest-running apprenticeship schemes in Basingstoke at the Atomic Weapons Establishment. Employers believe in apprenticeships because they have seen how they work, whether it is Fujitsu or MiniTec. Whether they are large or small, businesses have seen how apprenticeships deliver quality staff.
Secondly, businesses in Basingstoke believe in apprenticeships because we have one of the top-performing colleges in Basingstoke college of technology, which delivers hundreds of apprenticeship schemes every year in subjects as diverse as IT, web design and child care. Such organisations are leading the way, and we should be celebrating them today.
The third element, which was picked up on by my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) in his intervention, is the role of local enterprise partnerships. My local LEP, Enterprise M3, put apprenticeships at the heart of its skills and employability strategy that was published two years ago. It is that leadership and commitment, which has come right from the top, that has helped us to secure so much support, particularly through growth deal funding, which has supported the establishment of key skills centres right across the LEP. That is just the sort of support that we need for this programme.
I want to make three further points in the time that is available to me. First, the hon. Member for Streatham made it clear in his opening statement for the Opposition that the motion focuses on young people, and rightly so. However, he seemed very dismissive of the role of apprenticeships for older people who have been established in the work force for a number of years. He needs to consider that position more carefully. My local college delivers three quarters of its apprenticeships to people who are over the age of 18.
Mr Umunna
It is entirely wrong of the right hon. Lady to describe me as dismissing apprenticeships for older people. My point is that we need to increase the numbers dramatically, particularly in respect of young people. It is totally wrong of her to misconstrue my comments in that way.
Maria Miller
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making his position clear. It was a little less clear in his speech. The teaching staff at my local college will want to hear what he has just said, because it is important that we have a lifetime approach to training for people in our work force. Training does not stop when we leave college, school or university; it goes on through our lives. Apprenticeships offer an incredibly strong way for people to increase their skills and ensure that they have a high level of employability, particularly in areas such as mine, where we estimate that 50% of the job opportunities will require a higher education qualification in the future.
Secondly, I want to focus on the quality of apprenticeships. I commend the Government for driving up the standards of apprenticeships in recent years. However, I do not think that we should devalue the importance of level 2 apprenticeships. They are an immensely valuable way of making up for lost time at school or college for youngsters—or, indeed, older people—who do not have basic qualifications. I hope that the Opposition would want to rephrase the motion, because it tends to suggest that they are devaluing level 2 apprenticeships or writing them off altogether. I would not endorse that at all.
Finally, I know that the Minister is looking at funding routes that enable employers to get involved in apprenticeships, and I would like to talk to him about the process used by the Skills Funding Agency to allocate growth funding—perhaps he will meet me separately to discuss that. Currently, the SFA requires providers to recruit additional apprenticeships and then bid for funding. Opportunities to bid for funding are every three months, but the agency does not guarantee that extra funding will be allocated in that process. Colleges and employers should work together to maximise the opportunities for apprenticeships, and we must ensure that we do not lose opportunities simply because of the slowness of the process.