Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [Lords]

Damian Hinds Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 25th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

We cannot just wish it into being, we cannot assume it or assert it, and we cannot legislate for it: esteem is in the eye of the esteemer and parity of esteem is earned. In technical and vocational education and training, that requires a clear and understandable set of qualifications with high standards and specifications that people know cannot be fiddled because they have been set independently. It also requires equipping the individual with what they need to know and what they need to be able to do to succeed in a trade, craft or sector because those standards have been set by employers in that trade, craft or sector.

Those things were at the heart of the blueprint set out for technical and vocational education in this country, which has been followed for the last number of years. I say the blueprint, but it was also a red print, because it was the vision of Lord Sainsbury, a Labour peer. In his landmark report, he set out that we needed to reform the system so that we had a streamlined set of qualifications with clear paths to vocations. His recommendations included: a minimum length of time for apprenticeships, along with a minimum length of time off the job; for T-levels, a minimum length, which was much longer than usual for industrial placements; and standards set by employers. There was also the expansion of the remit of what was then the Institute for Apprenticeships to become the broader Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, linking apprenticeships and T-levels. Lord Sainsbury was also absolutely clear that specifying standards was not a job for Ministers in the Department for Education. It was a job for employers in the industries that would employ those apprentices.

We thought that those principles had become a matter of cross-party consensus. I am sorry to say that we were wrong. We have already had from this new Government a rowing back on the streamlining of qualifications. They have said that they will have shorter apprenticeships but still call them apprenticeships. Now, in the Bill, they will abolish—not reform or evolve—the body that is independent of Government, which sets the standards and ensures the integrity of the system.

Over 50 years in this country, we have had industrial training boards, the Manpower Services Commission, the Training Commission, training and enterprise councils—TECs—which were different from another TEC, the Technician Education Council, which existed alongside the Business Education Council, or BEC. BEC and TEC would eventually get together to give us the Business and Technology Education Council, or BTEC. There were national training organisations, the Learning and Skills Council, sector skills councils, the UK Commission for Employment and Skills and the Skills Funding Agency, or SFA, which would later become the Education and Skills Funding Agency, or ESFA. Lately, we have had local skills improvement plans and IfATE.

Now we will have Skills England, which will be the 13th skills agency in 50 years. I say to Ministers that if all it takes to solve our skills challenges is a new body, a machinery of Government change, do they not think that one of the previous 12 would have managed that already? Ministers, especially those in new Governments, like to create something new, and, in this case, they think that they have something new that business wants, which is a quango—except Skills England is not even a quango. I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for indulging me thus far in talking about all these things, because none of them is in the Bill. This Bill is not about Skills England. There are, I think, two mentions of Skills England in the text of the Bill and I think that they were both inserted by the House of Lords.

This Bill is about abolishing the independent institute that sets standards and passing those powers not to Skills England but to the Secretary of State. That is what Skills England is. Ministers are bandying about all these fancy terms about agency this, and agency that, but it is part of the Department for Education. When it comes to working across Government, I have no reason to believe that this new part of the DFE will be any more equipped to work across Government, let alone across the whole economy, in solving some of these issues.

I love the Department for Education deeply, but, honestly, to operate across Government, to exert leverage and to get things done, I am afraid that the new body has to be in the Treasury or possibly in the Cabinet Office—not in the Education Department, the Business and Trade Department, or some of the others that could have been picked. Therefore, far from reflecting what business needs, what this legislation does is remove the requirement for business to set the standards for what their future employees will learn.

Following the vote in the House of Lords, the Government say that they will amend the Bill to be clear that they will still listen to business. I have the amendment here. What it says is that they will be clear about the times when they will listen to business and when they will not, which is not quite the same thing. In any case, if we are to make use of that business voice—if it is really going to mean something—it has to go hand in hand with the independence of the body. As things stand, even if the DFE is listening to business, it will still be the convenor. There will be no other body. Therefore, it will be the Government who are setting the standards for T-levels and for apprenticeships. I have asked the Minister this question twice already. We would not allow the Department for Education to set the standards for A-levels. We would always have that independently done and verified. Therefore if we would not let it happen for A-levels, how can it be right for T-levels? That is a rhetorical question, but it is a rhetorical question that Ministers should try to answer.

Baroness Smith of Malvern set out all the things that were being done to make Skills England something other than just another unit—a mini department—within the DFE. Today, the Secretary of State has set out some of her appointments, which sound like good appointments, to that body. But none of that is in legislation. That was all news to us. News of this set-up and the appointments of these individuals has come out since the announcement of Skills England. We are voting over the course of the next few weeks, as the Bill passes through its stages, on what will be an Act of Parliament. All that Act of Parliament will say is that those powers are coming to the office of the Secretary of State for Education, and it will be for them to decide in the future how to use them. It may well be that this team of Ministers is in power for 25 to 30 years, or it may not. I encourage all colleagues to think about that. When we legislate, we do so not just for the next 12 months, or even for the next four or five years; we legislate the law of the land, which, all other things being equal, stays in place.

I have some good news. I confidently predict that the Government will hit all their targets on the numbers of young people going through technical vocational education and training and attaining. That is because I think back to the 2000s, and the key target of more children getting five or more GCSEs at grade C or above, including in English and maths. Year after year they made that happen, even though, as we knew subsequently, we were tumbling down the international comparison tables. About a dozen different ruses made those figures look better every year, and that was achieved even without having final control over the specification and what counted as passing or getting a particular grade. Let us imagine what the Government could achieve now.

The Government want a new body—fine. But to give it a chance to succeed for our economy and, crucially, for the young people who this ultimately is about, that body must be independent. I call on Ministers to take the opportunity, as this legislation goes through the House, to write that on the face of the Bill. We were encouraged by the Secretary of State saying earlier that, in any case, within two years they will review the status of Skills England with a view to perhaps making it a statutorily independent body. I encourage Ministers to take the opportunity in Committee to write that into the legislation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Darren Paffey (Southampton Itchen) (Lab)]

In rising to support the Bill, I want to say, without heaping too much praise on the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), that it is a pleasure to follow him and many of the comments he made. Like him, I have arrived at this place through the academic route, and perhaps precisely because of that, I, like him, am incredibly aware of the value of the vocational, practical and apprenticeship route. It is in that value that the power of what the Bill is seeking to achieve lies, and I hope to return to that point. I thank the Secretary of State, who is no longer in her place, for bringing forward the Bill, because seven months ago this country voted for change, and what we see today is another building block of that very necessary change.

On a recent visit to Southampton college’s marine skills centre in my constituency for National Apprenticeship Week last week, when it seems we were all busy making visits, I met some apprentices learning a whole range of skills, from engineering to electronics, to carpentry and yacht making. It was truly impressive, mostly because I would be entirely useless at all those skills. It reminded me that investing in apprenticeships is one of the most effective ways that we can equip the next generation with the skills they need. I am pleased to see that, with this Bill, the Government are taking action to ensure we get the right framework in place to shape our apprenticeship system. What apprentices want and what employers need is a system that offers routes into those meaningful, secure jobs, full of the dignity of work, that will bring them success as well as grow the economy.

I am not particularly obsessive about the structure of things or the way in which Government Departments organise themselves to implement policy. Like most people, I want what works, and I want what works best. The truth is that what we have at the moment, however much Opposition Members try to dress it up, is simply not working for too many people. I am pleased that the focus of the Bill is on how we create an agency that will reduce the number of hoops to jump through and will, as my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy) said, focus on outcomes, what happens at the end of these training courses, and opportunities.

[Damian Hinds]

Which hoops is the hon. Gentleman looking forward to the removal of?

[Darren Paffey]

I think the best people to answer that would be the employers who, time and again, have been telling us—and, I am pretty sure, telling the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues—about the pure bureaucracy and complexity of the system that has been set up. They are the best advocates of the need for change. By setting up Skills England we can give apprenticeships the flexibility and durability that we need, and that those training will need. Importantly, we can take the interests of employers and young people into account.

If the years since 2010 have taught us anything, it is that poor policy has consequences. Sadly, the IfATE structure set up by the previous Tory Government has failed to deliver and, alongside a lack of investment, that has left the UK with stubbornly high numbers of vacancies due to skills shortages and too many young people who are not in education, employment or training. I would welcome reflections from the Minister on how, at the same time as setting out the new framework and strategy for skills development, we can deal specifically with those not in education, employment or training, and whether a strategy specifically on that would be another jigsaw piece in resolving this picture.

Employers in Southampton Itchen are crying out for new trainees and employees, especially those with crucial, basic digital skills, but even today in this country about 7.5 million working-age adults lack those skills. Is that the golden Tory legacy that we keep being reminded of by Members on the Opposition Benches? All of that is changing with the structures that the Bill sets up, paving the way for Skills England. That will meet the skills challenges of today and empower all training providers and employers, including the excellent Kiwi Education and the South Coast Institute of Technology, to drive maritime, engineering, hospitality and digital opportunities in and around Southampton. It will also ensure that we reset the prestige of apprentices and the apprenticeship route, and elevate them once again to a place of real value.

I associate myself with comments from Members on both sides of the Chamber about the value of apprenticeship skills. I say that as someone who has paid my bills by being a university lecturer for a number for years, yet throughout my time in politics I have championed apprenticeship routes. A piece of paper at the end of something is pretty incidental, to be frank, because its real power is what it empowers someone to do and which doors it opens up. To return to the point made by the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings, it is about what skills enable someone to be, and what they become through those skills. That is where the real value and prestige of apprenticeships lies, and that is why we are resetting the value of them.

If we want growth and a well-trained workforce, the Bill is a route to delivering that. With this Bill, and with action that I know Ministers will be taking in future, this Labour Government are widening options and breaking down barriers to opportunity for people in Southampton and beyond. That is why I will be proud to walk through the Lobby and vote for the Bill later today.