Business of the House

Ian Mearns Excerpts

Thursday 26th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

My right hon. Friend raises a very interesting point. I shall have to look into it and come back to him.

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

Despite the fact that the Backbench Business Committee has a number of unheard debates on the stocks, it has been difficult to cajole hon. Members to air their debates on Thursday 3 May. There must be something happening outside in the country on that day, although I am not quite sure what it might be. It therefore falls to us to have a general debate on matters to be raised before the May Day Adjournment. I thank the Leader of the House for giving us that time on 3 May, but I hope that that will not prevent us from getting more time during that month for other debates to be aired. May we also have a debate or a statement in Government time on the strategy to upskill the population and workforce of this country? There has recently been a significant drop in the number of people being recruited into apprenticeships, and that coincides with the number of students doing degrees with the Open University falling by 74,000 between 2012 and the present day. What is going wrong with our strategy to upskill our population to meet the demands of the new technological age?

[Andrea Leadsom]

We always seek to give as much Back-Bench time as we can, because the hon. Gentleman has some very important debates going on and we seek to support them wherever possible. He also raised the issue of upskilling, and I can tell him that we have committed to reaching 3 million new apprenticeship starts in England by 2020, and that there are more than 1.2 million starts already. So we are in a good place and we seek to do more. With the new apprenticeship levy, we expect to see many more taken up in due course. We have also abolished the cap on student numbers in further and higher education, and record numbers—particularly of disadvantaged young people—are now going to university. I do not think we should be concerned about a failure to upskill our young people; on the contrary, there is an enormous improvement going on that we should all be proud of.