Oral Answers to Questions

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Nick Boles]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is often careers advisers and teachers who, perhaps for the best reasons in the world, just do not understand the opportunities out there in apprenticeships, or the fact that someone can now get a degree through an apprenticeship or rise to almost any position in the senior management of a company. It is no longer about a young lad under the bonnet of a car; it can still be that, but it can also be about a young woman who has just got a first-class degree at BAE Systems through a higher apprenticeship. We are trying to get that message out in every way we can.

[Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

This Government have contrived to create a country where this generation of young people is now the first generation for a century to be poorer than the generation before them. Young people now face an unemployment queue that is three quarters of a million long; graduates now face £44,000-worth of debt; and from figures published by BIS before Christmas, we learned that the number of apprenticeships for the under-24s has not gone up but down. Social mobility in this country is in reverse, and we need more apprenticeships for young people, not fewer. The Opposition have an ambition that by 2025 as many people should be going into an apprenticeship as are going to university. Is that an ambition that the Minister will match?

[Nick Boles]

What I hope to hear from the right hon. Gentleman is whether that pledge, which we have costed on a reasonable basis, received the approval of the shadow Chancellor. My understanding is that the shadow Chancellor has not approved the approximately £700 million of extra spending, entirely unexplained, that it would cost to support that ambition. The Government are very clear what our ambition is. We will create 3 million new apprenticeships in the life of the next Parliament. Those apprenticeships will be for all people who would benefit from them. Unlike the Labour party and the hon. Member for Coventry North West (Mr Robinson), we do not discriminate against people over the age of 24.