Queen’s Speech

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak about the skills and post-16 education Bill, and briefly on the building safety Bill. The skills Bill will legislate for a number of important and valuable initiatives outlined in January’s Skills for Jobs White Paper, such as putting employers at the heart of post-16 skills, including through local skills improvement plans, creating a lifetime skills guarantee and a lifelong loan entitlement, and providing greater support for further education. These are welcome extensions of existing policies on apprenticeships, T-levels, careers education and guidance and the Kickstart programme, which seems to get less attention than it should.

What really matters, as we have seen from the vaccination programme, is the actual delivery—whether all these initiatives succeed in delivering the right skills at the right time in the right places and to the right people, especially for young people seeking to enter the jobs market at this challenging time. An overarching skills strategy is needed to ensure they complement and reinforce each other, rather than creating a complex and confusing tangle of options through which those seeking new skills, upskilling or reskilling struggle to find a suitable route.

First, there need to be clear, flexible and well-defined pathways allowing learners to follow different routes according to their interests and abilities, with options to combine academic and technical elements and to include short, modular courses where appropriate. A well-resourced, well-qualified cadre of professional careers advisers will be essential to help individuals to identify and navigate the best pathways for them, and needs to be part of the strategy. Why could there not be a UCAS-like online service providing information about the whole range of technical and vocational training available and how to access it?

Secondly, the apprenticeships levy should be made more flexible. A significant proportion of levy funds is apparently going unspent. As part of an overall skills strategy, the scope of the levy could be broadened to cover a wider range of much-needed skills training activities —a skills levy, rather than just an apprenticeships levy.

Thirdly, much more needs to be done to promote the Skills for Jobs strategy, especially to three groups: parents, who are often the most important careers advisers; schools and teachers still not aware enough of the technical options available and, as we have heard, not complying enough with the Baker clause; and employers, large and small, who play such a crucial part and are among the greatest beneficiaries of a better skilled workforce.

SMEs need more specific help to play their part in skills training. They are particularly subject to the vagaries of cash flow and depend heavily on being paid for their work promptly and in full. Without that, their ability to invest, including in training, work experience and apprenticeships, is threatened—as, indeed, sometimes, is their very survival.

The practice of retentions in the construction sector, whereby larger contractors withhold a proportion of payments owed to their, usually smaller, subcontractors—ostensibly as insurance against possible defects in their work, but often it is an unreasonable sum or for an unreasonable period—is damaging to the performance and quality of the construction sector as a whole. Dame Judith Hackitt’s report following the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which the building safety Bill aims to implement, states:

“Payment terms within contracts (for example, retentions) can drive poor behaviours, by putting financial strain into the supply chain. For example non-payment of invoices and consequent cash flow issues can cause subcontractors to substitute materials purely on price rather than value for money or suitability for purpose.”


The Government have been promising for some years now to address the issue of retentions, on which there has been numerous consultations and reports but no action. In fact, I find myself sitting next to the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, who committed to provide one of those reports during the passage of the Enterprise Bill in 2015. It is high time for the Government to act, and I hope that the building safety Bill will prove to offer the legislative vehicle that is needed.