Queen’s Speech

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, when I put my name down to speak in this debate, it was inspired not so much by what we were discussing today but by the subjects discussed yesterday. Primarily, I am going to talk about the apprenticeship system and the developments in it. The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, may wish that she had taken a few more moments over her break, because I have discussed this subject with her far too often; neither of us particularly wanted to, but we felt we had to. We are missing the noble Lord, Lord Young, who talked about apprenticeships.

On this subject, the cock-up school of history is proved right in Whitehall. The training programme for business has not paid attention to what is going on in the education sector. We have a new approach on SEN. Perhaps the Minister could give us an assurance that in future when there is a training scheme we will not make the series of mistakes that we made over the introduction of the apprenticeship scheme. We designed it so that the biggest disability group in the country, dyslexics, or at least those at the severe end—I think that my interests are pretty well known in this House—were excluded from taking the qualification, because it asked for a written English test. You could not use the normal ways around to cope with that test that were available in all other parts of the education sector. I do not think that it was malicious. People said that we must raise standards and have good written skills, so we should have this very tough qualification. When the previous Government brought it in and the problem was pointed out to them, they said, “Yes, we will change it”. But we then had something rather inconvenient called the general election. There are lots of sporting analogies you can make about dropping the ball and bad passes; all I know is that we are now scrambling back to recover from the damage. The last 18 months of my life, which have impinged on the noble Baroness and many other Ministers, have been spent trying to correct this, because we have a series of regulations that make it incredibly difficult to change.

Are we going to ensure that we look more across the board? If you have been in this House as long as I have, you can make a series of set speeches on almost any occasion. For example, you can speak about the Chinese walls that exist between departments, which means that they do not talk to each other. There is a massive example of that happening in the area which I am discussing. Indeed, there are Chinese walls within departments, which means that people in different segments of the same department do not talk to each other. If you are dyslexic, you can take a degree with assistive technology. I declare another interest in that I am chairman of a company which provides such technology. You cannot use that technology when undertaking an apprenticeship or for a course that trains you to develop a skill, usually a manual skill, which involves you not being based in an office with a computer. However, you can use it to take a degree in English, which might help you to find such work. A drunken logic is crawling through my remarks.

I hope that the Government will act quickly to correct the mistakes that have been made in this area. The noble Baroness and I are wonderful friends but I do not wish to keep discussing this subject with her. Therefore, I hope that it will be addressed more effectively than has been the case. I thank the noble Baroness as progress seems to have been made in this area. However, I will not celebrate as I thought that I had dealt with this matter on three previous occasions. Perhaps it is a case of fourth time lucky. The previous Government acted in good faith in this regard but we should remember that their attempts to rectify the situation went wrong. The current Government should remember that and try to adopt a culture of cross-departmental oversight. We must not allow the mistakes to which I have referred to recur. If departments look more carefully at what other departments are doing, we will save ourselves a great deal of time.

If you want to help those disabled people for whom it is most difficult to obtain employment, particularly high-value employment—people with dyslexia may comprise the biggest single group of people in these circumstances but they are not the only ones by a long way—and who are most commonly either unemployed or underemployed, you must make training more accessible. Unless you have the culture in place that I have described, you will not achieve this. Please will the Government reconsider this issue and ensure that the mistakes which have been made do not recur and that training is accessible at all times? If that is not done, irrespective of anything else that you might do, you will end up taking two steps forward, one back and then usually one sideways. Life is too short; let us not make the same mistakes again.