Newcastle Upon Tyne, North Tyneside and Northumberland Combined Authority (Adult Education Functions) Order 2019

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Tuesday 1st October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for introducing this order, which, as we have heard, provides for a number of adult education functions to be transferred from the Secretary of State to the Newcastle Upon Tyne, Tyneside and Northumberland Combined Authority, the name of which, as we heard from my noble friend, has been shortened to the North Tyne Authority, which is much less of a mouthful. It will operate from the 2020-21 academic year onwards. These functions relate to education and training for persons aged 19 or over; to learning aims for such persons and provision of facilities; and to the payment of their tuition fees. The exceptions are in relation to apprenticeship training or a person subject to adult detention. Will the noble Lord clarify why apprenticeships are not included, and who will have responsibility for the education of those in adult detention?

We can all agree with and support the function to encourage education and training for persons aged 19 or over, and the Liberal Democrats supported the creation of this new authority, although we regretted that the four councils south of the Tyne refused to take part. There are powerful combined authorities elsewhere across the north of England that have mayors. They give focus to strategic planning and to the delivery of growth, jobs, higher education and skills standards. The Minister has named those combined authorities.

We support the order and welcome the devolution of functions to local areas, away from central departments. This will allow the combined authority to support the skills that are needed in the local area and ensure that they are appropriate for the local economy. Because, in addition to general skills, many parts of the country have local skills, often craft skills which should be encouraged, particularly where they draw local young people into continuing skills which might otherwise be lost. I do not know exactly what these would be in this area, but I think of such things as papermaking, basket weaving, glass-blowing and watchmaking, all of which have small numbers who keep long-standing crafts alive. At a recent Craft All-Party Parliamentary Group, we had demonstrations of these, along with neon light making. Local crafts for local jobs are an important part of the economy, as well as being important for our heritage.

How much funding will be allocated, and how does this compare with government funding for further education colleges more generally? How will more training and education be encouraged? How will the combined authority be held accountable for the functions that are being devolved? As my noble friend set out so clearly, this is an area with huge transport problems. Given those transport shortages and the long journeys students often have to make, what provision will the Government make to help with transport costs? I welcome the consultation that took place locally on the content of the order, I look forward to the Minister’s reply, and I wish the order well.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for introducing this order. As he said, it is of course similar to orders relating to six other combined authorities which we considered in your Lordships’ House almost exactly a year ago. I do not intend to repeat what I said then—at least, not at the same length. I will repeat, however, that the devolution of powers and funding for adult education that this order introduces are welcome. I very much hope that it enhances the provision of adult education in the north-east.

I thank my noble friend Lord Beecham for his local knowledge and for setting out the region’s funding cuts—sustained over the past decade—and what the new combined authority will face as a result. Much effective adult education provision is delivered locally, in line with the needs of communities. As the accompanying Explanatory Memorandum states, the transfer of those functions will assist in providing local areas with a role in,

“managing and shaping their own economic prosperity”.

Spending on education and adult learning needs to be seen as an investment for the long term. To achieve a sustainable supply of skills with the flexibility needed to meet the ever-evolving needs of business, industry and the public sector, the UK must maximise the potential of its existing workforce. That means that all adults of working age, whatever their background or location, need every opportunity to upskill and/or reskill. Learning and earning will make the biggest and quickest difference for the learners themselves, to their families, and to the communities they live in, as well as to employers and the wider economy itself.

A year ago, I referred to the possible unintended consequences of this transition from centralised to devolved funding. I highlighted the case of the Workers’ Educational Association, a long-established and hugely respected organisation of 116 years’ standing and the UK’s largest voluntary sector provider of adult education. I said then and I repeat now that I need to declare an interest of sorts, as the WEA was my first employer after leaving university. More than 25% of the WEA’s 48,000 students are in the combined authority areas, and many of them are from deprived communities that are furthest from the labour market. The devolution of funding could have the unintended consequence of diminishing this provision rather than enhancing it.

In last year’s debate, the Minister recognised the work being done by the WEA and stated that it,

“has a major role to play in delivering adult education and fostering a culture of lifelong adult learning … It is vital that providers such as the WEA make contact with the MCAs”—

the combined authorities—

“and support them so that the local economy and workforce have the skills and expertise that they need for the future. We have provided some guidance to the MCAs for the transitional years”.—[Official Report, 24/10/18; col. GC 85.]

I regret to say that, one year on, some of the WEA’s fears have been confirmed. The organisation has adapted to the new landscape by securing grants and contracts in most devolved areas, though this has not been without the loss of provision in several areas either because it was unsuccessful in its bids, or the new contracts did not support the same range of provision as the organisation previously delivered. As a national provider delivering locally, it remains in a difficult position, seeking multiple grants and contracts against different criteria, often on a year-by-year basis. It should surely be of benefit to combined authorities to acknowledge the level and impact of existing national provision in their area, not only as regards the WEA, and to seek a degree of continuity and gradual transition. It would help if the Government too acknowledged the role of national providers, thus safeguarding against the unintended consequence of destabilising provision, which is already having an impact on local authorities.

I want to raise a matter relating to the Explanatory Memorandum. Paragraph 12.1, under the heading “Impact”, states that:

“There is no significant impact on business, charities or voluntary bodies”.


It would be helpful—indeed instructive—if the Minister were to explain how such a statement could be included when, in paragraph 10.1, the memorandum states that no consultation was carried out. On what basis was it therefore determined that there was,

“no significant impact on business, charities or voluntary bodies”?

I ask this because the WEA is one of Britain’s biggest charities and a voluntary body. It was not asked what the likely impact would be, although of course it made its representations and concerns known to the DfE in advance of the orders introduced last year. It is clear that the impact of this and the previous orders is certainly “significant” as regards its ability to continue its established delivery of adult education.

The meaning of “significant” is of course subjective. Can the Minister say whether his officials assessed the effect on providers such as the WEA and deemed that effect to be not significant? If so, we should be told what criteria were used and at what level the impact would have been deemed significant. I do not expect him to provide these answers today, but I ask him to write to me setting out explanations. For devolution to be fully effective, support must be offered to the full range of providers—local and national—especially those already working with the most disadvantaged.

As the Open University has reported, the real casualties from the 2012 funding changes in higher education have been part-time students in England, whose numbers have since dropped by around 60%. Those who have been most deterred from study by the trebling of tuition fees are not those aged 18 entering full-time higher education but older, especially disadvantaged students. It is apparent that the biggest reason for the decline is the fees and funding policy in England because the scale of the decline in England, where tuition fees are much higher, is two and a half times greater than in other parts of the UK.

The key question regarding the future delivery of adult education concerns how much funding will transfer and how that will affect the ability of the combined authorities to deliver a full provision. The transitional funding in preparation for the full implementation of this order is not clear. The Minister said there was £6 million available in funding for the six combined authorities that were the subject of orders last year for 2019-20 and 2020-21, funded nationally by the Education and Skills Funding Agency. The combined authority for the north-east opted to begin its transition from academic year 2020-21, so will it also receive transitional funding for two years, including for 2021-22? How much will be made available annually?

The spending review announced £400 million for further education, which was widely welcomed within a sector that had been starved of adequate funding over the previous decade. Yesterday we had the unexpected announcement by the Secretary of State of £120 million for eight new institutes of technology. That was without consultation with the FE sector, which is already performing much of what he seems to envisage, so why reinvent the wheel? Simply fund FE colleges adequately and they will do the job that is necessary. But I am afraid that we now seem to have a rather macho Secretary of State who thinks that the role of Cabinet Minister is not demanding enough, so he has abolished the post of Minister of State for Apprenticeships and Skills and subsumed that remit within his own. I have never been a Cabinet Minister but I am fairly confident that it is a full-time job. I am equally confident that any previous Minister of State for Apprenticeships and Skills would contend that that too is a full-time job. To downgrade that post and bury it within the Secretary of State’s own portfolio demeans the importance of the skills agenda and the need to expand it, rather than the opposite. Labour will certainly reinstate the Minister of State post, while ensuring that apprenticeships and skills have the funding and the direction needed to play their part in building the economy that the country needs.

I may have departed somewhat from the order, but my final remarks are directly related to the devolution of adult education functions. The last thing required is mixed messages about how we ensure that we provide for the sustainable supply of flexible skills to which I referred earlier. This order is one part of the jigsaw, which is why we welcome it, but much more needs to be done.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their contributions to this discussion on the statutory instrument. I will endeavour to answer as many of the questions as I can.

The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, asked a number of questions on the size of the combined authority region itself. This came out of the devolution deal that was agreed in that part of the country. I am not familiar with the local politics in that part of the world, but there are some fairly fierce rivalries, and the area that we ended up with was about as good as could be created at the time. On the size of the allocated funding for this region and the plans for the future, that will be part of the spending review, and the details will be announced once we are aware of them ourselves. On the devolution of other functions, we are very much taking an incremental approach. We want to make sure that the functions we have devolved are improved upon, and if local authorities or combined authorities prove that they are good at it, I am sure that we will have a debate about whether more can move in the future. However, at this stage, we want to make this work.

The same applies to the apprenticeship levy, which will maintain as a central function. To answer the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, because this is a relatively new and very profound change to the way apprenticeships work, we wanted to make sure that it was run centrally until we had ironed out all the glitches. Again, I am sure that this will come up for discussion in the future.

On schools funding, I take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, on his rather gloomy view of the position. As I am sure he is aware, we announced a dramatic increase in schools funding only a few weeks ago of some £14 billion over the next three years—which I think is one of the largest single uplifts in funding for 10 or 15 years. That is before we take into account another £4.5 billion which is going into the teachers’ pension scheme contributions for schools.

I should be very happy to look at the case of the individual school to which the noble Lord referred, which claimed that it could not afford adequate books for its pupils. As the Minister responsible for academies, I spend a great deal of time ensuring that schools are run properly, and perhaps may be able to shine a light on any issues in that particular school. The noble Lord is also somewhat unenthusiastic about academies. There have indeed been failures there, but it is worth reminding the House that the whole point of academies was to tackle entrenched underperformance in local authority schools that often had gone on for 10 or 20 years. Indeed, schools that I took over from the local authority where my academy trust operated had been failing for 15 or 20 years. In the academies programme, we move much more quickly if the academy trust proves unable to sort out the challenges that it undertook in the first place.

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The noble Lord was concerned about the downgrading of the skills agenda in the department by the Secretary of State. To defend my Secretary of State, it was not his decision that a Minister was moved from the department to another part of government, but I would take a more “glass half full” approach, which is that it is because he believes it is such an important area that he has taken on a lot of the responsibility himself. I have also been given the oversight of the financial performance of further education colleges, so I am learning on that brief, too, but I assure the noble Lord that it is an extremely important part of our remit. As someone who never went to university, I know how important these colleges are for the education of young people.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

I am intrigued by the noble Lord’s comments. I unreservedly withdraw any suggestion that the Secretary of State might be acting in a macho manner—but it seems that somebody was. Can he enlighten us as to whose decision it was? If it was not the Prime Minister, my adjective might remain appropriate.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I am afraid I am going to have to disappoint the noble Lord. Those decisions were taken above my pay grade. I can assure him that the further education brief is given full support and impact in the department. I will need to write to the noble Lord on some of his more technical questions around transitional funding and so on, but I will be very happy to do that. We will continue with a watching brief on how this devolution is rolling out.

I reiterate that the order needs to be introduced to allow the combined authority to work with providers to tailor adult education provision for the academic year 2020-21. It will give residents the opportunity to reach their potential, improve their earnings and gain progression, and it will allow the system to deliver in a more flexible and responsive way and have the agility required to sustain a flexible economy. I commend the order to the House.