Technical and Further Education Bill (Third sitting)

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 24th November 2016 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Obviously that is not a matter for the Chair. However, the point has been made and I invite the Minister, if he wishes to respond, to do so.

[The Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills (Robert Halfon)]

Thank you, Mr Bailey—

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

rose—

[Kelvin Hopkins]

It is further to that point of order, Mr Bailey. I just want to support my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South. I arrived at the House fairly recently and picked up the paper from my office, but I have not had time to read it, and it is clearly lengthy. I entirely support what he said and hope that the Minister will be accommodating.

[Robert Halfon]

The existing policy statement has already been on the gov.uk website for several weeks, as has the delegated powers memorandum. What was provided last night was an expanded refresh, but we have provided information on the policy, and that is the key point.

[Gordon Marsden]

I appreciate what the Minister says about the original version having been on the website, but the point is that this is not the original but an expanded version. He used the word “refresh”, which, if I may say so, politely, is another slightly slippery term that would be best avoided. This is actually an amended version of what was on the website, which is why we are raising the issue.

We broadly support the principles of the Bill. We are trying to take it forward and do due diligence, as all members of the Committee should want to do. This is not a partisan argument or an opportunity to score points; it is about treating the Committee with the respect it deserves. Hon. Members received a significantly amended version of the policy statement at 5 o’clock last night, without having had any prior indication. I return to my point, which the Minister has not answered: why could this document not have been circulated on Tuesday? Why was it left until 5 o’clock on a Wednesday evening, when many hon. Members perhaps were not looking at, or were unable to look at, their emails? The Minister has heard already that my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North has picked his up only this morning. Frankly, if we want to proceed in a co-operative and friendly way in the Committee, this is no way to run a railway.

[Gordon Marsden]

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point, and I assume that most of the time these things come about—if I am not using unparliamentary language—as a result of a cock-up, rather than a conspiracy. For the sake of Hansard, I stress that I am not saying that that was the case here. What I am saying is that it was not terribly helpful that the document turned up at only 5 o’clock last night. I understand that these issues are quite complex. I might add in passing, however, that some of the discussion in this sitting will be about capacity, and if the Minister’s Department did not have the capacity to produce this very important document by Tuesday, that will raise concerns about its capacity to do some of the other things that it needs to do in relation to the Bill.

I am not asking that the document not be looked at. I entirely accept the point made by the hon. Member for North West Cambridgeshire that these things happen, but in the circumstances I think it not unreasonable to ask that hon. Members on both sides of the Committee, who might want to look at some of these issues, should have the opportunity to table amendments in the light of this policy statement. I remind those on the Government Front Bench that clause 1 and schedule 1 deal with most if not all of the meat of the establishment of this new institution, and we should get that right.

[Robert Halfon]

I will just say one final word on the matter. It is important to note that this is existing material. Most of it is already in the public domain—in the Sainsbury report and the explanatory notes. We did not publish it on Tuesday because we wanted to be able to digest the oral evidence session. There is no conspiracy. We were just trying to be helpful to the Committee by ensuring that there was a fuller note on the matter.

[Gordon Marsden]

I entirely accept the Minister’s explanation. It is unfortunate that we are in this situation, but I am asking whether, under the circumstances, we will be able to move amendments to clause 1 and schedule 1 by manuscript or on a starred basis at the beginning of next week.

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[The Chair]

The situation is that Members can table amendments if the Committee has not moved on, but if schedule 1 has been taken, they cannot. I call the Minister.

[Robert Halfon]

The policy document does not change anything. As I say, most of it was already in the public domain and we were just trying to help the Committee. We are here to debate the clause and schedule relevant to the issue in hand.

[The Chair]

I will move on to some preliminary announcements. Today we begin line-by-line consideration of the Bill. Members may remove their jackets during Committee meetings. Please ensure that all electronic devices are turned off or switched to silent mode.

The selection list for today’s sittings is available in the room and shows how the selected amendments have been grouped for debate. Grouped amendments are generally on the same or similar issues. The Member who has put their name to the leading amendment in a group will be called first. Other Members will then be free to catch my eye and speak to all or any of the amendments in that group. A Member may speak more than once in a debate. I will work on the assumption that the Minister wishes the Committee to reach a decision on all Government amendments.

Please note that decisions on amendments take place not in the order in which amendments are debated, but in the order in which they appear on the amendment paper. In other words, debate occurs according to the selection list and decisions are taken when we come to the clause that the amendment affects. I hope that explanation is helpful. I will use my discretion to decide whether to allow a separate stand part debate on individual clauses and schedules following the debates on the relevant amendments. If any Member wishes to make a declaration of interest, he or she may do so at this point.

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[Robert Halfon]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey. I am very pleased to be here this morning to begin line-by-line consideration of this important Bill. I look forward to debating it with all members of the Committee. I particularly want to convey my thanks to Lord Sainsbury and his Independent Panel on Technical Education for the excellent work that they have done on technical education, which we are now taking forward through the post-16 skills plan in the Bill.

I want to pay significant tribute to my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles), who has been recovering from a serious illness. It was good to see him in the House recently. I want to thank everyone who has taken time to serve on the Committee, and I thank you, Mr Bailey, and Ms Dorries for serving as chairpersons. I thank those who gave oral evidence on Tuesday this week and those who have already submitted written evidence; their expert contribution has got us off to a great start.

Turning to part 1 of the Bill, clause 1 seeks to amend the name of the Institute for Apprenticeships to reflect its wider responsibility for college-based technical education. The Enterprise Act 2016 will establish the Institute for Apprenticeships. The institute is expected to come into operation in April 2017 with apprenticeship functions. The clause, together with schedule 1, will extend the institute’s remit to reflect the Government’s vision for the skills system set out in the post-16 plan.

The reforms will result in technical education qualifications that are designed around employers’ needs. They will support young people and adults to secure sustained employment and will meet the needs of our rapidly changing economy. Measures to extend the institute’s remit are important for a number of reasons. As a country, we face a pressing need for more highly skilled people, yet the current system presents a bewildering array of overlapping qualifications with similar aims. We cannot continue to let so many of our young people work their way through a succession of low-level, low-value qualifications that lead at best to low-skilled, low-paid employment.

The Bill will give the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education responsibility for approving high-quality technical qualifications that develop the skills, knowledge and behaviours required by employers for skilled employment. Apprenticeships and college-based technical education courses will be based on a common set of employer-developed standards. This will ensure consistency between the two methods of obtaining a technical education.

Securing a step change in technical education is vital for the productivity of this country. By 2020—we are open and honest about this—the UK is set to fall to 28th out of 33 OECD countries in terms of developing intermediate skills. The size of the post-secondary technical sector in England is extremely small by international standards. That affects our productivity, where we lag behind competitors such as Germany and France by as much as 36%. Unless we take action, we will be left further behind.

A high-quality skills system needs to be distinct from the academic option. Academic qualifications such as A-levels are clearly understood, yet most young people do not go to university. Evidence shows that technical qualifications have long been regarded as inferior to academic qualifications. Reforming the system so that it provides a clear line of sight to the world of work will ensure that technical education in this country is valued as equally as the academic option.

The reformed technical education system will be built around a clear framework of skilled occupations. Occupational maps will be used to identify the occupations that are suitable for technical education, grouping together those with similar requirements, designing the system around clearly identifiable occupations, and bringing together employers to identify the skills and knowledge needed for those occupations. They will ensure that the new system genuinely meets the needs of individuals, employers and the economy.

It is important that a single organisation is responsible for working with employers and is the custodian of employer-led standards. Giving the institute responsibility at the heart of these reforms will ensure that all technical education provision is closely aligned and of the same high quality. We will ensure that the institute has the skills and capacity to be responsible for technical education when its remit is extended in April 2018. It is right that the institute’s name is changed to reflect the wider scope of its responsibilities.

[Gordon Marsden]

I associate myself with the Minister’s kind words about his predecessor, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford. It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey, and that of Ms Dorries. I appreciate that this is quite a technical and detailed Bill, so we will depend upon the skills of the Clerks and hopefully timely policy submissions from the Government to wade our way through it.

The Minister rightly spoke about the broad need for the institute. He talked frankly about the situation in terms of technical skills, which was alluded to recently by the noble Baroness Wolf. It is absolutely right that we have the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education—I do not know whether we are going to have to state that in full all the way through, or perhaps we can use the acronym; I assume the “E” will not be silent. I shall not detain the Committee with the story of why one Government had to change the title of a higher education and lifelong learning department; Members can think about that acronym.

[Robert Halfon]

On a point of order, Mr Bailey. To help the Committee, IFATE is a perfectly acceptable description of the institute during the debate.

[Gordon Marsden]

Great. I shall use it with relish.

We are very much in favour of the establishment of IFATE. We were very much in favour of the establishment of the Institute for Apprenticeships—so much so, in fact, that we anticipated the Government in tabling a clause in which, with our limited capacity as opposed to the civil service’s, we tried to spell out what that institute should do. I make that point to issue a caution to the Minister. He is still relatively new to his post, but not to this field; he has a distinguished record in championing apprenticeships, both in person and in policy. I am entirely confident that the principle of everything he has said today is very close to his heart—it is not always close to every Minister’s heart, but I think it is in his case—and that he will do his best to take that through.

We did not oppose the Bill’s Second Reading, not simply because of the Minister’s personal qualities but also because we believe there is a great deal of good in the Bill. However, the devil is in the detail, and the detail that causes us significant concern, and to which my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State referred on Second Reading, is the fact that we come to the Bill and to this new institution with a great deal of rather confused and not very comforting baggage.

I remind the Committee that when the Enterprise Bill was originally going through the House of Lords, where it started, there was no concept of an Institute for Apprenticeships at all. If Members consult the Hansard report of the House of Lords debates, they will see that there was much discussion on the Government Front Bench as to how the whole issue of standards could be developed. At one stage, a Government spokesperson suggested—whether accurately or otherwise I do not know—that some of it might be the province of trading standards officers. I think most Members here who know the way in which local government has had its trading standards officers cut back in recent years would agree that that is probably an over-optimistic assessment.

In due course the Government decided that they needed to set up an arm’s length body, which is why, at a relatively late stage during the Commons debate on the Enterprise Bill—I think it was on Report; I might be wrong—the then Minister, the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), tabled an amendment to that effect, which we then debated in Committee. As I said, the Government on that occasion had not got their act together to put a clause down establishing it in the Bill, so we put one down and we discussed it.

I know that no Government like to take anybody else’s idea, but we were rather disappointed that, when the Bill eventually came out, it was a fairly standard boilerplate structure, if I can put it that way, for setting up any institution of this sort. As we know, this is an innovation that potentially takes quite a lot of working responsibilities away from the Department for Education and the Skills Funding Agency. I think we are now back in the sort of territory that we were in during the Committee stage of the Higher Education and Research Bill. The Minister I faced then was the Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, but we had exactly the same conversations in that Committee about the appropriateness of a Bill that established the office for students but did not mandate students to go on to that body. I feel a sense of déjà vu, because we are in exactly the same place with this Bill. We will return to the detail of that amendment in due course, but I mention it now only to illustrate the lack of connectivity that there seems to have been, and the relatively late stage at which guidelines for the Institute for Apprenticeships have been produced.

Hon. Members might also remember that the skills plan was originally intended to be in the Government’s academies mark 2 Bill. It disappeared from that Bill at a relatively late stage, when the Government realised that that Bill would be too hot to handle with their Back Benchers. We then had the rather strange situation, again at the very last minute, in which a Government statement about introducing the Bill and laying out its provisions had a little bit tucked in the middle saying, “Oh, by the way, we’ve decided we don’t have to go ahead with the academies issue.” I am not here to talk about academies, but I mention that example because it is illustrative. The hon. Member for North West Cambridgeshire spoke earlier about things that go wrong in Government. It is illustrative of the fact that the Government felt, at a relatively late stage—largely because of their embarrassment over that Bill, some observers believe—that this set of changes, which we welcome, should have separate legislation.

Whatever the reasons for that, we welcome it now, although I will gently say that it would have been better to have been able to discuss some of this in more detail, and possibly to have the Institute for Apprenticeships itself incorporated in the Higher Education and Research Bill. During the passage of that Bill, as the Government Whip will well remember, the Minister for Universities and Research spoke at length about the importance of higher level skills and everything that went with that, so it seems rather bizarre to some of us that this did not go into that Bill in the first place. We will not dwell on that.

What we want and need to dwell on are the issues relating to capacity. Capacity and time in terms of establishment have plagued the Government ever since discussions about the skills plan and the apprenticeship levy started. Sector skills council after sector skills council, employer bodies and providers have all had queasiness about the apprenticeship levy. We, too, support the levy, but we share some of the severe concerns about its implementation. A long list of organisations, including the Confederation of British Industry and the Federation of Small Businesses, have expressed and continue to feel concern about timing and capacity.

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[Kelvin Hopkins]

Thank you, Mr Bailey. I was aware that I was straying from the subject. As I said, I taught in further education myself. I have taught a small number of day-release students as well, mainly A-levels in economics, politics and statistics. My experience was not very long—three years or so—but it was a great experience that has coloured my politics ever since. I know the difficulties of training young people.

Another problem that we have had is that, because of the reduction in employer size, there are fewer employees, and it is harder for a small employer to sustain an apprentice without a proper levy system with heavy state subsidy. I think that the levy system is exactly right; I would like it to be more extensive, so that we can give apprentices secure employment with reasonable pay, while they are working and studying. Apprenticeships across the board need to be properly sustained financially and a levy system is the way forward. We are moving in that direction.

I have come across another problem. Small garages, for example, might take on an apprentice as a car mechanic, who might stay there for three years, but then that small garage might suddenly find that its apprentice has been poached by a big garage that does insurance work, which would be very lucrative and much more highly paid. The small garage loses out because it has put a lot of work and finance into training somebody who has been lost to a bigger employer. We ought to be training more people and giving more security to small employers to ensure that they can sustain an apprentice with similar and appropriate pay for a longer period.

There is a lot for the institute to address. I welcome the fact that we are moving in the right direction, but we must ensure that apprenticeships are high quality and secure, not just because our young people should have the right to good training, education and skills, but because our country and its economy needs those people to do well.

[Robert Halfon]

I could listen to the hon. Member for Luton North for a long time on this subject, because he speaks with a lot of wisdom. I have been to the north-east of England to see young people on five-year apprenticeships in companies, doing exactly the things that he talks about.

I will just say that the public and private sectors will be following the same standards. We have exactly the same standards on training and quality, and we are introducing a public sector target from April 2017 in all areas to increase the number of apprenticeships in the public sector: 30,000 by 2020.

I will respond to the points made by the hon. Member for Blackpool South. He is kind about me and it is good to be opposing someone who also cares passionately. I very much enjoyed the visit to Blackpool and the Fylde College. What it is doing is extraordinary, not just for students but for the long-term unemployed.

I will comment on a few things, given that we are about to discuss amendments. The hon. Gentleman said that the levy was an administrative challenge for the IFA. It is important that it has only an advisory role on funding caps. The implementation of the levy is for the Department and the Skills Funding Agency.

The hon. Gentleman talked about the apprenticeship target and how difficult it was. It is worth remembering that there have been 624,000 apprentice starts since May 2015. We have 899,400 apprenticeship participations in the 2015-16 year. That is the highest number on record. Of course, it is a challenge to reach a 3 million target, but we are on the way.

[Gordon Marsden]

The Minister is right to point to progress so far and I do not want to disparage that. He reminds us that implementation is for the Department and the Skills Funding Agency. I am well aware, of course, that David Hill, who is an extremely talented and assiduous civil servant, has been seconded to do precisely that as director of apprenticeships. I was puzzled, however, that the Minister made no reference to the Apprenticeship Delivery Board. I will not go into whether it will have tsars or not; that is for others to decide and the Minister to ponder.

When that board was announced, it was advertised as being a key part of the process of encouraging and driving up the numbers. It was not simply to be a bully pulpit, but it was to have a very direct and active role. Yet since the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) stood down from that post, we seem to have heard very little out of the board. What is its role?

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[Gordon Marsden]

I am duly rebuked, Mr Bailey.

[Robert Halfon]

I reassure the hon. Gentleman that the Apprenticeship Delivery Board is in full flow. I meet it and its chairman regularly. It goes up and down the country and works with businesses to encourage them to employ apprentices. Much of our success has been because of that board’s incredible work.

On frameworks and standards, the hon. Gentleman will know that 25% of frameworks will be gone by the end of this year. The 400 standards support around 340,000 apprenticeships. We hope by the end of the Parliament to have moved entirely from frameworks to standards. That is our target. As he knows, the standards will be determined by occupational maps based on labour market evidence and information about employer demand. We do not want to set an upper limit, because we need flexibility to respond to the economy. It will be up to the IFATE to plan the timescales for the review of those standards.

[Gordon Marsden]

Will the Minister give way?

[Robert Halfon]

I want to get to the amendments, and no doubt the hon. Gentleman will bring some of these things up again at some point, so will he allow me to answer the questions?

The hon. Gentleman asks us to sign a blank cheque on IFA capacity. We are consulting on the Secretary of State’s strategic guidance letter to the IFA. The IFA’s shadow board will publish a draft operational plan. The hon. Gentleman is right that Peter Lauener, the shadow chief executive, is excellent. He has been working with Antony Jenkins, who is the shadow chair. The shadow IFA is working hard to get the institute’s operational plan up and running by April 2017, and that plan will be published soon. Progress is being made, and the institute will be set up in April 2017.

As the hon. Gentleman knows, the institute’s board and chair are being appointed. There are 60 core staff. The IFA will draw on many more people through engagement with employer panels, experts and more than 1,000 employees, so the IFA does have the necessary capacity. We are doing this carefully. The technical education bit will start a year later; the first course on the new route will start in 2019. We are doing everything that he wants. The institute has the necessary capacity, and we have the right people and board to run it.

On occupations not included in the 15 routes, if the hon. Gentleman remembers, the principal of his college said in the evidence session that it was possible to do different things, such as sports, through the academic route and applied general qualifications. We are not closing the door on those things, but 15 is regarded as the right number. We have analysed the labour market, and I think that it is right to have those 15 routes, which are, in essence, what our economy needs. On that basis, I believe that the expanded institute is the right body to be at the heart of the reforms—we are implementing the Sainsbury reforms—and the Government are committed to ensuring that the institute plays that role. Clause 1 should therefore stand part of the Bill.

[Tracy Brabin (Batley and Spen) (Lab)]

It has been interesting to listen to the Minister. I have one quick question. How will the nearly 900,000 apprentices currently on courses be channelled into those routes? If they are in retail, for which a route does not currently exist, what will happen to their course?

[Robert Halfon]

Current apprentices in the existing frameworks will not be affected. This will only be for new apprentices. Standards are being brought through, but people in the existing frameworks will not be affected by the changes.