Draft Public Sector Apprenticeship Targets Regulations 2017
Debate between Robert Halfon and Caroline Flint(7 years, 8 months ago)
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Robert Halfon
I thank the hon. Member for Blackpool South and the right hon. Member for Don Valley for their contributions. I also thank the hon. Gentleman for the kind comments he has made about my not being able to attend the FE Week conference because of the security issue that took place in Parliament. I will answer some of their points individually and some together.
On quality, the right hon. Lady made an important point about polytechnics. Perhaps the wrong decision was made. I hope that with the boost to FE through the Sainsbury reforms, national colleges and institutes of technology, and the extra £500 million announced, we will go back to state-of-the-art technical education. That is the purpose of many of the things I am trying to do in my work. We have changed the legislation to ensure that an apprenticeship does what it says on the tin—it is about not just work experience for a few months. As defined in the legislation, it must be a minimum of a year, with 20% off-the- job training. We have moved from a framework, where there was a spaghetti junction of qualifications, to rigorous employer-led standards that meet our skills deficit. That is why we have created the Institute for Apprenticeships and, from next year, subject to approval by the Lords, the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education.
Both the hon. Gentleman and the right hon. Lady asked about those bodies that are outside the scope, for which there are various reasons. The House of Commons, for example, is not subject to the control or direction of Ministers. As a smoker, I know that we would legally be allowed to smoke in here, but the Speaker has made a decision that there will be no smoking. As the hon. Gentleman will know, when I entered Parliament I was the first MP to employ a full-time parliamentary apprentice in the House. Many MPs now do that, and the House of Commons has a very good apprentice scheme. Over the years, I have met those apprentices, who work in all the different areas of the House of Commons. The BBC works with the scheme very closely. As to the Post Office, the reason is partly that 97% of the 11,500 post offices are run by independent postmasters on an agency basis, rather than by people who are Post Office employees, so there are reasons why some FE colleges and universities are out of scope and why a number of organisations were not included.
Caroline Flint
Can the Minister give one good reason why a university is out of scope while schools will be affected?
Robert Halfon
FE colleges are corporations or companies, for the most part; universities are regarded as independent bodies and were not seen as in the public sector or managed in the same way. However, there may be universities subject to the levy, depending on their wage bill, so they will be required to have apprenticeships or the levy will be used to fund apprenticeships elsewhere.
An impact assessment was done for the whole Enterprise Act 2016. Neither an impact assessment nor an equalities impact assessment was prepared for the regulation, because the measure affects only publicly funded bodies, with no costs to business. The Better Regulation Executive confirmed that no impact assessment is required in relation to the regulations but, as I have said, one was done for the whole Act.
The hon. Member for Blackpool South asked whether a number of areas in public services would be able to have apprenticeships, and perhaps I can give some examples, beginning with the national health service. The public sector target is 27,500 new apprentice starts for 2017-18. That is estimated to deliver 100,000 apprentices in the course of the Parliament. The information from Health Education England is that almost 20,000 apprentices were employed in the NHS in 2015 and 2016. I have met many healthcare apprentices when visiting colleges and apprenticeship training providers. We are developing pathway apprentice standards—level 2 healthcare support worker leading to level 6 nursing apprenticeship.
I recognise that schools are a difficult issue. First, it is important for councils to share their levy pot fairly. We have issued guidance to schools. The Department for Communities and Local Government is keen that the levy pot should be shared fairly. The whole purpose of the levy is to change behaviour and create an apprenticeship and skills nation. Why cannot a teaching assistant in a school do a teaching assistant apprenticeship, a cook in a school do a hospitality and catering apprenticeship, or someone who is doing business administration do a business administration apprenticeship?
Robert Halfon
There is an important point here. I have acknowledged in the past that there will always be some gaming of the system and I accept that once the levy comes in we will not know how much, for a while. However, if someone is doing a teaching assistant job why should they not be offered an apprenticeship and a skill? They certainly will not be able to progress without a skill. With a skill and an apprenticeship they will have a much better chance of progressing. If someone is a school cook, why not give them the chance to do a hospitality and catering apprenticeship?
Caroline Flint
I do not see the evidence that some of those routes for progression are not already working. I have in mind people in my constituency who have become teaching assistants—in fact it was something that the last Labour Government helped to create. I know a number of people who have used that route to be supported and get training, and they have ended up taking the teaching route afterwards. Likewise, in many of the schools that I visit, and I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman visits many schools too, members of the ancillary staff—whether that is in the kitchens, or on the maintenance side of the school—often have to get their NVQs and other qualifications that are suited to what they are doing, and it is concerning that we just end up with a rebadging for no good reason.
Robert Halfon
First, that may be the case for some people, which is all well and good, but I want everyone to have a chance of having an apprenticeship. However, even if the right hon. Lady is correct that everyone has a certain qualification or a certain level of training, why not give them a chance to do an additional piece of training? If they have a level 3 qualification, why not give them an apprenticeship in level 4, and so on and so forth?
As I say, the purpose of these regulations is to change behaviours. As long as standards continue to be developed—new standards are being developed and they are of higher quality—I think we will give everyone that chance. We want employers to know that when we say we want to create an apprenticeship nation, that is what we mean.
The hon. Member for Blackpool South talked about the issue of the headcount versus the full-time equivalent; that was also raised by the right hon. Member for Don Valley. We think that headcount is the fairest measure to assess workforce numbers for the purpose of delivering high-quality apprenticeships. If someone does more than one apprenticeship with the same employer, they can count towards the target more than once. Headcount data are readily available across the whole public sector, and if the headcount target were to be replaced on a full-time equivalent basis, the 2.3% target would result in a lower number of starts, meaning that the public sector would not deliver its fair share of apprenticeships unless the target was raised. Having said that, we have listened to those who are concerned about how the target might impact on them, given the high proportion of part-time workers, and we suggest that these bodies should use FTE in parallel with headcount, to report and explain any underachievement of the target as necessary.
This is not about one size fits all; we have listened to people and responded. The hon. Member for Blackpool South talked about cuts. No one has denied that there have been pressures—significant pressures—on the economy but most of the organisations that we are talking about pay the levy, so for most of them it will come out of the levy pot. It is not relevant to say that cuts will affect this process, because if an organisation wants an apprenticeship, it will come out of its levy pot. That is an important point.
The hon. Gentleman also talked about the supply chain. He will know that after the first year of the levy, provisionally 10% will be allowed in terms of the supply chain. He talked about gaming; if anything, we could affect gaming if we do not get things right. After the first year, we will see how things pan out, then we will make a decision, but the 10% figure will not apply until after the first year of operation of the levy.
The hon. Gentleman also asked whether or not this process was an efficient use of public money. If we look at apprentices’ returns, we see that if someone is doing a level 2 apprenticeship their wage increase is 11%, between £48,000 and £74,000; the figure is between £77,000 and £117,000 for level 3 apprenticeships. Ninety per cent of apprenticeships get jobs. Apprenticeships are very good for the economy. There is another figure that I forget, but all apprenticeships deliver a huge return in terms of cost-benefit to the economy.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned social justice and social mobility. He will know, because I mentioned it in the debate in Westminster Hall about financial support for apprentices, that we are undertaking a review of social mobility and apprenticeships. Some £60 million was guaranteed for this year, and the review is under way. As for the Maynard reforms, I hope to make an announcement soon—that is a real “soon” and not a civil servant’s “soon”—that I do not think he will be too unhappy with.
The hon. Gentleman talked about veterans, and I will reflect on his remarks. I have not seen his whole speech, I only read the article in FE Week. I thought that was important, and I will look at what we are doing. I know, as the Defence Secretary proudly tells me, that the Ministry of Defence is a huge employer of apprentices, but I think that is an important thought.
The hon. Lady—
Robert Halfon
Sorry, the right hon. Lady—I beg your pardon—talked about getting women into STEM.
Caroline Flint
That is an important area, and there are lots of jobs across the public sector that need the skills that a STEM-based education provides. However, I am sure the Minister knows as well as I do that, across the public sector as well, there is a massive amount of gender job segregation, which, in some ways, reinforces the pattern of low pay for women in certain sectors. It would be very good in the long term if we can do anything at all to encourage more diversity across those areas.
Robert Halfon
The right hon. Lady makes an important point. Some 53% of apprentices are women, and the survey suggests that female apprentices actually earn more than men. However, there is a huge problem around women in STEM subjects.
One of the issues I face when looking at careers guidance in schools is that they show a picture of a woman being a nurse and man doing engineering. That is from primary school onwards, and it is a significant problem. We are doing a huge amount of work on careers strategy and we are looking at that. Everywhere I go, I try to promote female STEM apprenticeships and females doing STEM in schools, but there are cultural issues and all kinds of problems that make this quite a difficult problem to surmount.
Caroline Flint
I thank the Minister for what he says, but perhaps he could go away and reflect. In evidence to the Public Accounts Committee, officials told us that there are targets for addressing this particular problem for black and ethnic minority people but not women, which he clearly understands from what he has just said.
Robert Halfon
It is important that we take the right action to make sure that we increase those numbers; I think that we are doing that. The hon. Member for Blackpool South asked about monitoring. The Skills Funding Agency, through the National Apprenticeship Service and the Digital Apprenticeship Service, is monitoring that and works with the bigger employers. Department for Education officials will analyse the returns on a yearly basis. He will know that my boss, the Secretary of State, chairs the “Earn and Learn” taskforce.
There is no particular stick that public sector bodies get if they do not meet targets, but we are doing everything possible. We want to work with public sector bodies—they will obviously publish their information; it will be up to the independent bodies how to collate it—to try to see this as a new thing that we are doing. We will see how it pans out each year as we assess, but at this point in time, we are trying to work with public sector bodies, rather than saying that there will be a penalty if they do not deliver on their particular targets.
You will be pleased to know that I am coming to the end of my speech, Mr Nuttall, but I shall close by saying that this is a very important part of our reforms; it is not just a stand-alone product. It is part of our designs to change behaviours to create that ladder of opportunity for millions of our young people.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That the Committee has considered the draft Public Sector Apprenticeship Targets Regulations 2017.
Energy Prices
Debate between Robert Halfon and Caroline Flint(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Caroline Flint
I will give way shortly.
Before I set out my case, let me deal head-on with one issue raised by the Minister for Business and Enterprise, the right hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matthew Hancock). He claims that the energy companies are refusing to pass on reductions in wholesale costs because of the prospect of an energy price freeze. Let me first thank him for the vote of confidence in our prospects at the election and tell him he is right about one thing. I absolutely believe there will be a Labour Government in May and we will freeze energy prices until 2017.
The substance of what that Minister says, like so much he comes out with, bears no connection to reality for one simple reason. From the day we announced our price freeze, which, as I have said many times, would stop suppliers increasing their prices without preventing them from cutting them, we have been clear that the price freeze—[Interruption.] If Conservative Back Benchers wait and listen to what I have to say, I will provide the evidence of my words as they appeared in Hansard.
From the day we announced the price freeze, we have been clear that it goes hand in hand with our reforms of the energy market and the creation of a tough new regulator with the power to cut prices when costs fall. That is what the Green Paper we published in November 2013 says—at paragraph 2.25, for those hon. Members who have not yet found the time to read it. Let me remind Members of my exact words in a debate on energy prices in April last year, when I said that
“the Government should…intervene to require all suppliers to freeze their prices. As we have said many times before, that would not prevent companies from cutting prices, but it would stop them from increasing them.”—[Official Report, 2 April 2014; Vol. 578, c. 892.]
What could be clearer than that? I said the same in June last year, too, when I urged the House to back a motion to give the regulator the power to cut prices when costs fall, which Government Members defeated. Therefore, none of the energy companies and no hon. Members should be in any doubt about what we will do.
Yes, we will freeze prices until 2017, so that bills can fall, not rise, and we will also give the regulator the power to cut prices. Let me remind the House that the purpose of our price freeze is not just to give us time to reform the energy market for the future, but—crucially—to compensate consumers for the fall in wholesale prices in 2009, which was never passed back to them. If anyone is labouring under the illusion that the price freeze is, or will be, an excuse for not cutting prices to reflect falls in wholesale costs, let me disabuse them of that idea today.
Robert Halfon
Under this Government, fuel duty was not just frozen but cut, and the fuel escalator was got rid of. That means that in tax terms, the average motorist is better off by 20p every time they fill up the family car, amounting to hundreds of pounds a year. Given that this debate is about energy prices, why did the right hon. Lady and her party vote against all those measures?
Caroline Flint
On the average energy bill, gas and electricity have gone up by about £260 since 2010. I shall say a little more about who has been hardest hit by that. If we look at the poorest people in our communities, we find that their price rises have gone up substantially more. On every occasion since I was given this job by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition, I have consistently raised concerns, as I think the hon. Gentleman will appreciate, not only about wholesale cost falls not being passed on, but about the sharp practices going on in the sector, which need to be attended to.
Caroline Flint
Labour Members certainly agree with that, as do others, including the CBI. Energy should be a managed market. It is different from other things that we may buy, because it is essential to life. It keeps our homes warm, it keeps the lights on, and it keeps our hospitals and our businesses going. In this area it is absolutely clear, and I would have thought there would be some agreement from those on the Government Benches about this, because they have welcomed the CMA review. Why would they welcome a review if they thought everything was hunky-dory? Clearly there is something wrong in the way this market has been working, and that is why we have risen to the challenge to do something about it.
Robert Halfon
The right hon. Lady is being extraordinarily generous in giving way to me. She said that the energy companies are only reducing prices to new customers, but under the Government’s regulations they have to offer the cheapest tariff. I know that because I regularly get letters from EDF, my energy provider, not only offering me a cheaper tariff but informing me of the cheaper tariffs on offer from other companies.
Caroline Flint
The hon. Gentleman has on a number of occasions stood up for consumers where he has concerns about how the energy sector is working. I say this to him: the energy companies have been asked to inform their customers of the cheapest tariff, which is okay, but the truth is that we have the enormous problem of the inherited legacy post-privatisation of a very sticky customer base. That is demonstrated by the fact that the number of people switching is falling, not increasing.
Let me give the hon. Gentleman an example of another practice that is happening at the moment. It is called white labels, and it is where an energy company—one of the big six—offers through another organisation, maybe a supermarket or another company, a cheaper tariff to people who decide to be customers of that organisation, when it is the energy company providing the staff in the call centres and doing the training behind it, but they do not let their existing customers know what is going on. That is a good example of how they get around the offer they should be making to their existing customers to reflect wholesale cost falls for everyone, not just those whose business they want to acquire.
Local Government Funding
Debate between Robert Halfon and Caroline Flint(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Caroline Flint
On the working neighbourhoods fund, I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman has fallen into his Tory coalition partners’ trap. The Tories say, and he repeats the claim, that we planned to scrap the working neighbourhoods fund and had already cut money from it. In the March Budget we did announce savings, including £300 million through rationalising the regional development agencies, but we clearly distinguished between those programmes that were not a priority and would therefore be scrapped and those, including the working neighbourhoods fund, to which we were committed but would look to find savings in. It was a three-year programme in which, in November 2009—[Hon. Members: “Three years.”]. Three years’ funding is more than the one year that we used to have under Tory Governments, and more than the non-existent funding that poorer communities had under the Tory Government from 1979 to 1997.
Indeed, in November 2009 we announced a £40 million boost to the fund, worth £1.5 billion from 2008-09 to 2009-10. Of course, we had to look at programmes, but there is no evidence whatever to suggest that we would have scrapped the working neighbourhoods fund. That is not the case.
Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)
The right hon. Lady talks about devolution, but her Government took £13 million out of the housing budget in Harlow, where 45% of housing is social housing. The current Government are ending that and guaranteeing Harlow housing money for Harlow people.
Caroline Flint
I am afraid that is rubbish. The Labour Government, in so many different ways, contributed not only to boosting the refurbishment of homes that had been left to languish for too many years under the Tory Government, but to ensuring that there were ways and means for local councils, with other housing providers, to provide more homes.
The National Housing Federation, I think I am correct in repeating, says that, once the homes that Labour funded in its last period in office have been built, under the coalition Government’s plans, no more homes will be built. In relation—[Interruption.] The Minister for Housing and Local Government says “nonsense”, but let us just wait and see, because even in a time of recession, it was Labour money that worked in partnership with others—[Hon. Members: “Taxpayers’ money”.] It was taxpayers’ money with which a Labour Government decided that we should promote the building of more social homes. Even in the teeth of recession, I think we built at least 55,000 homes to provide for people who could not afford a house on the private market.
We all know why that front-loaded package is happening: because the Secretary of State gives the impression of being more interested in trashing local councils, chasing cheap headlines, calling councillors stupid or lazy and telling local authorities to grow up. The hundreds of thousands of decent, honest, hard-working people who work in local government, and the millions of people who depend on the services and support that they provide, hardly seem to warrant a second thought, but they will be the ones who pay the price for this Government’s decisions.
To make matters worse, local councils are being forced to make deeper cuts than they expected and to do so much quicker, because the reductions in local government funding are front-loaded. As much as 50% of the cuts could fall in the first year. Councillors are looking at cuts of 14%, 16% or 18% to their budgets within weeks, but the Secretary of State still denies it. He says that it is a fiction, but he is about the only person left who still thinks so.
Police Grant Report
Debate between Robert Halfon and Caroline Flint(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Caroline Flint
No, I am talking about the cost of these elected individuals over and above what we have at the moment, and priorities being skewed in ways that do not help.
We need to make a better case of explaining how serious organised crime impacts on our neighbourhoods and communities so that people can see the relationship between the drug dealer in their street, the prostitutes in their neighbourhood and the counterfeit goods at the car boot sales and how that leads all the way back up to the organised criminals. I think we should have made a better case of explaining that under my Government, and I certainly think we need to do that in future, so that the link between these policing priorities can be seen. The danger is that that will not be done because these elected individuals will not be interested in that; they will just be interested in getting easy votes, whereas sometimes we as politicians have to explain the big picture so that we get the policy right.
That is a credible and sincere thing to say. I fight every day to make sure that the communities I represent are protected from antisocial behaviour and the other problems they face, but I know, both as a former Home Office Minister and as a constituency MP, that many of the problems in our neighbourhoods develop as the young people and adults involved in antisocial behaviour become more hardened criminals, and that hardened criminals at the top end are often behind the low-level crime my constituents experience. We have to deal with both aspects. The Minister said nothing about that or about looking at better operational capacity—and in doing so saving some money along the way.
Robert Halfon
Why is it perfectly okay for people to elect councillors, MPs and all sorts of other representatives, yet the right hon. Lady does not trust people with the responsibility of electing someone who will provide an overview of the kind of policing they want for their neighbourhood?
Caroline Flint
We already have elected councillors as part of the police authorities, and I think that model could be improved. At the local level through the safer neighbourhood teams, we already have monthly accountable meetings which the public can attend and talk about their local policing priorities. This is not about being against accountability; it is about what is right and what is fit for purpose—and, to be honest, what is good value for money, which is part of the debate we are having this afternoon.