Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [Lords]

Baroness Winterton of Doncaster Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 21st February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. We need to start the wind-ups at a quarter to nine, so if everybody could take about six minutes— interestingly, the last speaker’s contribution was exactly six minutes—we should all be able to get in, and I will not have to introduce a time limit.

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

I will do my best, Madam Deputy Speaker, to squeeze my remarks on the 12 amendments in my name into six minutes, but I apologise in advance if I run slightly over.

To echo the words of my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), we are all here to make a good Bill better—to make it the best possible Bill—and I hope that the Minister will reflect on my amendments, which I do not intend to press to a Division, so that we can continue the dialogue and make sure that the Bill truly shines by the end of this democratic process.

My new clause 4 would require the Secretary of State to publish a green skills strategy. This has been recommended by the Institute for Government and the Confederation of British Industry, and has been backed by several Members from across the House. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Department for Education have already commissioned a report from the new green jobs taskforce, which laid out several recommendations on how to deliver on the Government’s green jobs target in the “Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution”. That included publishing a net-zero strategy to promote good green jobs, yet we know that the UK will need 170,000 more workers to qualify each year in home insulation, renewable energy and electric vehicle manufacturing, and infrastructure upgrades if we are to meet our net-zero targets. The think-tank Onward has predicted that approximately 1.7 million jobs will need to be created in the net-zero industries by 2030, of which 1.3 million are in occupations that require strong, low and medium-level technical qualifications, which are in critically short supply. It is a no-brainer: the Government should make the concession at the Dispatch Box, either in this House or the other place, that we should, although perhaps not in this Bill, look at publishing a green skills strategy. That is vital for the joined-up thinking and whole-of-Government approach that is needed for net zero.

I will seek to bundle up the next series of amendments, appropriately enough, into mini amendment modules, but I first declare an interest: I tabled these amendments as chair of the Lifelong Education Commission, which I established in lockdown; having been reshuffled out of Government, I decided, with time on my hands, that I would set up this commission. I have received administrative support from the think-tank ResPublica, which has helped me prepare the amendments and a number of reports.

New clause 6 would require the Secretary of State to publish an annual report on overall skills levels and economic output across England and Wales. It can be taken with amendments 7 and 8, which would require careers advisers to hold a level 4 qualification, and which would give local authorities oversight of the provision of careers guidance for the purposes of ensuring consistency and quality. If the Bill is to succeed, there needs to be a better joined-up effort to monitor changes in the UK’s skills provision and how that is reflected in the economy. An annual report would allow data sets to be created that would provide information at national and local levels, so that areas of success and concern could be identified for targeted support. That should cover all qualifications from entry level to level 8, and details should be given on the size and composition of each cohort.

To help local authorities better craft their local skills improvement plans, such a review should include relevant information about local labour markets, and data on job retention, labour market turnover, and different measures of labour productivity. That is important for transparency, but we should be mindful of the need to balance that against data burdens on institutions, including education providers. An annual report should therefore build on existing work carried out in market intelligence on post-16 skills and education data.

On careers advice, the level 4 qualification requirement that I set out in amendment 7 should apply to all school, college and university career advisors. The Government should also take steps to ensure that mandatory registration with the Career Development Institute is not needlessly burdensome or expensive. That means crafting a national careers strategy at the same time, and working closely with further education colleges, who are best placed to design and deliver dedicated careers advisory courses.

I turn to new clause 7, which I will consider with amendment 3. The new clause would place the Government’s lifetime skills guarantee on a statutory footing, ensuring that those without an A-level or equivalent qualification, or those who hold such a qualification but would benefit from reskilling, can study a fully funded approved course. Retraining or reskilling sometimes means gaining a qualification a lower level than others that we have already reached in our learning trajectory, and anyone who wants to gain an equivalent or lower qualification should be able to access Government funding for that.

The ELQ rules should be explicitly removed as a condition for claiming a lifelong loan entitlement. Neither the lifetime skills guarantee nor the lifelong loan entitlement are truly lifelong if people who already have a level 3 to level 6 qualification are excluded from obtaining any more funding. The programme needs to be as broad and simple as possible to encourage—not discourage—participation, and should cover all provision up to level 3, irrespective of whether learners are taking a full qualification or taking one for the first time. That means removing all barriers, including any limits on repeating level 3 qualifications.

Amendment 3 would expand financial support for higher and further education courses to include means-tested grants for the purposes of ensuring that financial hardship is not a barrier to reskilling. The Bill still has limited detail about the exact structure of the LLE and how it will operate, such as the minimum credit level required to access it. In the light of that, I welcome the launch of a panel under the Minister for Higher and Further Education to review the structure and purpose of the LLE. As long as the LLE relies on a system of loans rather than grants, it will be difficult to encourage uptake in adult skills improvement among young people without assets, savings or other reserves to serve as a financial cushion. The LLE therefore risks becoming a clear clause of inequity between age groups in the education system. An 18-year-old choosing which education path to go down will have a different perspective on loan debt from someone in their 30s, 40s or 50s. As we advance through our careers, we accumulate more financial commitments, such as rent or mortgage payments and the costs of family care and support, and that makes career jumps much harder to undertake than career starts. A proper commitment to lifelong learning needs an explicit national decision about what we are prepared to fully fund. We need a national system of means-tested grants, targeted at the most disadvantaged.

I turn to new clause 8, which I will consider with new clause 9. New clause 8 would require the Secretary of State to publish a national strategy for integrated education. It would set out a plan for developing courses that had a mixture of academic and vocational content at levels 4 to 8, and would support the creation and expansion of institutions offering such courses. New clause 9 would require the Secretary of State to set out a framework of national guidelines for the unbundling, stacking and transfer of modular course credits between institutions. It would also set out a role for Ofqual, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education and the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education to ensure that such a framework operates effectively. I will not go into further details on that; needless to say, such flexibilities need to be worked out at a far more granular level, and any credit system will need to be more sophisticated than just letting learners accrue a certain number of points.

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I turn to amendments 4, 5 and 6 on lifelong learning strategies as part of the future devolution of skills They would expand the membership of local skills improvement plans to include other local organisations and extend the Secretary of State’s power to designate and remove employer representative bodies to mayoral combined authorities where that is within their devolved competences. Local authorities need to play a leading role in the plans alongside business, the arts, further and higher education, faith and third-sector community organisations. Skills and education policy must be a central part of future devolution deals. I will not go into any further detail, but I encourage the Minister to look closely at the content of my amendments and to work closely with all Members on how we can make this the best possible Bill by taking up all the amendments mentioned.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

To be of assistance, I am going to put in place a six-minute time limit. If we cannot stick to my helpful guidance, not everybody will get in.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

We are having an interesting debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) on the case that he set out from the Front Bench by rightly highlighting that, every couple of years, the Government say they will solve the skills problem by putting employers at the centre, and it never works, so they come back and do the same thing again. He was also right to highlight the failure of the apprenticeship levy, about which the Government were warned.

I rise to speak to new clause 13 in my name. Nine years ago, the Government pledged to introduce alternative student finance, but it still has not been delivered, barring large numbers of Muslims from higher education. The problem became a serious one in 2012, when tuition fees were drastically raised and student loans became essential for pretty much everybody. For some British Muslims, having to take an interest-bearing student loan simply meant that they could not go to university at all. Riba—interest—is prohibited in Islam as it was in Christianity until the middle ages. Some Muslim young people defer university until they have saved to pay the fees outright. Some, with a heavy heart, take out a loan and feel bad about it ever after. Others do not attend at all. That is the reality facing young British Muslims today.

Last October, Muslim Census published the findings of a survey on the scale of the problem. It concluded that, every year, 4,000 Muslim students opt out of university altogether because alternative student finance is not available, 6,000 choose to self-fund, severely limiting their course choice and student experience, and four in five who took loans felt conflicted as a result, sometimes leading to mental health consequences requiring clinical intervention. It is in nobody’s interests to fail such a large group of bright young people who we need to contribute their full potential in the years ahead. As Prime Minister, David Cameron promised to change that. At the World Islamic Economic Forum in London in 2013, he said:

“Never again should a Muslim in Britain feel unable to go to university because they cannot get a student loan - simply because of their religion.”

The promise he made was very clear. Nine years later, there is still not even a timetable for keeping it. It looks to young Muslims as if Ministers simply cannot be bothered.

A year after David Cameron’s speech, a Government consultation attracted 20,000 responses—a record at the time—on a proposed takaful system, in which students pay into the system to guarantee each other against loss. This co-operative structure is generally recognised as sharia-compliant. Repayments, debt levels and cost to the Government would be the same as for conventional student loans. But progress since then over eight years has been glacial. In November 2015, a Green Paper said:

“we are looking to develop the ‘Takaful’ product more fully.”

A White Paper the following year said there was a “a real need” to support students who felt unable to use interest-bearing loans and that:

“we will introduce an alternative student finance product for the first time”—

which—

“will avoid the payment of interest”.

That was seven years ago. In 2017, campaigners hoped the new Higher Education and Research Act 2017 would enable a takaful loan model. Ministers then said that the May 2019 Augar review would cover it. It did not, but ever since Ministers have used the forthcoming response to that report as a justification for still not doing anything. The response to the Augar review was supposed to be published at the time of the spending review, but six months later there is still no word.

British Muslims make up nearly 5% of the UK population and almost 10% of students. In the borough I represent, Muslims are about a third of our population. It is extremely hurtful that the Government simply cannot be bothered to keep the promise they made nine years ago to so many people. Thousands of young Muslims miss out on university. Others struggle over the conflict between what they believe and their hopes for higher education. Our system should not be doing that to people, as the Government recognised nine years ago. New clause 13 requires the Secretary of State to at last make the long-awaited regulations. I hope the House and the Minister will support it.

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[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. I note that two Back Benchers wish to speak, and I am sure that the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman will bear that in mind. We do have to finish at 10 pm.

[Mr Perkins]

I will certainly ensure that there is time for the voices of other Members to be heard, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Let me first thank the Secretary of State for what he has just said, and for being here for the Bill’s Third Reading. He appears to be wearing an ostentatiously large “Truss for Leader” badge. I do not know whether that is a scoop or not, but he is certainly very welcome. [Hon. Members: “It stands for ‘T-levels’.”] In that case, I apologise. I misrepresented the right hon. Gentleman, and I am happy to set the record straight. We have heard today that 5,000 people are taking T-levels this year; I have no idea whether there are more or fewer in the “Truss for Leader” camp, but at least I have been able to clarify the meaning of the Secretary of State’s badge.

I repeat the right hon. Gentleman’s thanks to everyone who served on the Public Bill Committee. We heard some excellent contributions from Members on both sides of the Committee, and we have heard some powerful contributions today. That should give all of us confidence that there are many people in this place who recognise how critical the further education and skills agenda is. There is a shared passion, throughout this place, for ensuring that we offer better opportunities to a whole generation of younger people. We recognise the importance of the sector, and the fantastic contribution played by so many professionals in it, as well as their commitment to ensuring that that new generation have the opportunities that they deserve. I think there is agreement on, at least, the importance of that agenda.

I have to take issue with what the Secretary of State said about the Bill leaving this House stronger than it was when it arrived from another place. Amendments were tabled there by people with tremendous experience, including a whole raft of former Education Secretaries and a number of other people with real commitment to the sector, and we felt that those amendments would have greatly strengthened the Bill. That view was shared by the Association of Colleges and many other contributors to the debate. It is a matter of tremendous regret that those amendments were removed by the Government and that the very sensible amendments that were proposed tonight were either voted against or not put to a vote. That is a regrettable step. The Secretary of State speaks about his obsession and passion for getting this right. We have heard from his colleague, the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), that in many of the areas that we were pushing, the Government agreed with the principle of what we were saying but felt it unnecessary for our proposals to be put in the Bill.

Throughout my 12 years in this place, we have had a raft of reforms from the Government, and have often heard the same sort of rhetoric. I mentioned at some length in my speech that employers are being put in the driving seat. That has been the stated aim of every reform from this Government over 11 years. We have heard about schools knowing their pupils best, and about schools being the best placed to ensure that careers guidance and work experience are delivered, yet throughout those 11 years we have seen the failings of that approach, which is why we believe that getting some of these things into the Bill and into statute is a matter of real value. I will not repeat the contributions that I made in Committee and in this debate, but I would reinforce to Members in the other place that we Labour Members believe that there was a lot of merit in their amendments, and we will continue to push for the values that were outlined in them, even though we were unable to win the votes tonight.

I thank the Bill Committee, and all those in the Public Bill Office for the substantial support they gave us on the huge number of amendments that we tabled. I also thank Lindsey Kell in my office for the huge amount of work that she has done in supporting me on this Bill. Unlike those on the Treasury Benches, we do not have an army of civil servants, but we have been very well advised and supported. I thank all those organisations in the sector that have engaged with us and supported our amendments with evidence. They have been incredibly helpful in enabling the Opposition to do our job of holding the Government to account, suggesting a better direction of travel, and outlining how a Labour Government would approach these matters differently. I recognise that other hon. Members would like to contribute, so I simply thank all those involved in getting the Bill to this stage. I look forward to continuing these debates in the future.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I would recommend about three minutes each for the remaining speakers.

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[Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. This afternoon, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence made an important and statesmanlike statement on Ukraine. This evening, Mr Putin has recognised the two separatist regions in Ukraine as independent states, with dangerous parallels to Germany’s recognition of the Sudetenland in 1938. In these circumstances, do you accept that it would be appropriate to have a further statement, as soon as possible, on the new Ukrainian situation? The Defence Secretary himself stated today that he would update us as necessary, and this may well be the reason for making such a statement tomorrow or as soon as possible.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point of order. As he said, the Secretary of State did undertake to keep the House updated, and I am sure he will do so. The hon. Gentleman will also be aware that the House will be debating the sanctions regulations tomorrow. I also know that those on the Treasury Bench will have heard the point that he has made.