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Mr. Tim Boswell (Daventry): £100 million.
Mr. Brady: So £100 million was lost through the incompetence displayed when the policy was introduced. We were promised that the policy, central to improving adult skills and learning, would be re-introduced in short order.
Mr. Pollard: A propos the ILA, its withdrawal was the result of a fraud committed on an ever-increasing scale. It had nothing to do with the way in which it was administered by the Department for Education and Skills.
Mr. Brady: The hon. Gentleman puts his finger on the point. Surely the problem is that Ministers should have implemented the scheme properly by providing proper safeguards against fraud. Instead, it was set up in a way that was wide open to fraud. They also ignored warnings and indications of difficulties for far too long before they acted.
Mr. Pollard: The ILA was worth £200. It would have cost much more to ensure that it was not abused. The problem was caused by Jack-the-lad coming along and abusing it.
Mr. Brady: If the hon. Gentleman thinks it is so obvious that the scheme could never have worked because it was too expensive to proof it against fraud, why does he think that Ministers in his Government were incapable of seeing the blindingly obvious when they introduced the scheme?
The Government's record on adult skills is not one of which they can be proud. Government targets push the learning and skills councils' budgets into providing for 16 to 18-year-olds and for basic skills at the expense of adult skills. That will affect the ability of colleges to meet local skill needs and demand from employers and employees for part-time courses.
What does business need? That was summed up by the British Chambers of Commerce which said that it wants
- "young people to receive education and training, not education or training."
The Engineering Employers Federation is one of many organisations to have highlighted the importance of the vocational route being given equal weighting to the academic route. The federation also voices concern about the adequacy of guidance—a point touched on earlier—and says that there is a need for work-based learning that
- "energises and excites students and does not drain them of enthusiasm for continuing to higher levels of study."
We join the Government in our mutual ambition to see a renaissance in skills education in our country, but we shall constructively oppose the Government when we see them failing, or showing signs of taking the wrong turning and letting down our young people.
5.52 pm
Mr. Kerry Pollard (St. Albans): I shall be extremely brief, as we have little time.
There is a critical skills shortage—especially in the south-east; there is no doubt about that—in all sorts of professions and trades. In my area, it takes a year and half to get an appointment with a speech therapist and the therapy that many young children need. That is unacceptable. We cannot get plumbers or bricklayers, either, so we need to increase their number. That is one aspect of the problem.
Another aspect, which no one has addressed, is prison education. If we are to reduce the prison population and stop prisoners reoffending, as about 75 per cent. do, we have to educate them and give them vocational skills. There are some excellent examples of this, and I shall cite two. One is found in Feltham young offenders institution, where the Ford Motor Company is offering apprenticeships to young guests. They are trained to maintain motor cars; the training continues after their sentence ends and they are then offered a job by the Ford Motor Company. That is an excellent scheme and we should set up more like it. The second example is that of Transco, which in two prisons in England is training gas fitters, giving people skills so that when they get out of prison, they can get a job, raise their aspirations and expectations, and perhaps not reoffend.
I am pleased that the Select Committee on Education and Skills has at last decided to consider prison education—it is long overdue. I know that the Minister and his colleagues will welcome that work. Our Government are doing good things to tackle the skills shortage, but we need to accelerate the process.
5.54 pm
Mr. Phil Willis (Harrogate and Knaresborough): First, I apologise to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for having to leave the debate early. I have already apologised to both Front-Bench Members.
This has been a most interesting debate, if only because of the revelation that the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) and Baroness Thatcher share the same children. I find that an intriguing prospect. We now know what the right hon. and learned Gentleman got up to during the night.
I thank the Minister for finding the time to introduce this timely debate. It gives us the opportunity to consider what stage the Government have reached with their skill strategy, where they want to go and what has been left out for the next general election. It is timely in another respect, too. I am rather sad that the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) is not in his place, because the Select Committee on Education and Skills has decided to conduct a year-long inquiry into the skills strategy. We support that decision and hope that the Committee will take the Government to task on many of the things that they are doing.
Few would deny the statistics that Members on both Front Benches have given during the debate. Indeed, those statistics have constantly been brought to the attention of the House. They show just how far behind Britain lags in its skills agenda. To be 25th in a league table of 29 industrial countries for 17-year-olds in further education or training is not something that any Member should be proud of. To be 13th out of 22 for 16-year-olds gaining the equivalent of five good GCSEs is another indictment of not only the present Government but the previous Government. Most worrying, perhaps, is that according to Chris Humphries of the national skills taskforce, by 2010 about 65 per cent. of jobs will require at least a level 3 qualification. At present, only about 38 per cent. of our workforce has that level of qualification, compared with 73 per cent. in Germany.
I am sorry that the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) has disappeared, having made three speeches. I know that the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady) is incredibly committed to the whole of the education and skills agenda. The idea that we need either more level 2 or level 3 skills, or more graduates, is wrong. It is fundamentally flawed. Indeed, evidence from the recent report by Professor Machin of the London School of Economics, commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills, shows that higher academic qualifications have robust productivity effects, at both national and regional levels. Professor Machin's interesting piece of research demonstrates that by comparison with investment at any other level, it is graduates who add to our productivity and competitiveness, and to the earnings of the nation as a whole.
For Liberal Democrats—and, to be fair, for the Government—it is a question not of either/or, but of whether we need both approaches.
Andrew Selous : I wonder what the hon. Gentleman's response would be to the figures of my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady), which showed that about 48 per cent. of graduates felt that they were not in graduate-level jobs three years after starting work. Does that not suggest that quite a few graduates have taken courses that have not best equipped them for the work that they have gone into?
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