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Session 2006 - 07 Publications on the internet General Committee Debates Further Education and Training Bill [Lords] |
Further Education and Training Bill [Lords] |
The Committee consisted of the following Members:Alan
Sandall, Committee
Clerk
†
attended the Committee
Public Bill CommitteeTuesday 12 June 2007(Morning)[Mr. Peter Atkinson in the Chair]Further Education and Training Bill [Lords]Written evidence to be reported to the HouseFET 01
Memorandum submitted by Universities
UK
10.30
am
The
Chairman:
I shall begin with some housekeeping points. I
remind the Committee that there is a money resolution in connection
with the Bill, copies of which are available on the Table. I also
remind Members that adequate notice of amendments should be
given. As a general rule, I do not intend to call starred
amendments, including any that might be reached during an afternoon
sitting. Members can take it as read that they may remove their jackets
while I am in the Chair.
That—
(1)
the Committee shall (in addition to its first meting at10.30
a.m. on Tuesday 12th June)
meet—
(a) at
4.00 p.m. on Tuesday 12th
June;
(b) at 9.00 a.m.
and 1.00 p.m. on Thursday 14th
June;
(c) at 10.30
a.m. and 4.00 p.m. on Tuesday 19th
June;
(d) at 9.00 a.m.
and 1.00 p.m. on Thursday 21st
June;
(2) the proceedings shall
be taken in the following order:Clauses 1 to 13; new Clauses
relating to Part 1; new Schedules relating to Part 1; Clauses 14 to 21;
new Clauses relating toPart 2; new Schedules relating to Part
2; Clauses 22 and 23; new Clauses relating to Part 3; new Schedules
relating to Part 3; Clauses 24 to 27; Schedule 1; Clause 28; Schedule
2; Clauses 29 to 32; remaining new Clauses; remaining new Schedules;
remaining proceedings on the
Bill;
(3) the proceedings on the
Bill shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a
conclusion at 4.00 p.m. on Thursday 21st
June.
It is a pleasure
to be here, Mr. Atkinson, and I look forward to serving
under your chairmanship. This is the first Bill since 1992 to focus on
further education training, which is important for a sector that is
often felt to be neglected and undervalued. The Bill will help us to
reform the supply side and to shape up to the skills challenge that
Sandy Leitch set out clearly in his recent report. It will also address
aspects of the Learning and Skills Act
2000.
The further
education sector in this country provides learning opportunities for
more than 5 million people a year. Those opportunities are crucial in
providing skills for securing productive, sustainable employment, and
they promote community and personal development. Sandy Leitch’s
report should have cleared out any sense of complacency on the
issue.
Although this is a relatively
small Bill, it is an important one. It underpins our agenda to
transform further education, which we set out in last year’s
further education White Paper. The Bill includes the restructuring of
the Learning and Skills Council, and it will make the council and the
wider further education system more responsive to the needs of
learners, potential learners and employers. It will also enable further
education institutions to award foundation degrees only and will
modernise arrangements for industrial training
levies.
I have tabled
amendments to make arrangements for improving unsatisfactory further
education provision. Those and other matters that are covered in the
Bill are important, and I am sure that we will discuss them in great
detail. The programme motion proposes that the Committee meets twice
today, twice on Thursday and twice on Tuesday and Thursday next week.
That gives us a total of eight sittings, which I think is right to
cover the Bill’s wide content. The motion was agreed by the
Programming Sub-Committee, and I commend it to the
Committee.
Mr.
John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con): I
welcome you to the Chair, Mr. Atkinson. Your perspicacity is
matched only by your legendary benevolence, on which we lesser mortals
will depend as we consider this important
matter.
The Minister
has set the scene by describing this as an important Bill. It is
certainly an important subject. He referred to the Leitch report, and
Opposition Members cannot help but conclude that the Bill would have
been more fit for purpose if it had included more of the report. It is
curious that the Further Education and Training Bill makes almost no
reference to the content of the Leitch report and, indeed, the
Government response to it. Having said that, I agree with the Minister
that the further education sector is vital—it provides
opportunities for people across the country to gain skills, to train
and to be educated—and we celebrate the work of further
education colleges as, I know, do all Committee members.
The Bill is important in a
number of respects, which we shall debate at length. The Opposition
want to tease out the unsatisfactory aspects of the Bill and support
those that point in the right direction. However, we are disappointed
that the Bill does not provide a more fundamental review of the
circumstances affecting further education and training, together with a
series of recommendations about how they might be improved. The
programme provides sufficient time to debate the matters that are
before us, and we look forward to doing so in a co-operative but sparky
spirit, so that the legislation is scrutinised in an appropriate and
thorough way. We support the programme
motion.
Sarah
Teather (Brent, East) (LD): I, too, welcome you to the
Chair, Mr. Atkinson. This is the first time that I have had
the pleasure of serving under your chairmanship. I am pleased to see
the Under-Secretary of State for Education and Skills, the hon. Member
for Corby on the Committee and hope that he will not find it too
unpleasant an experience. This is a relatively brief Bill and, with the
exception of the provisions relating to foundation degrees and
intervention powers, it is also relatively uncontroversial, so I
suspect that we will be able to deal with it rapidly.
In common with
the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings, I am disappointed
that the Bill does not herald the implementation of the recommendations
in the Leitch report, but we assume that we will be back in Committee
soon to debate those.
We are happy with the programme
motion. If we are all brief and to the point, we should be able to get
through this by the end of Thursday. Today, we will seek to probe
issues relating to the relationship between local authorities and the
Learning and Skills Council, and on Thursday we will express our
serious concerns about the proposals regarding intervention and
foundation degrees.
Question put and agreed
to.
Ordered,
That, subject to the discretion
of the Chairman, any written evidence received by the Committee shall
be reported to the House for publication.—[Bill
Rammell.]
Clause 1 ordered to stand
part of the Bill.
Clause 2Regional
councils
We move now to the
meat of the Bill, the first part of which deals with changes to the
structure of the Learning and Skills Council, in that it proposes that
the LSC be regionalised and its local offices come to an end. I know
that hon. Members will want to debate the matter at some length,
because it was aired on Second Reading in the House and discussed in
the other place, where the Bill originated. There are contentious
financial, organisational and administrative issues associated with
that proposal.
The
clause places the LSC under a duty to establish a regional LSC in each
area of England specified by the Secretary of State, and to specify
functions for those regional councils. Indeed, the regional LSCs will
be able to exercise powers and functions outside their areas. This is a
probing amendment to draw attention to that provision, because it is
not clear what is meant by it. What kind of functions will be exercised
outside the areas of the regional LSCs? In what circumstances might
those functions apply? How would that be determined? What reporting and
accounting would there be for all that process? Does the Minister
perceive this matter to be a matter for all regional LSCs? Are all LSCs
likely to operate outside their areas, or is this something that he
anticipates will only take place in particular parts of the country,
perhaps where there is an obvious overlap between responsibilities? It
may be that a regional council that is focused around a conurbation may
feel that it needs to operate in the suburbs beyond that conurbation.
That could be the type of thing that the Minister has in mind
andthat the Bill intends, but there is not a clear
understanding, certainly among Opposition Members and I suspect across
the whole Committee, of precisely how that process will
work.
Amendment No. 21
is essentially designed to determine why these regional LSCs need
powers outside their area and also to test the legitimacy of
those powers. One might argue that there is a certain type of legitimacy
in regional offices, and that there is a certain level of regional
representation. I do not want to go down the road of considering
regional government and all that that embodies, Mr.
Atkinson, because you would not let me. The Opposition believe in
proper democratic accountability and therefore, frankly, we are
suspicious of bogus structures that offer no real legitimacy. However,
notwithstanding that, it is important that the Minister makes it
absolutely clear how this particular aspect of the Bill is likely to
work in practice. To that end, I am delighted to move amendment No. 21,
which stands in my
name.
Sarah
Teather:
With your permission, Mr. Atkinson, I
would like to make just a few comments relating to the clause to enable
us to speed through our debate.
The Liberal Democrats are
largely in support of the idea of moving to a regional structure, but
originally we envisaged that process as being coterminous with regional
government, which would have given those regional councils some type of
democratic accountability. Of course, that gap is still there within
the Learning and Skills Council, regardless of how we reorganise
it.
With reference to
amendment No. 21, I wonder whether part of the point of the amendment
is to allow organisations based around cities, which may fall across
regions. I wonder whether the Minister will comment on that issue. I
can imagine a situation where there are regions, but there may also be
a city that draws people for employment purposes from outside that
particular region. In that situation, one would need to ensure that the
planning of skills training is appropriate for people who live within a
separate region. I wonder whether that is part of the point of the
amendment.
I also
wonder whether the Minister will say something about the representation
of college principals or college governors in the new regional council
structure. That issue has been raised with me by the Association of
Colleges, which is concerned.
Finally, I wonder whether the
Minister will explain how the regional structure will work with the
national structure for the organisation of higher
education.
Mr.
Tim Boswell (Daventry) (Con): May I begin, Mr.
Atkinson, by welcoming you to the Chair? We have engaged on a number of
important Bills in the past, and I hope that you will indulge me as I
make what might be termed a substantive speech on this issue, which
will preclude my doing so in a clause stand part debate or possibly at
a later stage of the
proceedings.
Before I
go on, may I welcome the ministerial team, one of whom, the Minister
for Higher Education and Lifelong Learning, I have already had
discussions with on other matters this morning? I am also delighted to
see the Under-Secretary of State for Education and Skills, the hon.
Member for Corby, back in the team. I recognise the genuine
contribution that they both make. May I also say, proleptically to
later clauses, that I welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Wales,
the hon. Member for Carmarthen, West and South Pembrokeshire? Although
it would be apparent to anyone who has even the most
limited knowledge of
accents that I am not Welsh, I have a Welsh wife and certain Welsh
educational interests. If nobody else raises Welsh matters, I may feel
the need to do so later
on.
Regarding
the specific issue of regional councils, there is only one point in the
Minister’s opening remarks this morning about which I have some
reservations. It is a characteristic—a sad
characteristic—of the present Labour Government that
they tend to suggest that no social advance took place before 1997 and
that everything good has taken place
since.
I hope that we do
not have that kind of discussion; indeed, knowing the Minister, we will
not. I readily and happily concede that Ministers have made efforts in
recent years, in some cases successfully, to improve what I hope is a
common objective—to recognise, celebrate and develop our further
education.
10.45
am
The Minister
made a point about further education that I thought was somewhat
inaccurate. Not only is he beginning to rewrite the history of the
past—of the pre-Labour Government period—but he is
beginning to elide the history of the present Government. He might have
a bone to pick with the Minister for Science and Innovation, who was
Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment when the House
considered the Learning and Skills Act 2000. My hon. Friend the Member
for South Holland and The Deepings, who was a member of the Standing
Committee that considered the 2000 Act, will recall that it passed
through the House at some length, with more than 30 sittings in
Committee, and I had the privilege of leading on the matter. The 2000
Act was rather important for further education, even if it was not
confined to that
subject.
I promise the
Committee that there will be no further instances—if there are,
I invite hon. Members to put me down—of my speaking as a former
shadow Minister and saying, “We told you so at the time.”
However, I start with one instance. The Minister will, of course, be
aware of the 2000 Act, but it would be a self-indulgent to assume that
he and his officials have read in full the transcript of that Standing
Committee. However, I am sure that he will know about the amendment
that I moved at 10.30 am on 9 May 2000, seven years ago, to clause 19.
I invited the then Minister to accept this
amendment:
“The
Secretary of State may, by an order subject to affirmative resolution
in both Houses of Parliament, after consultation with such persons as
may seem to him to have an interest, (a) amalgamate, (b) divide, or (c)
vary the area of operations of one or more of such local learning and
skills councils.”—[Official Report, Standing Committee
F, 9 May 2000; c.
309.]
I am afraid we
went down to a resounding defeat on that occasion—it was three
votes to 11—but had that provision been embodied in the 2000
Act, we would not have needed half of the present Bill, because
Ministers could have moved the pieces around the chessboard. I say that
in passing, but if the Minister cares to read that debate—I had
not reread it until a few moments ago—he will see some
interesting exchanges about the balance between central and local, and
those exchanges will continue whatever form is used.
Without prejudice to the future
of the Learning and Skills Council—I do not want to engage in
that debate now—it is at least arguable or defensible to move to
a regional structure, and the Minister will seek to justify
that in Committee. However, I have
reservations—some precise ones that I shall deal with in a
moment and some general structural ones. It is not the first time that
the LSC has been reorganised, but every time it happens—in this
case it is being done formally by moving to a regional
structure—there are other changes. We tend to be promised less
bureaucracy, fewer committees and a general reduction in cost to the
taxpayer.
The Minister
will know that the reorganisation of the LSC is already under way
internally, and, in a sense, that does not depend on and is not
confined to the regionalisation agenda. Other changes are being made to
the way in which the LSC operates, and they probably need to be made,
if only to reduce costs, although that is not without difficulty,
including for constituents of mine who work for it. However, the
Minister needs to say clearly how much money will be saved by the move
to regionalisation, by how much bureaucracy will be reduced in the
interface with users of the LSC’s services and whether the
arrangement can be sustained. I say that because, whatever aspirations
Ministers may have had over the seven years since 2000, things have
been subject to revision and change. That is my main point. I therefore
invite the Minister to say that the present changes will be
substantive, helpful and money-saving changes that will deliver a
better and more flexible service.
I want the Minister to consider
three specific points in relation to that. First, if he looks up that
transcript, he will find some exchanges about function, and we
persuaded Ministers of the day to change their minds slightly on the
matter. There is the question of what might be termed home authorities
for particular businesses. For a national employer—let us say
Sainsbury for the sake of argument—it is clearly very important
to have a relationship with the learning and skills council that will
handle its needs and activities. The LSC will have an idea of the
employer’s training needs, and it will want to discuss them with
someone and to see that they are delivered—of course, the train
to gain initiative will kick in to some extent. In future, will that be
conducted at a national level by a designated officer within the LSC,
or will it be done regionally to meet the needs of employers at that
level? It is extremely important that that should happen, and Ministers
need to comment on it.
There have sometimes been
uneasy tensions, and one of the paradoxes about having a bigger
regional structure, rather than a structure of 47 local councils, is
that it will be less unequivocal about where to start. A company will
have one head office and that is fairly easy to pin down in one local
LSC area, but it may operate in each of the regions—for example,
it may have its head office in one region but more of its activities in
another. I would like the Minister to tell the Committee a little about
how such arrangements with national level employers would
work.
Conversely, the
second area concerns small and medium-sized enterprises. Whatever else
one says, we have had some good support in
Northamptonshire built on the experience of the old training and
enterprise councils structure, where we had an integrated chamber
of commerce structure—we will not reopen that argument. At least
if we had local employment needs, there was somebody available locally
to talk to and—if one can use the phrase—broker with.
Individual local employers have been able to make approaches at a local
level.
I frequently
become paranoid about not the concept of regional government, but its
delivery and practice as it affects my constituency. Not only do I have
the most south-westerly constituency in the east midlands—it is
not far away from that of the Under-Secretary of State for Education
and Skills, the hon. Member for Corby—but it is a substantial
distance away from the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for
South Holland and The Deepings, who is also an east midlander.
Conversely, my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth is just
over the border from me, and some of my people go to his schools, for
example. However, that is a different region. When one is looking at
SMEs, in particular, one is looking at dispersed rural areas—it
is 100 miles to Nottingham, which is a long way to go to get a service.
The Minister needs to give assurance, not least in terms of relations
between the regional LSC structure and the local county structures, for
example.
Angela
Watkinson (Upminster) (Con): In Havering, we have an
excellent business education partnership, which is a member of the
local chamber of commerce and has direct links with local employers and
the local FE and HE college. Does my hon. Friend see a role for
business education partnerships in feeding into the learning and skills
councils?
Mr.
Boswell:
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention.
Clearly, I do not want to caricature the position of Ministers.
Ministers do not want everything to happen at the regional level, and
they know that education and skills delivery will be local, but the
important thing is how the links are articulated. My hon. Friend the
Member for Upminster has eloquently mentioned education business
partnerships, and I know that one or two of those have operated at a
county level.
Employers’ organisations
are also important. I used to be involved with the National Farmers
Union. It tends to operate at a county level and also at a three-county
level—it is clear that the Under-Secretary of State for
Education and Skills, the hon. Member for Corby has some sympathy with
the points that I am trying to make. We all agree that we need local
delivery. We want to strip out as many layers of bureaucracy as we can,
but we need to feel that there is some local ownership.
My final point concerns
cross-boundary arrangements. Because of the geography of my
constituency I take a particular interest in this. I have already
mentioned that some of my constituents travel to the constituency of my
hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth for schools, college
and further education. It is very important that anomalies
donot prevent the application of perfectly sensible
arrangements for families—dad should be able to drop off a
teenager at a particular college on his way to work, for
example.
In
conclusion, we can always play games in this area. We can devise ideal
structures and they may not work. We can have ramshackle structures
and, given good
will, they may work. I am not caricaturing what the Ministers propose as
one or t’other. We want the structures to work, and what has
happened in the past has not been ideal. I am prepared to give a fair
wind to what Ministers are now proposing, and I hope that it works. It
is important that they are aware of the sensitivities and the history
of debates on the matter. I would be grateful if Ministers were to
consider the relationship with national level employers.
As I did not mention it
earlier, perhaps I can also chuck in the issue of specialist or
heritage skills. In my constituency, for example, there is a stonemason
who has a very good operation and who takes on about three apprentices.
That is difficult to deal with at a local level, because there is a
small national need for such skills. Perhaps Ministers will add that to
the list.
To
summarise, my concerns are national employers, specialist skills, the
relationship with SMEs and the way in which one achieves outreach to
contact them however far from the regional centre of government they
may be, and, finally, an assurance on cross-boundary issues. I have
nothing but good will for the Ministers, if they can get this right and
if they can simplify things. I hope that they will remember the maxim,
which I quoted in those exchanges seven years ago, about Occam’s
razor: it is unwise to multiply entities beyond the necessity for doing
so. The less bureaucracy and the more delivery we have, the
better.
Bill
Rammell:
This has been a helpful exchange to get to the
heart of some of these matters. I listened with interest to the
enthusiasm of both the hon. Members for South Holland and The Deepings
and for Brent, East for formalised, regional, democratically
accountable structures. I do not seem to recall that enthusiasm when we
had a debate about elected regional government some time ago.
[
Interruption.
] If I have misrepresented them, I
apologise. However, there are structures to ensure that there is
democratic
accountability.
The
hon. Member for Brent, East asked me a specific question about the role
of both FE and HE colleges within the revised and reformed regional
councils. We confirmed in Grand Committee in another place
that
“we would expect all
LSC regional councils to be business-led, drawing employers from the
priority skills sectors in the region
concerned.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 23
January 2007; Vol. 688, c.
GC329.]
We also stated that
membership would include those with backgrounds in the trade unions,
local authorities, college providers and higher education. In that way
we will ensure that councils have a good understanding of the skills
needs of the local communities that they
serve.
I shall respond
directly to some of the comments by the hon. Member for Daventry. His
implied criticism was that the Government do not recognise that any
social advance took place before 1997. I refute that: I recall that
there were some social advances between 1974 and 1979—there were
also social advances between 1945 and 1951 and between 1964 and 1970.
More seriously, of course, there have been advances in the past under
Governments of all parties.
In response to my statement
that this is the first substantive further education legislation since
1992, the hon. Member for Daventry mentioned the Learning
and Skills Act 2000. The 2000 Act affected further education, but it did
not focus fundamentally and exclusively on further education, as this
Bill does.
The hon.
Gentleman asked me to recall his intervention seven years ago at 10.30
am, but I cannot exactly recall what I was doing on that occasion.
However, I take his point that the Learning and Skills Council has
achieved a significant success, but as the learning and skills
landscape changes, it can and should evolve. No one seriously says that
we do not need an intermediary body to fund learning and skills
providers on the ground, but how the Learning and Skills Council
undertakes that operation has, rightly, evolved and should continue to
evolve
further.
Jeremy
Wright (Rugby and Kenilworth) (Con): The Minister is
right. The structure must evolve, but as my hon. Friend the Member for
South Holland and The Deepings has said, we expect the
Government’s response to the Leitch review imminently. What
happens if that response indicates that the Government intend to go for
a sub-national arrangement that is not regional? How will that tie in
with what the Bill
proposes?
11
am
Bill
Rammell:
I will not pre-empt the
Government’s response to Lord Leitch’s comprehensive
report. [Interruption.] No, the Bill does not pre-empt it. There
is a clear consistency and consensus between this Bill, which focuses
on the supply side, and the arguments advanced by Sandy
Leitch.
The hon.
Member for Daventry raised issues concerning reform of the Learning and
Skills Council and costs, which we will consider in
detail later in our proceedings. I reflected long and hard on some of
the statements made on Second Reading, and on the wholly extraordinary
and erroneous claims by the Conservative party about the proportion of
administration expenditure in the LSC’s overall budget. I hope
that at the end of our debate some of those accusations will be
withdrawn, because the proportion of expenditure on administration
under the LSC has reduced from 4.6 per cent. to 1.9 per cent. of
overall
expenditure.
The hon.
Member for Daventry asked me explicitly what savings
the current restructuring exercise would deliver. The current
restructuring will engineer savings of up to £40 million per
annum. That needs to take account of all the changes, including the
removal of the 47 local LSCs. On the non-executive side, through these
changes we will reduce non-executive participants from 750 to 150,
which will put things in much better
shape.
Mr.
Hayes:
The Minister is right. There were exchanges
on Second Reading about costs. I want to be absolutely clear and candid
about that, as I am sure that the Minister does, too. Is he saying that
there will be an immediate saving as a result of the measure he just
described, or that that saving will accrue once the reorganisation is
in place? How much of that saving has already been announced? He would
not want to be in the business of double accounting, any more than we
would.
Will the Minister clarify what
was meant by what the Secretary of State and others said on Second
Reading about the savings only kicking in after some
time?
Bill
Rammell:
A combination of changes is taking place
through the existing Learning and Skills Council strand 7 of the
“Agenda for Change” and the changes taking place as a
result of the measures in the Bill, which will generate savings of
£40 million per annum. I ask the hon. Gentleman to reflect on
the claims made by Conservative Members on Second Reading that the
Learning and Skills Council was spending £1.8 billion on
administration and expenditure.
Bill
Rammell:
As the Under-Secretary of State for Education and
Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Corby has said, that claim is
complete nonsense and without
foundation.
Mr.
Boswell:
On that point, I have had a most satisfactory
correspondence with somebody whom I know at the LSC. I am satisfied
that at least some aspects of the figures might have been overstated,
but that does not mean that there is not a concern about bureaucracy.
The Minister has said that he will cut the number of non-executive
directors as part of the reform, which may slightly reduce costs. Can
he assure the Committee that there will still be the same involvement
at local level? It is important that people who are active locally in
the business community are able to input to the
LSC.
On the
requirements for flexibility, from a cursory look at the Bill—I
have not sought to amend it—it seems to me that the rigid
structure that we criticised seven years ago will now be transferred to
regions. If Ministers ever wanted to make things more flexible or to
vary them, they would not appear to have the opportunity to do so
through the Bill. Will the Minister consider whether that is worth
re-examining?
Bill
Rammell:
I will discuss the specifics of that issue later,
but the hon. Gentleman has made an important point. If we are reducing
the number of non-executive directors from 750 to 150, what continuing
contribution can those individuals, who have given significant service,
make to the overall learning and skills landscape? There are a number
of ways in which they can contribute. First, they can do so through
direct contact and involvement with further education providers on the
ground. Secondly, although we are—rightly, in my
view—moving from 47 area councils to nine regional councils, we
will also have150 partnership teams on the ground, so we will
get both a regional and a localised interface, which is lacking from
the current structure.
My experience as a constituency
MP is one of the things that has convinced me of the need for change.
Under the system of the 47 learning and skills councils, the council
for my constituency covers the geographical area of Essex, which is as
large as some countries in terms of both size and expenditure. The idea
that there is the necessary degree of localisation in those
circumstances is not borne out by the
evidence.
Jeremy
Wright:
I want to take the Minister back to costs and
savings and ask him to provide a bit more clarity. I refer him to the
Learning and Skills Council’s annual report and accounts for
2005-06, in which Ray O’Dowd, whom he will know as the LSC
“Agenda for Change” champion, described the changes that
the LSC was making at that
time:
“we will be working
with providers in a more strategic, hands-off way. Working like this
will need about 1,300 fewer staff, which will free as much as
£40 million a year for investment at the front line. In the past
year we have set out the reorganisation and staff changes that we need,
and these should be in place by late
2006.”
I want to be clear
that the savings of £40 million that the Minister has said will
result from the proposals in the Bill are not the £40 million to
which Ray O’Dowd referred in that document—Mr.
O’Dowd suggested that the savings would be achieved by measures
taken by the end of
2006.
Bill
Rammell:
I was talking about a combination of the
LSC’s strand 7
and—[
Interruption
.
]
That is
not a surprise; it is what I said about five minutes ago. I am talking
about a combination of the strand 7 measures and the changes that will
result from the Bill. I can update the Committee: through the strand 7
“Agenda for Change”, we now estimate that 1,100 net posts
will be removed. Combined with the measures that we are debating, such
as the move from 750 to 150 non-executive directors, that will create
an overall annual saving of £40
million.
I know that
we will return to this issue. We are looking for precision and clarity.
I welcome the acknowledgment from the hon. Member for Daventry that
what he and other Opposition Members said on Second Reading was without
foundation. The claim was that the LSC’s administrative
expenditure was£1.8 billion, and one can reach such a
figure only by including learner support and capital expenditure, for
example.
One of the
things that I am very proud that this Government have done in the past
10 years is significantly to expand our capital expenditure. In 1997,
not one penny was being spent in the mainstream capital budget; today,
£500 million per annum is being spent. If that is administrative
expenditure, frankly it is the type of administrative expenditure that
people on the ground have been crying out for over an awfully long
period.
The hon.
Member for Daventry also asked whether the transfer of responsibility
from local to regional LSCs will make it harder for SMEs to be involved
in skills planning and delivery. I genuinely do not believe that that
will be the case. Employers will make up more than 40 per cent. of the
membership of the LSC’s national and regional councils, while at
the local level, as I said earlier, the LSC’s 150 or so local
partnership teams will work with a much wider range of stakeholders,
including employers, to ensure that local learning and skills needs are
properly identified.
I want to discuss the specific
details of the amendment. It may be helpful for the Committee to recall
that the Learning and Skills Council is the Learning and Skills Council
for England. In that sense, it is a single, unitary body and I believe
that that is one of its key strengths, enabling it to work at national,
regional, local and sectoral levels. As we set out in the 2006 White
Paper, we are strengthening both regional
and local tiers of the LSC. The LSC has to be sufficiently flexible to
work across regions, sectors, city regions, areas and cities, and also
to engage with partners, employers and learners at every
level.
The amendment
that the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings has tabled
seeks to remove the provision mirroring section 20(2) of the Learning
and Skills Act 2000, which applies to existing local LSCs. That
provision reconfirms, for the absolute avoidance of doubt, that the LSC
has flexibility to secure commissioning and delivery of learning and
skills in the most effective way possible.
So, for
example, a regional council will be able to contract with and fund a
learning provider operating anywhere in England, or indeed fund an
institution that attracts students from outside its own specific area.
A practical example of where that would be necessary would be in the
event of a merger of two colleges in neighbouring regions. The legal
entity would be in one region, but the LSC regional council for the
neighbouring region would need to engage with that provider. That is
notwithstanding the fact that the provider’s legal base would be
in the area covered by a different regional council, possibly securing
provision across regional boundaries. I think that that was the issue
that the hon. Member for Daventry was driving
at.
The amendment
tabled by the Opposition would explicitly prevent that type of
activity, as well as removing the ability of a regional council, where
specified by the council, to undertake activity on behalf of the
council for the whole of England. Although we intend that the regional
councils will be underpinned by statute, I believe that the
sub-regional structure needs to be flexible and responsive. The LSC
will improve engagement through the 150 or so local partnership teams
that I have already referred to, and there will be about one team per
local authority area. I believe that those partnership teams will be
much closer to local communities than the current 47 local councils,
and therefore they will be better placed to ensure that the needs of
learners are being identified and met.
Those local area partnerships,
as flexible internal executive arrangements, are not specifically
provided for in the Bill, but their job is to work directly with local
stakeholders, including employers, local authorities and local
colleges, schools and independent providers, to identify and meet the
learning and skills needs of each
area.
The LSC will
have to consult learners and potential learners, as well as employers.
It will also—rightly, in my view—work
with the national learner panel and other learner networks to ensure
that the voice of learners is genuinely heard. That is a very important
issue and therefore we intend that the LSC will recruit and appoint a
learner to the national council in due course, possibly this autumn. We
also expect each LSC regional committee to include a learner as well.
That is an important change and, allied with the other responses that I
have given, I hope that the exchanges on this particular amendment have
introduced some clarity, and I am grateful for having had the
opportunity to contribute to that
process.
The need for
the regional councils to exercise functions that are delegated to them
by the national council, both within and outside their area, is clear.
These are sensible provisions that will enable the LSC to continue to
operate flexibly and effectively. I therefore ask the hon. Gentleman to
withdraw the
amendment.
11.15
am
Mr.
Hayes:
The Minister is a good and diligent Minister, and I
am delighted that we will hear from him at length over the coming
hours, days and weeks. May I also take this opportunity to welcome the
Under-Secretary of State for Education and Skills, the hon. Member for
Corby, who will no doubt be assisting the Minister with his usual
skills? However, the beginning of this Committee has been a
disappointment. Ihave been disappointed with his combination
of obfuscation, rhetoric and assertion. We have also had some smear
from the Minister about the record of the previous Conservative
Government and about the content of speeches that were made on Second
Reading. We need a little more accuracy in the way in which we deal
with these affairs.
My hon. Friend the Member for
Rugby and Kenilworth has made a revelation in the course of this
debate, which is that the savings that the Minister reported at the
beginning of his speech were a combination of savings already made and
savings expected to be made. Given that my hon. Friend made it clear
that the savings already anticipated as aresult of the
reorganisation that he mentioned were£40 million, one
wonders what contribution the new savings will make to that combined
total, as £40 million plus zero comes to £40 million,
does it not? £40 million plus another amount would come to
something more than £40 million. We are not absolutely sure
where those savings come from, how much more we expect to save, and
what the LSC budget will be like at the end of next year as a result of
these changes. We have had more heat than light from the Minister on
that subject.
Turning
to the two other matters of substance that have been debated, the
Minister has made a good case on why, in certain circumstances, a
regional LSC might need to act outside its area. That is the issue at
the heart of the amendment, and I anticipated that to some
degree—the hon. Member for Brent, East said the same—when
I said that it was likely that in city areas one could understand that
the employment base might not be coterminous with the regional
structure, and that it would therefore be necessary to have some
flexibility in the way that the organisation operated. To that end, the
amendment has done its job, and as a result of probing, we have
discovered what we need to be assured of. However, the other point that
the Minister raises about the exact nature of these regional
organisations and their relationship to localities gave cause for
concern once again. If we are going to have this panoply of local
bodies sitting beneath the regions, we may be reinventing the structure
that we are now reforming. I can see a burgeoning of organisations and
individuals that fill the gap that has been created by the very change
to regionalisation that the Bill proposes. Is it not really the case
that what is required here is a root and branch reform of how we fund
and manage matters of the kind that the Leitch report recommends, and
to which the Government will no doubt respond.
I recommend to the
Committee—the Minister may not have had the chance to see it and
it is highly relevant to this part of the Bill—the report
published today by the Opposition’s economic competitive policy
group, chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham
(Mr. Redwood), on skills training for a more competitive
economy. In that document, hot off the press, a case is made that is
rather similar to that made by Sandy Leitch, that we need a fundamental
rethink of how we fund and organise the management of skills, rather
than this re-arranging of the deckchairs as we head for the iceberg
that the Minister has articulated, and I am being generous by saying
“articulated”. I shall withdraw my amendment because I do
not want to start the Committee in an unnecessarily antagonistic vein.
However, I hope that some of those matters will be clarified as the
work of Committee develops, because I am still very concerned about the
financial and organisational effects of some of the proposals that we
have begun to tease out this morning.
Amendment, by leave,
withdrawn.
Mr.
Hayes:
I beg to move amendment No. 22, in
clause 2, page 3, line 8, leave
out ‘and local authorities’ and insert
‘, local authorities and sector
skills
councils’.
The
Chairman:
With this it will be convenient to discuss
amendment No. 25, in clause 7, page 6, line 38, after
‘employers,’,
insert—
‘(ba) sector skills
councils,
or’.
Mr.
Hayes:
The subsection that amendment No. 22 would amend
specifies that the LSC must consult regional development agencies and
other local bodies on guidance to regional councils. However, it does
not specify that the LSC should have a duty to consult sector skills
councils. Given the greater role envisaged by the Leitch review for
such councils, and their significance in articulating the needs of
employers and working with training providers to ensure that what is
offered matches those needs, those bodies should at the very least be
consultees.
Sandy
Leitch—I make no apology for mentioning him again, because the
Minister started by referring to the Leitch report in relation to the
Bill—and the official Opposition would like sector skills
councils to have a much bigger role. The report that I mentioned
earlier, which I know will be on the Minister’s bedside table
tonight, makes precisely that case. The sector skills councils should
be the principal conduit for identifying need, explaining that need to
the Department and working to accredit courses that meet that need with
training providers in FE colleges and elsewhere.
That is not the Bill that we
have before us; it is the Bill that we expect to see in the next
Queen’s Speech, when the Government respond to the Leitch review
and the new Prime Minister is at the helm. However, in order to reflect
the importance of the sector skills councils, they should at least be
consulted. Amendment No. 22 provides for that—it would make the
sector
skills councils statutory consultees in the process. Let me flesh that
out for a moment. The Leitch review says at paragraph 4.25
that
“Sector
Skills Councils (SSCs) are beginning to effectively engage employers.
Over three fifths of employers who have had dealings with their SSC
think that SSCs have had a positive impact on skills development in
their sector. Nearly two thirds of employers who deal with their SSC
are satisfied. This includes those employers who operate across a
number of SSCs with different business and occupational areas. The
evaluation shows that there are significant variations by sector in
performance.”
However,
“employer satisfaction with the
labour market information provided by their
SSC”
is generally
good.
In my judgment,
the Government also recognise the importance of sector skills councils
and are likely to do so all the more when they respond to the Leitch
review. I cannot see why, therefore, they should reject the amendment;
given the importance of SSCs, it would be perverse to resist it, and I
know that the Minister will be eager to accept such a positive
contribution tothe Bill.
Amendment No. 25 deals with the
duty of the LSC to secure the provision of facilities for education and
training. It would provide for the LSC, in performing that duty, to act
with a view to encouraging diversityin education and training,
and to increase the opportunities for individuals to exercise choice by
consulting SSCs in line with the FE White Paper. Paragraph 3
states:
“Alongside learners,
employers are the major customers of FE....We have now established a
full network of 25 SSCs, led by employers to ensure that their needs
and priorities for the skills that will support productivity are both
articulated through SSAs and met through more responsive
provision.”
In essence,
our amendments reflect our determination to ensure that employer-led
organisations are at the heart of the process. I hope that the
Government will accept them in the spirit in which they are offered.
Should the Minister be resistant to my pleas, at the very least I hope
that he will take this opportunity to explain what role he sees sector
skills councils playing in this consultative process and how he sees
them interacting with the newly structured Learning and Skills
Council.
Sarah
Teather:
Liberal Democrat Members are very supportive of
these amendments. They seem perfectly sensible. If Sandy Leitch has
recommended that post-19 provision needs to be employer-led, it seems
sensible that the regional councils should be required to consult with
the sector skills councils. I shall be curious to hear the
Minister’s response to the amendments, but we are very
supportive of
them.
Jeremy
Wright:
May I belatedly welcome you to the Chair,
Mr. Atkinson? I rise to speak in support of amendments Nos.
22 and 25 moved by my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The
Deepings. I should say from the outset that the sector skills council
that deals with the land-based industries, Lantra, is based in my
constituency. Partly as a result of the work that it does, it is
particularly important that these amendments find their way into the
Bill. I, too, hope that the Minister will view them sympathetically.
One of the reasons for that is that it is apparent from my
discussions with Lantra that the sector with which it
deals is specific in its requirements and very
unusual in many respects. Whenever policy is formed and guidance and
advice is constructed the land-based sector should therefore be
included.
I hope that
the Minister can help me with one particular issue and offer me some
reassurance. If there is to be a regional structure, a case will
inevitably be made for regional centres of excellence. In land-based
engineering, for example, there is probably enough demand to justify
five centres of excellence nationwide. With nine regions, each region
will wish to compete for one of those centres. There will not be enough
to go around and it would be inappropriate to create nine centres
simply to meet that requirement. I hope that the Minister can reassure
us that if we are to have a regional structure, there will be a
mechanism for resolving those sorts of issues to ensure that the
sector—the land-based sector in this case—is properly
served with these centres of excellence and that there is a national
overarching view to go along with the regional structure proposed in
the Bill.
Mr.
Boswell:
It will not have escaped the Minister’s
attention that the two amendments bear on two slightly different
bodies: one is in relation to the duty or obligation of the regional
councils to consult and the second relates the council itself. In a
sense that has been brought out in what has already been said. In
addition to the other tensions we identified earlier there is also a
tension between the council and sector skills councils and the
operation of the relationship, such as it is, and whether it should be
at a national, regional or local level.
The Minister owes the Committee
some explanation of how that should work. Sector skills councils will
have an important continuing role, but they need to have the right
consultation mechanisms. My judgment is that they should be at both
regional and national level. As my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and
Kenilworth pointed out, some facilities cannot operate below the level
of the region and may need to have only a small number of centres of
excellence. I mentioned the example of stonemasonry, although I do not
think that that needs to be exclusive, but certain minority, albeit
important, skills may need a single centre of excellence nationally.
Those links need to be carefully
deployed.
Some of my
earlier scepticism about sector skills councils is being dissipated in
the event. I am pleased about that. They are beginning to bed down.
There was a hurry to move into a national structure. Ministers were
rather pressing ahead with it, sometimes beyond the capacity of those
centres. Those of us who know the area well will be aware of the
strengths of organisations such as SEMPTA and Construction Skills, in
the latter case based on a training levy, although we will not debate
that issue today. They had some substance before they started. I have
been impressed, in my recent work in connection with Pitcom, on the
response to e-skills. There are other favourable cases: even Lantra,
which I have known man and boy in my professional, as well as my
policy, capacity, has now established itself and has a major
contribution to make.
In terms of what the Government
are proposing, and what Conservative Members are saying, there is a
very important role for sector skills councils. They need to have the
right relationship with the Learning and Skills Council as it operates
nationally and regionally and the Minister should explain to the
Committee how that will work in
practice.
11.30
am
Bill
Rammell:
The hon. Member for South Holland and The
Deepings set out his enthusiastic support for sector skills councils,
which I welcome, as they are at the heart of the Government’s
agenda in responding to the skills
challenge.
The hon.
Gentleman also said that according to the Leitch report, to which we
will respond shortly, the sector skills councils will take on a more
substantive role. He also alluded to the fact that Sandy Leitch
recommends that we move even further in a demand-led direction. I agree
with both those propositions and nothing in the Bill contradicts that
approach. If hon. Members could identify what in the Bill stops us
moving in the direction of the Leitch report’s recommendations,
I would better understand their concerns. Ministers throughout the
Department, especially my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary, regularly
meet the sector skills councils.
Mr.
Boswell:
Will the Minister accept that if legislation
specifies certain bodies as consultees and excludes others, whatever
his good intentions and however much he may wish it to happen in
practice, there is different pressure to conduct consultations on those
that are specified and those that are not? That is at the root of our
concerns on the
matter.
Bill
Rammell:
I will address that concern directly, as it is
explicit in the regulations that we expect that engagement to take
place with the sector skills councils.
The critical matter is not what
the Bill says, but what it does not say. If the Government’s
response to Leitch reflects the principal message in that report, which
is to move to a demand-led system with a very different
structure—the Learning and Skills Council is not mentioned until
70 pages into Leitch—we anticipate that further statutory change
would be needed to facilitate that new structure. We are not arguing
that the Bill is necessarily unhelpful in that respect, but that it is
a missed opportunity; it does not pave the way for such fundamental
change. That is the essence of our point about the
Bill.
Bill
Rammell:
That clarification is helpful, but I genuinely
disagree with the hon. Gentleman. The critique that usually comes from
Opposition Members is that we legislate too often when it is not
necessary. To move the system in a more demand-led direction one does
not need to legislate; we have already committed ourselves through the
“Further Education” White Paper to moving to 50 per cent.
of provision being
demand-led by 2015. There is a debate to be had about how much further
and more quickly we can go in that direction, but it does not require
legislation. That is why I said that there is nothing in the Bill that
contradicts Sandy Leitch’s recommendations.
The hon. Member for Rugby and
Kenilworth talked about the importance of centres of excellence and how
they can be recognised within the revised structure. I refer him to the
previous debate; it is clear that we have a unitary council structure
and there will be a national overview. If we had accepted the
amendment, it would have been more difficult to ensure genuine national
co-ordination when responding to the issue of centres of excellence.
The hon. Member for Daventry raised concerns about centres of
excellence. I remind him that we are moving forward with national
skills academies, and we are committed to there being 12 by 2008. We
also have an excellent network of centres of vocational excellence,
which are developing the kind of best practice model that we need to
see across the country.
I have made clear the
importance that we attach to the work and role of the sector skills
councils. They are the key to articulating demand for skills, to
identifying priorities and to stimulating increased demand for skills
among employers. Hence, they are a vital plank in the creation of a
more demand-led system, as we outlined in last year’s White
Paper on further education. Indeed, the importance of that role was
acknowledged and asserted by Sandy Leitch in his recent
report.
We have
already ensured that the LSC involves the sector skills councils fully
in delivering its functions, including regionally. The LSC works with
the SSCs through sector skills agreements, which also bring together
employers and other key partners, including the awarding bodies. The
agreements set out each sector’s needs and provisions and the
action needed on the supply side to meet skills gaps and
shortages.
The LSC
rightly consults widely with SSCs nationally and regionally through the
regional skills partnerships, enabling it to respond effectively on
skills priorities. In addition, the new LSC structure will allow it to
work much more effectively in partnership with SSCs and employers and
its many other partners. The nine regional councils, which will be
given statutory underpinning under clause 2, will have a key role in
developing strong collaborative relationships with key partners,
including SSCs, in order to secure a strong link between jobs, training
and skills.
Clause 7
makes it clear that other persons to be consulted may be expressly
specified in guidance made by the Secretary of State. We have made
available an illustrative draft of the statutory guidance, prepared in
accordance with the Bill, to which the LSC must have regard. That draft
makes explicit reference to consultation with SSCs and regional skills
partnerships. It makes it clear that we expect the LSC to consult with
the 25 SSCs and, once it has been established, with the new commission
for employment and skills. That genuinely provides the reassurance that
hon. Members seek.
Although I agree with the
sentiment behind the amendments, I believe that they are not necessary.
I would not want to refer in legislation to organisations that are
non-statutory bodies. I said earlier that this is the first
substantive piece of further education
legislation since 1992. We do not want to pin ourselves down to specific
bodies in primary legislation. Such organisations may change, and
referring to them in primary legislation could therefore be without
meaning. Given that, and given the draft regulations, I hope that the
hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings will feel able to
withdraw the amendment.
Mr.
Hayes:
The Minister assures us that, through guidance,
sector skills councils will indeed play a critical role in the
consultative process laid out in the Bill. However, there remain
concerns. One is the narrowing of the membership of the Learning and
Skills Council to 10 members, which was dealt with under clause 1; it
will have fewer members than the Higher Education Funding Council, the
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and the Quality Improvement
Agency. It seems that 10 is the new minimum. Another is the removal of
localities from the system that regional councils will inevitably
cause, notwithstanding what the Minister said about other sub-regional
bodies. I also have doubts about what I would describe as a sort of
bunker mentality, as the LSC comes under increasing pressure following
criticisms from independent sources—the Leitch review envisages
it withering away—and there are constant concerns about
bureaucracy.
Those
issues of consultation, liaison and responsiveness become ever more
critical. However, I know that the Minister is genuinely committed to
ensuring that all interested parties play a part. I hear what he says
about the importance of guidance and, furthermore, hear what he says
about the risks and dangers of enshrining some of these matters in
primary legislation. A Minister of any political colour would take a
similar view. Having heard him offer those assurances, I beg leave to
withdraw the
amendment.
Amendment,
by leave,
withdrawn.
Clause
2 ordered to stand part of the
Bill.
Clause 3
ordered to stand part of the
Bill.
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