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The second argument is one of social justice. If you consider most young people who are in full-time education beyond the age of 16, the great majority will get something like five years of post-16 education, including university, at major expense to the state in all of those years. Now, if you consider the people affected by this Bill, most of them get little beyond 16. As a result of the Bill, they will get an extra two years of education, but for most of them, probably not much more than that. The people we are bringing into education here are going to get two years compared to the five years of people going down the full-time route. How could we possibly justify a situation where the people going
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The amendment is necessary for two reasons. First, it is necessary to ensure that the Bill can work. Unless we can show how we can get the places, we should not pass such a Bill. Secondly, it is necessary as a matter of simple justice. I earnestly hope that my noble friend can find some way of including this principle within the Bill. I know that constitutional issues are involved. However, from the Government’s point of view, a Bill that gives no indication of how it could possibly be made to work and no guarantee of fairness to the group who are being forced into compulsory education is not the right way of going forward. I beg to move.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford: I support the noble Lord’s amendment. His point is a potent one. Those who enter into the part-time apprenticeship form of education, or go into education but have a part-time job, are those who lose out. One difficulty we face, as he rightly pointed out, is that while apprenticeships are probably the best way for these people to acquire education and training—because they are well-motivated when they are in a job and are motivated by that job—we nevertheless have a surplus of applicants for apprenticeships at present. Not enough companies offer apprenticeships. If you ask them, “Why are you not putting forward an apprenticeship?”, they constantly raise the problems of cost, bureaucracy and so on. I refer the noble Lord to the report last year on apprenticeships by the Select Committee on Economic Affairs. It pointed out how very satisfactory a lot of apprenticeships are. Nevertheless, there is quite a strong case for giving a subsidy to employers.
I point out to the noble Lord an anomaly that he has not mentioned; that is, under the train-to-gain scheme, which admittedly applies to current employees of a company, the company gets paid for employees training for a level 2 qualification but if it takes on an apprentice aged 16 or 17 to do a level 2 qualification, there is no subsidy for the company. In fact, it has to pay the apprentice’s wages and 50 per cent of his fees at the further education college for off-the-job training. There are positive cost disincentives to take on apprentices and a positive incentive for companies to take on people with no training whatever and put them through training subsequently through the train-to-gain scheme. This is totally absurd. The Government need to consider aligning the train-to-gain scheme with apprenticeship qualifications.
Those who stay on at school qualify for educational maintenance allowances but those who do apprenticeships do not. In terms of equity, it would seem sensible to establish a level playing field and make it clear that
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7 pm
Baroness Howe of Idlicote: I support this amendment. I am reminded of those part-time-only providers, such as the Open University, that have done very badly out of some of the deals on extended education that the Government have rightly been encouraging in many other areas.
I listened only a few days ago to an employer who was providing apprenticeships at a fairly basic level and was doing very well but was complaining because, as soon as the young person on an apprenticeship had gained a qualification, experience and confidence, they were usually stolen by another employer. That trainer felt not that the money was wasted—they were doing it partly to help the individual—but very much out of pocket. It is only fair that this amendment is taken very seriously indeed. I am certain that the noble Lord, Lord Layard, will have got his facts more than verified and more than right.
Lord Elton: I am very interested in what the noble Lord proposes. I absolutely take the point that employers need some inducement to provide these places, which are desperately needed, and that that inducement could be financial. However, I cannot work out from his amendment—I am probably just being slow—quite how it would work. First, the provider of education under the new scheme will provide it, if he is an employer, part-time; the provider of education referred to in subsection (1) of the amendment would provide it “full-time”. Is there an element of pro rata here? If someone is working, as it were, for two-thirds of the time, over a year, is that equated to an equivalent number of school days below the age of 16, or does it relate to a number of college days if further education is involved? Secondly, I cannot work out what proportion is intended to go to the employer. I think I understand what the noble Lord intends but it seems that it is split in subsection (2)(b) between employers and some others who are, presumably, the people with the workstation, as it were, as opposed to the people with the hands-on job. To help me in this and to shorten what I say, could the noble Lord tell us what he thinks the quantum of the benefit to the employer in a typical case would be, and how many employees would amount to a row of beans when it came to a big employer?
Lord Layard: On the question of pro rata, I am not suggesting that. As emerged from our earlier discussions, the teaching side of part-time courses can be quite intensive. Many vocational courses are also more expensive than college-based courses. On top of that, there are problems evaluating an NVQ. That is why, as of now, expenditure on a modern apprentice, which is paid to a training provider—typically, a training company—and the work that they do with the apprentice, including finding him an employer, is the same as the amount that is given to an FE college for a full-time student at that college. There is that parity.
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I suggest that extra money needs to go to the employer to find the places, in addition to the money going to training providers who arrange the off-the-job element, the evaluation and the assessment. A total of the moneys will go to people who are going down the part-time route, some of which, as was said, will go through the training provider—or the FE college, if that is where they are doing their part-time training—and some of which will go to the employer; there is that total. Another total comes from the money spent in respect of those in full-time education; some of that is for tuition, some is the educational maintenance allowance and some involves child tax benefits and so on. The aggregation that I am talking about would involve looking at this at the national level—or it could possibly be done locally—and asking what is the total of resources going to one type of person compared with another, and for those going down the part-time, job-related route, guaranteeing the amount of resources per person: that would be no less than the amount going to the more privileged group going through the full-time route. That was my suggestion.
Lord Hunt of Chesterton: I support my noble friend. One of the most important points about education for the people we are concerned with here is not only gaining knowledge but gaining confidence—the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, made that point. In the UK over the past 30 or 40 years, once young people leave their workplace and go to college, there has been a marvellous transformation—they have gained the kind of social confidence that formerly I used to see visiting the United States. Britain has been transformed by this. Nevertheless, there are whole areas of Britain in which not enough people can do that. We must make this funding available and have suitable colleges that are reasonably provided with the social and other facilities that are available for people attending universities. This area of justice is important.
It also makes those people more effective when they go to work, because they have the ability to communicate. It is when they are not as effective as they might be that there is a drain on our economy. I speak as a small employer of 25 people. With my colleagues, I have seen a transformation in the quality of people coming in when they have been to college. That is what we need to invest in, and it is an anomaly that we are not investing as much as we should be in this valuable part of our society.
Baroness Verma:We have some sympathy with the noble Lord’s amendment and agree that, if the Bill is to achieve what it sets out to do, those apprenticeships must be available in the first place. The complexities of how the different funding streams will work and how they can be accessed easily by employers must be looked at. We all agree that we must do everything we can to ensure that all employers are fully engaged in providing apprenticeships. We were assured in a recent meeting with the Federation of Small Businesses that it sees apprenticeships as important to the development of business. We will need to look much more closely at what the noble Lord, Lord Layard, has said.
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Lord Adonis: I completely endorse my noble friend’s remarks on the value of apprenticeships. This is why we have increased apprenticeship starts from 65,000 in 1997 to 180,000 last year, and are projecting the number of starts to grow to almost 210,000 by 2010-11. In 2007-08, we spent £624 million on apprenticeships, up from £532 million in 2002-03. That is a significant increase in funding. We project that the £624 million of 2007-08 will grow to £776 million in 2010-11—an increase of nearly 25 per cent. We are putting significant resources behind the overall expansion of apprenticeships.
On the question of remuneration, apprentices aged 16 to 17, and those who are 18 and in the first year of their apprenticeship, have minimum weekly pay set at a level designed to ensure that they receive at least the same amount as those in full-time education or approved training who are attracting the package of EMA plus child benefit and child tax credits. This is the comparison that my noble friend was making.
A recently published survey shows that, in 2007, the average net pay for apprentices was £170 per week. That is significantly more than the maximum package of support available for young people in full-time education or unwaged training, even if any reasonable wages from a part-time job are added in to the equation. However, we have asked the Low Pay Commission to review apprentice pay and the exemption from the national minimum wage. It has called for evidence on this issue and is due to report on its findings and make recommendations to Government by the end of February next year. I am sure that my noble friend will make representations himself to the Low Pay Commission, and we shall certainly draw the commission’s attention to this debate in your Lordships’ House. We would not wish to pre-empt the commission’s report by legislating in advance of that evidence and analysis.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford: I put it to the Minister that perhaps one problem faced particularly by small and medium-sized employers is the level of apprentice pay. It may not be very high, but, as he has indicated, it is well above the educational maintenance allowance level, and paying apprenticeship wages is a very real cost for employers. Research evidence shows that, in the short term, companies are out of pocket on apprentice pay; but, with advanced apprenticeships, they get back more over the longer term than they do in the shorter term. The level of apprentice pay is a real problem. It is much higher in this country than in Holland, Scandinavia or Germany, where regulations keep apprenticeship pay very much lower than in this country.
Lord Adonis: The issue of the supply of apprenticeships by small employers is very much on our minds. How we seek to boost that supply is an issue of great concern. I will deal with the specific point mentioned by the noble Baroness; and also with the comments that she made earlier about the direct incentive payments scheme under the LSC’s Train to Gain initiative, whereby employers with fewer than 50 full-time employees are eligible for a contribution to wage costs for employees, in order to help them achieve their first level 2 qualification and/or approved skills for life qualification. This was the specific point raised by the noble Baroness; that
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Paragraphs 5.16 and 5.17 refer specifically to the Train to Gain initiative and the wage subsidies that are provided to small employers. Paragraph 5.17 says:
“We believe that this approach should be extended to employers with fewer than 50 full-time employees recruiting Apprentices ... We do not propose across-the-board eligibility for this incentive payment, as the particular risks of employing 16 to 18 year-olds vary across different types of business, as do the benefits for the programme of incentivising growth in this way. It will be targeted where it is likely to bring meaningful growth (for instance, a target group might be cost-sensitive small businesses in a sector that we know to be afflicted by skills shortages), and the criteria will be transparent”.
It goes on to give other examples of incentive payments that we might make to employers to offer apprenticeships. For example, it cites third sector organisations, which, it says,
- “have also got a significant role to play in the expansion of Apprenticeships ... In recognition of this, the pilot scheme will also include a number of Third Sector organisations. We will set aside sufficient budget to pilot the scheme in this spending period (and to pilot a variety of approaches with different groups), with the intention of revisiting the total budget and best approach, with the benefit of the pilot’s data, in the next Comprehensive Spending Review”.
So precisely the issues raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, and by my noble friend, about how we might more directly incentivise employers to offer apprenticeships, are being addressed by these pilot schemes and by other measures set out in the world-class apprenticeships paper. We would welcome the views of the noble Baroness and of my noble friend and we hope that, when we have got the data from the pilots, they will look at them with us and help us to reach conclusions about the way forward.
Lord Layard: I am grateful to the Minister for that. On the question of the employer subsidy, we have a situation where only 30 per cent of large firms provide apprenticeships. It is not just small firms: two-thirds of large firms are not providing apprenticeships. We should not think that a pilot scheme just on small firms will necessarily deal with the problem.
Lord Adonis: Perhaps I, too, may quote paragraph 5.18 of the world-class apprenticeships paper, which says that,
- “we believe that there is scope for moderate growth in Apprenticeship numbers by offering similar direct payment incentives to large companies, so that they can recruit more Apprentices than they need to meet their requirements”.
So the paper also addresses the issue of large employers offering more apprenticeships.
Lord Layard: I believe that that is about people training more individuals than they are required to do and being paid for it. However, my impression is that in many cases training anyone will mean the receipt of a subsidy.
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This world-class apprenticeships paper is a huge step forward. We have been pootling along over this issue, redesignating some workplace training as apprenticeships but, to be honest, without a major breakthrough until now. We are now poised for a major breakthrough and there is only one reason for that, which is this Bill. Unless we can provide many more apprenticeships and satisfy the apprenticeship guarantee, we cannot possibly implement the Bill, and the Bill is incredibly important because of all the other things that follow from it.
What concerns me about my noble friend’s reply is the lack of a reference to the general principle of how this group of people should be funded compared with those who go down the full-time route. These are the underprivileged people whose educational future we are trying to lift, but all the inertia in the system will lead to full-time people being treated better than this group. I wonder whether it is possible for the Government to think of some way of tying their own hands, because that is what is required. The pressures from the full-time lobby are so strong that the part-time people will never get a deal unless the Government do that. Surely the Bill is about trying to get a new educational philosophy going. It deals with only about 30 or 40 per cent of the population, and this is the first time that we have had a Bill which is concerned only with the less privileged part of the population. With all the old pressures, the full-time route will get the focus of attention and the focus of the money.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford: I remind the noble Lord that we will have another Bill next year, perhaps somewhat misleadingly called, again, the Education and Skills Bill, and I believe that it will deal specifically with issues relating to apprenticeships. It will certainly deal, for example, with the demise of the LSC and the establishment of the new funding council, and I believe that the apprenticeship issue will be picked up in it.
Lord Layard: It will of course be a very important Bill. However, in this Bill we are dealing with the two groups who are not in full-time education: the apprentices and the others. This is the time when we should not forget the others; they will be less privileged than the apprentices and there needs to be a way of ensuring that they get a good deal.
Lord Elton: I support the noble Baroness. The prospect of a diminishing perspective of Bills overlapping with each other is really alarming, and if this issue can be decided in this Bill, it should not be postponed until the next.
Lord Layard: I am grateful for that intervention. I hope that it will be possible to think of some way in which this issue can be addressed in the Bill; otherwise, as I said, the Bill will convey no idea of how such funding could be implemented or how it could be justly implemented. I shall leave it at that and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
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Baroness Royall of Blaisdon: I beg to move that the House do now resume. In moving this Motion, I suggest that the Committee stage should not begin again until 8.25 pm.
Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
Terrorism Act 2006 (Disapplication of Section 25) Order 2008
7.24 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord West of Spithead) rose to move, That the draft order laid before the House on 21 May be approved.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, the Government agreed in our debates during the passage of what became the Terrorism Act 2006 that there should be a requirement for the annual renewal by Parliament of Section 23 of the Act, which extends the maximum period of detention of terrorist suspects from 14 to 28 days. The order before the House today therefore disapplies Section 25 of the Terrorism Act 2006 for a period of one year beginning 25 July 2008, thereby extending for another year the maximum period of pre-charge detention for terrorist suspects of 28 days.
Pre-charge detention has been the subject of considerable debate over the past 12 months, both in the context of the Counter-Terrorism Bill and in the reviews carried out by the Home Affairs Committee and the Joint Committee on Human Rights. I do not intend to go over those debates here, but it is worth reminding ourselves why Parliament agreed to the exceptional 28-day limit.
Terrorist investigations can be hugely time-consuming, and the increase from 14 to 28 days was necessary primarily as a result of the greater use of encrypted computers and mobile phones, the increasingly complex nature of terrorist networks that have to be investigated, and the increasingly international nature of terrorist networks, meaning greater language difficulties and a greater need to gather evidence from different jurisdictions abroad.
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