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We have been pressing to get more apprentices and training in the Olympics, trying to draw in people from surrounding boroughs, including people we need to take off that NEET register—the difficult to employ. Many people are having some success and we are driving hard on that.
I draw your attention to another important policy change. We have now ensured that there are no legal hurdles for writing into public procurement contracts the right to specify numbers of apprentices and training. That is another important step forward.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford: My Lords, the Minister says that there are no legal obstacles to writing this in. Are the Government insisting that on all public procurement contracts the contractors take on apprenticeships?
Lord Young of Norwood Green: My Lords, it is certainly our intention to write that into public procurement contracts. We are on a journey here,
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A number of noble Lords drew our attention to the benefits of competitions in raising people’s awareness of the importance of skills. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, drew our attention to the Big Bang competition taking place across the road as we speak in the QE2 conference centre, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, drew our attention to the WorldSkills championship which we are investing in. We have an organisation working on that, so I hope that it will be a great precursor to the Olympics, which itself is committed to having a skills legacy.
The noble Baroness, Lady Verma, said that we were obsessed with one end of the age scale on apprenticeships. That is not true; we used to be but we have changed that. Last year we had 27,000 adult apprenticeships. It is a huge growth area, 50 per cent up on the previous year.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford: My Lords, I apologise for intervening again. Can the Minister clarify whether, except in exceptional circumstances, for anyone over 25 who signs up for an apprenticeship, the employer, or the apprentice themselves, has to meet 50 per cent of the fees?
Lord Young of Norwood Green: My Lords, fortunately it is not the apprentice but the employer. Why do we make the distinction? We do not have unlimited funds. We take the view at the moment that the adult apprentice brings to the employer a bit more experience than the 16 to 18 year-old. I am not saying it is a perfect solution but that is why we did it. It certainly does not penalise the apprentice and it has not stopped the massive increase in adult apprenticeships. I am not denying the distinction or claiming that it is perfect, but given that politics is the language of priorities, we have to decide where we are going to focus. As keen as I am to create adult apprenticeships, I am even keener to ensure that we meet our 16 to 18 targets, where there has been a bit of a decline. We are making a huge effort to increase the number of apprenticeships with £140 million announced for a further 35,000 apprentices —21,000 in the public sector and 15,000 in the private sector. That is a challenging target, as someone has already remarked.
I make no apology for describing apprenticeships as a renaissance, as I did in the previous debate. Again, we would be doing ourselves and this country an injustice if we did not acknowledge that apprenticeships were nearly dead in 1997. We had only 65,000 apprenticeships in that year, just over a quarter of which were completed. However the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, juggles the figures, he cannot fail to acknowledge that 250,000 apprenticeships this year, with a 65 per cent completion rate—nearly two-thirds of them—is a massive leap forward. I do not deny that we need to do more to ensure that we push up the level 3 apprenticeships—we will work hard on that—but that is a massive achievement. That is acknowledged throughout. We need to build on that, and we are doing so with the £140 million which I mentioned.
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Not only that, we recently announced the idea of overtraining: asking employers whether they would take on more apprentices to provide their supply chains. We put that out to competitive tender and had a superb response. The exact figure will be announced soon. It has created thousands more apprenticeship opportunities. I say sincerely and genuinely to this House that every apprenticeship opportunity that we create is a beacon of hope, either to a young person or to an adult. It really is. It is making a contribution to social cohesion, which was mentioned in this debate, and to social mobility. Again, I ask noble Lords to look at the progress that has been made.
The noble Lord, Lord Cotter, made an interesting contribution. He was candid enough to admit that he may not have devoted as many resources to training as he should have done, and I welcome his candour. What are we doing for small businesses? We have focused £350 million specifically on SME training: not on the training that we think they need but on the training that they told us they need, such as in business improvement techniques. That has been a success. We are seeing a significant take-up.
People ask how we get these small and medium-sized employers to buy into the idea of recruiting apprenticeships. We do it, as the noble Lord, Lord Cotter, reminded us, through group training associations. There are some really interesting models out there, including a number of generic models. We are encouraging all sorts of progress in that area, and we will invest more money in GTAs. We think that that is the way forward for SMEs. I can give noble Lords a number of examples. In one training association, something like 360 employers shelter under its umbrella. They offer real employment placements.
I have to part company with the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, on apprentices. It is true that there used to be doubt about what constituted an apprenticeship. We have taken away that ambiguity about apprenticeships by saying that it is absolutely clear that there must be a work placement with it. You cannot complete an apprenticeship with only college-based experience. It must have a work placement with it. We have made that absolutely clear in the apprenticeship Bill. The completion figures that I gave are genuine. In the past, we have had learning apprenticeship programmes, but they do not count towards apprenticeships. We might have young apprenticeships which, I might add, are a
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Very briefly, because I am running fast out of time, we have the huge task of raising people’s awareness of apprenticeships and the value of things such as engineering, which the noble Lord, Lord Broers, mentioned. We know that we must raise the status of that. It is unfortunate that, whenever I meet young apprentices, I have yet to meet one who tells me that they were encouraged by their teachers at school to go for an apprenticeship. Last week, when I went back to the floor, I met some young apprentices in a telephone exchange—not one that I had worked at, but one that I knew well. One young apprentice remarked, very perceptively, “Wouldn’t it be good if schools celebrated their young people who achieve apprenticeships as much as they celebrate those who achieve a university place?”.
Given that I have run out of time, I will endeavour to answer any other points made in writing. I thank again the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, for introducing this vital debate.
6.05 pm
Baroness Greengross: My Lords, I start by thanking every noble Lord who has taken part in this debate. I am most grateful to them, and my gratitude extends to the other members of the all-party group. I know that those who could not be here—including those from another place—will read the report of our debate with much interest. We have covered a huge amount, from small children to very mature adults, from assistant teachers to management training, and all the different skills, both hard and soft, that are needed.
I thank the Minister for displaying both his personal commitment to what we have been talking about and the commitment of the Government, which I do not think is in question. There is an acknowledgment that, if we are to get out of this recession, we must all work together through a political as well as an economic consensus on what needs to be done. We wanted to highlight, partly, that the role of business is essential and, with the Government’s help, we have to facilitate that in order to achieve what we all want on behalf of the future of our country. While thanking everyone most sincerely, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
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