Education and Skills Bill

I agree with the hon. Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink) that the Bill's provisions are one more attack on liberty by this new Labour Government. We are now in the 12th year of this Labour Government, and one would hope and expect a Labour Government to put resources and effort into raising opportunities for those with least, but instead there are now more than 1 million young people in the 16-to-24 age group who are not in employment, education or training; that means that more than 1 million young people are missing out on either work or training. On Government figures, that is a 15 per cent. increase in the number of people in that predicament since 1997. [Interruption.] I do not know what the Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mr. Simon), is muttering about; he is free to intervene on me, if he wants to correct me. The Government's policy has failed young people. It has failed them in terms of vocational educational opportunities, for instance. This year's big new measure is to do with diplomas, but just 0.5 per cent. of the cohort have taken advantage of it, and there is a real risk that it will fail. Apprentices are the other key area of opportunity for people who have not succeeded as they might have wished in academic pursuits. The Government claim that the number of apprenticeships has increased from 75,000 in 1997 to 250,000 in 2007. The Minister for Schools and Learners is nodding, and that statistic would suggest excellent Government progress, but the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee reported in June 2007 that"““most of this increase has been as a result of converting government-supported programmes of work-based learning into apprenticeship.””" In other words, they are not real apprenticeships. In this 12th year of failure by this Labour Government to provide the inspiration—a word used by the hon. Member for Castle Point—for young people to engage with learning, the Government have now come up with the heavy-handed response of bringing in compulsion, and of setting up the bureaucratic nightmare, which was apparent from what the Minister for Schools and Learners said, of local authority committees and groups pursuing young people who have been let down by the education system. Instead of pressure being put on the education system and local authorities to deliver in a way that captures the imagination of these young people, the young people who have been let down are to be pursued so that they face a bureaucratic nightmare that can lead to fines, criminalisation and stigma. This is not the right way to respond to the difficulties the Government have had in reaching such young people. On the issue of compulsion, I seek reassurance from the Minister as to what steps he is planning to take to ensure that young people in further education colleges or schools who want to learn do not find that that is disrupted by those who have been dragged into classrooms by the bureaucratic process the Minister described. Can he also put me right on one other point I am concerned about? As a result of this measure, if there is an outstanding young student who at, for example, the age of 17 completes their school education and wins a scholarship to one of our top universities, but who wants to take a year off, will they be able to do so, or will they be compelled to be engaged in education for that year? [Interruption] The Under-Secretary says that, according to my figures, they would be NEETs. The truth is those figures are provided by Government, and the Under-Secretary is quite free to get to his feet rather than—