Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

It is an interesting issue. The hon. Gentleman will be aware of the fact—he may lament it—that there used to be significant industrial concerns in the public sector that are no longer there. If he was alluding to the decline in the number of apprenticeships in many of those industries, I should say that that pre-dated privatisation. If he was alluding more broadly to a decline in support for apprenticeships, we have to look to a number of areas to discover why the private sector has reduced the number of apprentices that it is taking on. One crucial factor is the bureaucratic burden that many otherwise well intentioned private sector concerns now face.