Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I am grateful, as ever, for your guidance, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and I can assure you that I had noticed the new clauses. Indeed, they are highly pertinent to the exchanges taking place across the Chamber because they tie Ministers to an empirical assessment of where bids are, where they have come from and how much they are going to cost. That contrasts with what has happened over recent weeks and months, where the link between Ministers and those things has been opaque, obscure and obtuse. That is simply not good enough. Since it was established in 2001, the Learning and Skills Council has undergone three major reorganisations. Under the Bill, it will be abolished and replaced, as I said, with three quangos. Perhaps it is not surprising that the LSC took its eye off the ball. The Government are, of course, now keen to attribute blame to the LSC; we hold no candle for that body, but because legislation of the kind we propose in the new clauses was not in place, it is perhaps not surprising that Ministers lost control, were unable to anticipate these matters and were unaware of some of the facts. Indeed, Ministers now claim that they did not know what was going on. They must claim that, must they not? If they did know what was going on, they would take full responsibility rather than partial responsibility for the mess we are in. The projection of costs seems to me to be a pretty fundamental part of managing capital budgets. How can we possibly not know how much we have planned to spend against how much we have got—surely this is bread-and-butter stuff? To be told, in the Minister's words, that the Government could not possibly meet the ambitions of colleges is extraordinary when those ambitions were fuelled and fostered by the very body charged with that purpose—a body that was, in the end, answerable to Ministers. Despite causing the disruption, Ministers failed to monitor information that their Departments were receiving. The crisis puts into sharp focus the issue of responsibility for capital projects under the new arrangements proposed in the Bill. If the Bill remains unamended, I suspect that we might get into such a mess again, so these new clauses and what we said on Second Reading, in Committee and subsequently are made all the more pertinent by the circumstances that I have described in these few words. The circumstances regarding FE were not entirely known when we began to debate the Bill; the truth has come out gradually. As I say, more and more colleges have made it clear that they, too, were promised the large investments that, clearly, the Government now are not in a position to make available. However, it is not entirely true that Ministers knew nothing until very recently, because an examination of the LSC minutes makes it perfectly clear that, as early as February 2008, doubts were raised about the capital funding of FE colleges. Certainly by autumn that year, it was as clear as crystal that a major crisis was about to engulf the sector and the Government. We did not receive an adequate explanation from Ministers in Committee, and last week at departmental questions, the Secretary of State said:""one of the reasons why our universities are so good is that I do not run them".—[Official Report, 30 April 2009; Vol. 491, c. 1027.]" That is certainly true. If he ran the colleges, I guess that we would have had the same thing repeated in revenue terms as we have had in respect of capital bids. The new clauses, plainly and simply, would improve the Bill. If I were in government in such difficulties, I would grasp the new clauses with both hands and take the view that the Opposition were trying to be helpful. Nothing in the new clauses is partisan. They are entirely consistent with the rest of the Bill. They would provide better lines of communication and better information to Ministers. They would prevent Ministers—whether Labour or Conservative—from finding themselves in the circumstances in which this Government find themselves in respect of FE. At a time of great economic uncertainty, the last thing we need is a Government who create more uncertainty, yet that is what all this has done. We do not think that the LSC is perfect and we know that it needs reform—that is why we have outlined plans for a streamlined agency to fund FE—but we do not think that this is the right time to spend money on restructuring rather than on training. The FE capital funding crisis shows what happens when Ministers are more interested in changing structures than transforming lives. Fallacy follows falsehood, and failure follows both. We need Ministers who mean and do what they say, not pass the buck. We need a structure for the funding and management of skills that is cost-efficient and effective. Most of all, we need a Government who trust FE to deliver the training to build the skills that our people want, our communities deserve and our economy needs.