Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

That is an excellent point. It is indeed a political scorched-earth policy. Not only are the Government producing money from budgets allocated for the period after April 2010, but many tax rises are due to be introduced immediately after the next general election. When the Minister replies, he should bear in mind that what the sector needs is more certainty about how the extra £300 million for the current financial year will be spent. A rationing exercise will clearly be necessary. Not all the bids currently lodged with the LSC can possibly be funded from that £300 million. Many bidders, indeed most, will miss out, and the sooner they know that, the better. All of them will have incurred bidding costs and planning fees, and will have commissioned architects to help them to draw up their proposals and submit them to the LSC's capital board. Following a survey of its membership, the Association of Colleges calculated that 30 of its colleges had spent at least a quarter of a million pounds on bids, and 18 had spent more than £5 million. All that expenditure may be in vain if the capital programme does not go ahead. Many of the bidders will want to know whether their costs will be met by the LSC. The irony is that those costs, not only for the colleges at either end of the range but for the 100 or so in between, will probably be close to the £300 million allocated in the budget. There is an urgent need for an assessment of what is required by the further education sector—which is the purpose of the new clauses—and for clarity from the Government on the funding criteria that they will apply in future, through the LSC. The hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings began by observing that further education was crucial to our economy, and I shall end my speech in much the same way. The FE college system is essential to helping people to negotiate their way through the current recession, and even more essential to ensuring that we emerge from the other side of it with a world-class, well-skilled work force. We must meet not only the industrial demands that we will face in the future, but the demands of climate change. We shall need skilled engineers to meet the 2020 targets on which consensus has been reached. There is no point in setting such targets if we do not have the engineers and technicians to meet them. The FE sector has a crucial role in bringing those skills to the workplace and the design board, and it deserves rather better than the ineptitude that it has suffered from the Government so far.