Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I am very grateful for that, Mr. Deputy Speaker. New clauses 1 and 11 are not necessary. In terms of new clause 1, an ongoing benchmarking programme already exists. As part of the capital investment programme, almost all further education colleges—some 98 per cent.—are already participating in an existing property benchmarking programme called eMandate overseen by the LSC, and that programme will continue under the chief executive of skills funding. The eMandate programme captures data on an annual basis from all participating colleges in the FE sector. Those data include information on the quality of their estate and their estate management costs. Participation in the eMandate programme is open to all FE colleges and is compulsory for any college that wants to apply for public capital funding for building. We simply do not need the kind of stocktake described in new clause 1, because precisely that process already exists, and because nobody has suggested that a lack of that kind of information caused the problems with the FE capital programme.