Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

As the hon. Gentleman said, one of the key conclusions of the Foster report is that the programme should have been much more needs-based, and it is clear that it must be more needs-based in future. The reason why it was not needs-based was not because good information did not exist about the state of the FE estate; that information was being collected. The problem was that it was not used effectively. New clause 1 sets up the paraphernalia to collect that information, but that paraphernalia already exists. Good information already exists, but the right things were not done with it. New clause 1 is therefore not the answer to this problem.