Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I shall move on to new clause 11. The new clause also raises the question of parliamentary scrutiny, but it is also superfluous because its measures already exist in the Bill. Paragraph 7 of schedule 4 requires the chief executive of skills funding to publish an annual report and accounts covering expenditure on all areas, including capital. That report will be laid before Parliament. I hope that that, together with the commitment of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to return to the House with a statement in due course, will give Members some reassurance about the level of parliamentary scrutiny. If the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes) wants to have a debate in Government time, he will, as he knows, need to come back on a Thursday and talk to the Leader of the House rather than me—my pay grade is considerably beneath considering such matters. We do not need new clause 11 in order to have transparency and parliamentary accountability, and we do not need new clause 1 in order to have good information about the state of the FE estate. Let me turn to the general points that Members have made. The hon. Members for South Holland and The Deepings and for Bristol, West (Stephen Williams) raised the question of colleges that have not received, but have applied for, approval in principle. There are currently 79 colleges that have received approval in principle and 65 that have applied for it and have not received it. The points they make about the great amount of work—and potentially of expenditure, as well as of investment of time and energy—that will have gone into reaching the stage of submitting the application, which is itself a huge, thick pile of documents, are very well understood. We have been very clear in our discussions with the new leadership of the LSC that the colleges in that position will be treated broadly in a single pool with the colleges that have already received approval in principle. All of them will be deemed to have a difficulty which the LSC, under its new leadership, needs to help them to deal with. Several Members—the hon. Members for Bristol, West and for Isle of Wight come to mind—mentioned the £300 million of new cash that was announced in this financial year to enable us to put through some of the most urgent and high-priority cases. The hon. Member for Isle of Wight said that it glossed over the entire issue—I believe that the rich phrase he used was that it was a "sticking plaster on a disembowelment"—whereas the hon. Member for Bristol, West said that it was a political scorched earth policy. Naturally, I cannot accept any of those colourful descriptions. None the less I am clear about the fact that £300 million will not solve this problem, whose magnitude is much greater. I am not attempting to gloss over the entire issue, and I do not pretend to have solved the problem or put the matter to bed with £300 million. What the £300 million will enable us to do is to put forward, this year, in decisions that will be made in a small number of weeks' time—in the early summer—the most urgent and high-priority cases across the country. That will still leave many colleges needing certainty and clarity about their future.