Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, my noble friend talked about this being a portmanteau Bill and other noble Lords talked about trying to find a coherent theme going through it. I return to the area of education, disability and special educational needs, quite simply because I am a vice-president of the British Dyslexia Association—a position which is based on self-interest as a dyslexic. Someone came up to me at one of its functions and asked: "Have you seen this? The apprenticeships Bill has a minimum literacy requirement in it". "Really?" "Yes it does." I hope that the Minister will tell me I am reading it wrong, because other legal requirements such as the Disability Discrimination Act may well override this legislation. However, when potentially a group may be excluded from accessing the principal provision for which this legislation will be remembered, and it may well be one of those who access this training, this qualification and this way forward, quite determinedly by saying, "You must have reached X level of qualification in a certain area"—that is in the use of English—I suggest that the Minister should go away and quietly kick the person who drafted this Bill. Many people in other disability groups have come to the same conclusion. Something is very wrong at least in the presentation of this provision, and it really is not on. A reference or a pointer across to where this applies in other pieces of legislation would have helped very strongly. What does having a disability mean? It means that you either cannot do something or you have a problem doing it. I shall concentrate on dyslexics, although I appreciate that they are not the only group affected. Dyslexia manifests itself in terms of written language. Dyslexics from the traditional non-academic classes are in one of the highest groups for under-qualification and no qualification, and find themselves strongly represented in the prison population. You cannot get a job; you cannot earn money; you end up getting sucked into the criminal system. That is well accepted by just about everybody. The Government then say, "You must have X level of basic literacy". That makes me suggest that somebody has not thought this through. That should not have happened, no matter what the Minister says. I encourage the Minister to give me the assurances that will tell me exactly where what is in the Bill is overridden. Which legal requirements do that? If they are not there, we will have to change the Bill. It is that simple. I would put money on being able to rustle up a majority on this one; we have done it before. I have other suggestions. The Bill has not really engaged properly with the disability lobby. Measures on inappropriate expenditure and the reasonable needs of learners are bumping into one another. Are we trying to create work for lawyers? There are enough of them in this House. Maybe there is a special interest group that has really got hold of the Government. It should be clarified which legal requirement comes out on top and when. How will it be decided as a legal precedent? How will it happen? Which bits of legislation will come out on top? How will they work together? In such a big, rambling Bill, provisions are bound to bump into many other sections of legislation. I hope that the Government have a strategy for dealing with that. If they do not, the Bill will take a long time in Committee, on Report and possibly even on Third Reading. We have to sort it out. If we do not, we will be going against the spirit of the legislation that the House has passed—to my certain knowledge—over 20 years. I hope that the Government will have coherent answers. Having asked for a coherent answer, I crave a small indulgence to address something that is not in the Bill. It is an accomplishment to find something to do with any form of learning that is not in the Bill. There was a considerable error towards other areas of government policy in the Learning and Skills Act 2000. In that Act it was decided to concentrate only on qualifications and funding for qualifications that led directly to employment. It did not cover anyone involved in such things as coaching for sports, particularly amateur sports. I have a Bill covering the same ground, but on the assumption that my Private Member’s Bill stands less of a chance of becoming law than this Bill, I suggest that we try it here as well. By removing funding for that, people who are meeting government targets to get people involved in sport are required to fund it themselves. When we consider the number of targets from the Department of Health and other departments in the education world, it would be appropriate to provide some funding for that group to enable them to be trained. Let us consider the people who are supposed to be supporting and funding this activity. They include the Department of Health, the Treasury, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills and the good old DCMS. They are all there, as I have been told on numerous occasions. Can we please have some more favourable treatment for the people involved? The Bill is about support for skills, learning and children. There may not be apprenticeships, but surely these skills should receive support. We should make sure that sports clubs, which are delivering a part of government policy, should get support. I accept that it cannot be open-ended and that there might be caveats, but anything would be better than the current situation. I apologise for going off on a slight tangent, but hope that I will be forgiven on the grounds that for once I was the first to mention the subject.