Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I, too, welcome the Bill and congratulate my noble friend on the efficient way in which she introduced such a long and complex Bill. It is timely because the country needs to improve its skill base if we are to help to get out of the recession and provide for and prepare ourselves for the future prosperity of the country. I start by declaring an interest. I am leader of Wigan Council, chairman of the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities and a member of the board for NWDA. I appreciate what noble Lords have said about this being a crazy and complex arrangement. However, it is important to make it simple for those who want to use the system and it needs to be readily understood and accessed by the young people it employs so that we can create a public face for the new agenda that is clear and straightforward while expecting agencies to work more effectively together with, as my noble friend said, light-touch regulation. The skills agenda is also complicated by other government initiatives. I want to raise two which have not so far been mentioned: worklessness and the city region pilots. The Government have produced a very swift and welcome response to the recent Houghton report on worklessness. It showed that worklessness remains a significant problem in some areas of the country. Unemployment is now rising faster in those areas than in other parts of the country. The promise of £1 billion for the Future Jobs Fund will help local authorities to tackle some of those issues. The schemes will need to be up and running by October so, clearly, most of them will have to contain a significant training element. If we are to get people who have been long-term unemployed back into employment, there will need to be significant training to tackle low skills with work-based training. That will need already to exist when the new arrangements come into place. The Government are also producing a programme of city region pilots, which will enable certain parts of the country to have greater delegation than others. In Manchester, we wanted to prepare for that and make sure that we were doing the best for our local economy, so we commissioned an independent economic review of Greater Manchester. Inevitably, skills emerged as a central theme of the study. We need to develop high-level skills to ensure that we can meet the demands of the knowledge economy, and also drive up basic skills if we are to have an impact on the most deprived communities. We need to make sure that the flexibility of devolution can be brought to those areas. One part of the Bill that has not been mentioned so far is Clause 41, which establishes a responsibility for local authorities to encourage participation in education. At the moment, there is wide variation in participation in local areas. At 16, the lowest participation in a local authority area is 72 per cent, and the highest is 97 per cent. That is a huge difference. If we look at it from the other perspective, NEETs—those not in education, employment or training—the lowest is 2.6 per cent, the highest is 11.8 per cent. That variation reflects different communities and the negative attitudes towards education and training in families and neighbourhoods. I disagreed with quite a lot of what the noble Lord, Lord Bates, said in his speech, but one thing that he said that is wrong is that all families want the best for their children. If only that were true; it would make our work a lot easier. There are some parents who, as he said, do not know what they want, but many actually do not care. In some of our deprived communities, there is a large number of parents who do not care. They may be drug users. They do not have an interest in the future of their children. We need to take that on board. We can improve participation by structural changes and better support for individuals and families, but the fundamental barrier, as my noble friend said earlier, is the level of aspiration in individuals and families for education. The Government have made some promising starts. Sure Start is a very important scheme, but it is a longer-term scheme. I know that in Greater Manchester, Aimhigher has been successful in getting more young people from the more deprived communities to participate in higher education. As I said, it will take a long time and it may be too late, by the time that young people have reached their teenage years, to get them interested in education. Noble Lords will not be surprised that I am pleased to welcome the devolutionary tendencies of the Bill. However, in my experience, two contrasting sets of circumstances lead to devolution. The first is when enlightened Ministers recognise the benefits of local solutions to local problems; the second is where intractable difficulties and insufficient resources mean that the Government are happy to pass the agenda to local authorities. In the kind of rugby that I played and am interested in, Rugby League, we call that a hospital pass. It is a pity that the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, is not in his place. I enjoyed his robust contribution about what he achieved when he took FE away from local authorities, but there is a different view from the other end of the telescope. When his Government were starving local authorities of funding, we had to make difficult choices between the statutory sector and further education. By giving a separate funding stream to FE, he cannot really claim that he did much better. I am amazed by how many noble Lords have said that the LSC is a successful organisation. I must say that from my perspective it is not, given its recent problems with capital funding and revenue funding. It has also failed to address some of the local skills problems. At a meeting that was meant to see how we could raise operations in some of the more difficult areas of Wigan, I was shocked when someone from the LSC said that it was important to provide hairdressing courses for girls. I am not sure that that is raising aspirations, although maybe it would be if they tried to cut my hair; they would have to look upwards. FE has also failed to develop adequate links with schools and local communities. Recruitment to some of the new sixth-form colleges may have been on a wider geographical basis, as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, but it has not been on a wider social one. Those colleges have not broadened the social impact; they have actually creamed off some of the better students and ignored those in deprived communities. As an aside, it is interesting that, having ignored their local authorities for many years, FE and sixth-form colleges are now talking to them. I recognise some of the issues. We in Greater Manchester have already talked about how we make sure that provision post-16 links up better with schools and is planned across a much wider area than a single local authority to ensure both the efficient use of resources and the provision to young people of a wide range of different skills. I also want to talk about the city region agenda and the fact that it has taken 12 months for Greater Manchester to begin to develop an employment and skills board similar to the one in London, despite a multi-area agreement. I trust that my noble friend can assure me that this legislation will not further delay the creation of such an important body and the delegation that we need from the LSC to ensure that it works. I mentioned the Manchester Independent Economic Review, which is consistent with the Government’s ambitions to achieve better outcomes for employers and individuals. Again, I hope that we can ensure that there is an amount of devolution in the Bill, but we may well need to do things in future that are not already incorporated, and if we can build in some flexibility we will be able to secure a more successful future for skills and development. I welcome the Bill. It will create education that is more relevant to local people, local businesses and local communities, and if we can improve participation and give greater access to skills and training in those areas, we can start to transform deprived communities.