Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I support the amendment because the National Apprenticeship Service needs a separate status. Under the Bill, as we have heard, responsibility for the apprenticeships service is given to the chief executive of skills funding. However, the agency that he heads—the Skills Funding Agency—has no life under the Bill, which does not even mention it. The head of the agency is the chief executive of skills funding, who will simply be a senior civil servant in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Three things are wrong with this. First, it means that the SFA is completely unaccountable to Parliament, unlike its predecessors the LSC and the Further Education Funding Council. Given that this agency will have responsibility for more than £5 billion of public expenditure on skills and development, this seems to be quite wrong. Of course, it will be accountable through the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, as that department is accountable for all its activities, but it will have no direct accountability. Its accountability through a great department of state, such as the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, will be much diluted—one might say almost to the point of invisibility. Secondly, not being established on a statutory basis, the agency will be that much less immune from further ministerial and administrative tinkering. One might say that being established on a statutory basis has not proved to be much of an obstacle to Ministers tinkering in the recent past. Still, it would be preferable if the agency was firmly established on its own statutory basis. Thirdly and finally, of particular importance is the fact that this also means that, unlike the LSC, the SFA will not be subject to the disability equality duty under the Disability Discrimination Act or to the public sector equality duty when it comes in under the Equality Act later this year or next year. It will fall under these duties only indirectly in so far as it comes within the scope of the department’s duty. As will become clear as we go through the Bill, the activities of this agency will have a considerable impact on disabled people and the ease with which they can access apprenticeships, so its effective exclusion from the requirements of the equality duties is a particularly unwelcome feature of the Bill. In summary, the amendment would remove the responsibility for apprenticeships from the SFA and create an accountable body, the National Apprenticeship Service, with general and specific duties under the Disability Discrimination Act and other equalities legislation. Given that the body will have an end-to-end responsibility for apprenticeships and government targets, this is not an unimportant matter.