Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

Perhaps I could decide what to do about my amendment. It is after the dinner hour, and I thought that I was engaging in a leitmotif overture, but it seems to have turned into Act 1 of a Wagnerian drama. We are back almost to Hans Sachs and his apprentice David. I introduced Scotland and Wales only because it seemed to me that no one was going to suggest that you could not move freely across the boundaries to Wales and to Scotland, and that "mainly"—I asked what that meant—would not be applied to people who moved between Wales and Scotland. The Minister will be surprised to hear that I was once a premium apprentice. I did part of my apprenticeship in Glasgow, but I suppose that I was not really supposed to do that; I should have stayed in England. This is my problem; I do not understand why we have to have these restrictions. I also asked a couple of other questions which, with due respect, the Minister has not quite dealt with. How can an apprentice be enforced to give this undertaking? I was 23 when I got my premium apprenticeship; I must have had special educational needs to have waited so long. How can we expect somebody who undertakes an apprenticeship to give an enforceable undertaking? They might give an undertaking, but it is not enforceable, that is for sure. The Minister did not answer the question about Europe. I wonder whether Clause 1(7) is okay under European law. I would guess that it is not, but I am not a lawyer. I was grateful to the Minister for mentioning that we lived in a global economy because that was my central point. A lot of employers operate in England and are not English: perhaps they are German or from the United States. Faced with this clause, they would say, "I don't want to be any part of this system if I've got to get into the bureaucracy of what’s in Clause 1(7)". The Minister should take this matter back and think about it. What I said at the beginning is entirely right. This is entirely unnecessary, so why not drop it so that we have one less restriction?