Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I am interested in these amendments that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has put down—somewhat belatedly, if I might say so. It would have been good if he had alerted us to them a little earlier. I take on board the points he is making. The noble Lord said that in his experience local education authorities are beginning to lay down the law. That is not my experience. Many local education authorities are only just beginning to wake up to the responsibilities they are going to have under this Bill. A lot of negotiations are taking place among authorities regarding who will be working where. We have run down the capabilities of many local education authorities and this is causing real difficulty. There was a time, 10 or 20 years ago, when local education authorities had very large numbers of advisers and people running them. Authorities that used to be providers of education have become very much commissioners of education. They have very slim-line central secretariats these days; they have been slimmed down to small strategic authorities. Authorities are having now to think about acquiring capabilities that they have lost. I am interested that the noble Lord feels that they are already adopting a very heavy-handed approach. There are, I know, among the colleges fears of going back to the days when local education authorities ran them. That has been echoed by the noble Lord, Lord Baker. However, the colleges are quite clearly established now as corporations in their own right. Most of them have strong corporations and capable chairs and capable principals. I am interested that he feels that already we are seeing signs of local authorities wanting to extend their empires. We probably also come from, so to speak, a slightly different standpoint. On these Benches our vision is of local education authorities having more of these responsibilities and having a good deal of discretion to run the show and do things and do their own thing rather than being told by the YPLA or the SFA what they ought to be doing. Our great fear is that these two new authorities, particularly the YPLA, far from being light-touch authorities, are actually going to be strong second-guessing authorities. From reading some of the briefings we have received, it seems that local education authorities are going to have to go cap in hand to the YPLA and show it their plans and get their plans approved. Then they are going to have to go to their sub-regional groupings and regional groupings and so forth. A lot of bureaucracy is still involved. I am interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, although I do not fully understand where he is coming from and we do not fully sympathise from these Benches with the line that he is taking.