Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

Listening to the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, the Committee has been reminded of the enormous administrative paraphernalia that is going to be created by the Bill. First local authorities will work out local needs assessments, then they will submit to some regional body a regional needs assessment, then this will all be looked at by the Government for a national needs assessment. There is so much planning; Stalinists would welcome this approach to education provision. That is not how it is done now. For the past 30 years, as a result of my freeing them from local education authority control, FE colleges have had a glorious golden age—no one can deny that. FE technical and vocational training has never had such a fillip as it has had for the past 30 years, and it has had it because the colleges were freed from the dead hand of the local education authorities. They were allowed to do their own thing, and they decided to provide the courses that local people wanted. They did not go and talk regionally and nationally; they knew what they wanted to do, they knew what the local lads and lasses wanted to do, and they provided the courses for them. They were constantly in touch with the market, always adjusting, introducing new courses for tourism, expanding those for medical services for nurses and cutting back on others that were a lot less popular. That was real freedom. The ultimate solution should be—I have yet to persuade my Front Bench of the value of this argument, but I am working hard on it—that they should return to being free institutions and students should be given vouchers to decide themselves which courses they want to pay for and go to. Let the students decide; that is what choice is about. We are told that the Prime Minister is all about extending choice to ordinary people, but if he really wanted to do that then he would give all qualified youngsters the chance to buy their own education. Is that not freedom? It is not planning. My noble friend’s amendment is very interesting. He is saying that, now that FE colleges are going to be under local education authority control for a time, they should be allowed to recruit students from wherever they want. That is what they have now, the complete freedom to recruit whoever they want. I know one FE college in London which is at the junction of three London boroughs. It recruits from those boroughs and from well beyond; it recruits into Kent as well. Will the colleges have that freedom? The Minister is nodding. I would like him to say one sentence: that no FE college or sixth-form college will have a catchment area. I am sure that my noble friend would like the same sentence from him. That is the real gain. The Minister nodded, so I hope that he will use that sentence, which I will repeat: no FE college or sixth-form college will have a catchment area. The Ministers are looking to see whether that is in their brief; I am sure it is not, but I hope that it will be by the time they come to reply. I hope that they will say that, because it is the essence of freedom and the colleges should have that freedom. Otherwise, local education authorities will restrict them by saying, "We want you to do these courses for our area", although they might be right next to the boundary of another area that does not want that sort of thing. We should let choice decide this matter. My noble friend’s amendment is important. It goes to the heart of the arrangements in the future and the relationships of FE colleges to local education authorities. If they do not have that freedom, it will be a grave disappointment. The difficulty is enormous: in order to deliver education up to 18, the Government have brought in the Bill and put the FE colleges back under local education authorities—but at the same time they are slashing their capital expenditure. The Ministers know, because the Government made a Statement last week, that 92 projects have been submitted for sixth-form colleges and FE colleges, all of which were approved by the former council. Of those 92, only 13 have been approved. That is not the way to improve the public services that the Prime Minister is talking about and that will improve the opportunities for young people in technical and vocational education; it is holding them back. There is a great debate about whether cuts are going to happen after the next election but, as far as FE and sixth-form colleges are concerned, the cuts have started already—massively so. The Government slipped through an Answer last Friday, although they did not make a Statement to either House about it—no verbal Statement was made, I assure the Minister—about a major change in reducing the expectations and abilities of FE and sixth-form colleges to provide the services that the Bill wants them to. That is a separate debate, though; the debate here is about catchment areas. I hope that the Minister will utter the sentence that I have encouraged him to say.