Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, our names are not attached to these amendments or to the clause stand part, but we have a great deal of sympathy with them. Although the Skills Funding Agency’s budget is smaller than that of the YPLA—it is roughly £3.5 billion, whereas the YPLA has a budget of about £7 billion—it is still a very substantial budget. The situation is very odd. For 16 to 19 education, and probably 14 to 19 education, we are setting up the YPLA, which is to be an NDPB, have its own separate board and report directly to Parliament. Higher education is also run by an NDPB—HEFCE—which has a separate board and reports directly to Parliament. The Skills Funding Agency will deal with adult education and will run four separate agencies of substantial importance: the Train to Gain service, the Adult Advancement and Careers Service, the National Apprenticeship Service and the National Employer Service. They are not mentioned in the Bill, which picks up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, that we know remarkably little about the running of the SFA. In terms of transparency and accountability, I find this a difficult issue. On the one hand, it can be argued that the Minister has to answer directly for the SFA. It is going to be set up as a next-steps agency run by a civil servant with a large number of people under him. It will have more people than the YPLA, which is going to have only 500 allocated to it from the LSC; the SFA will have 1,500 allocated to it. It is a substantial organisation being run by a civil servant, answerable directly to the Minister and with considerable powers, which are detailed in the Bill. It will run the whole of our adult education and training services and the adult apprenticeship service. How is the SFA going to be made more accountable? We have done away with the Adult Learning Committee that was established under the LSC. One advantage of the SFA having NDPB status is that there would be a board behind the chief executive representing the many areas in the adult skills world. Local government, the sector skills councils, employers and regional initiatives could all be represented. The anomaly is that elsewhere in the education world there are NDPBs with advisory boards that are, to some extent, answerable directly. With the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the LSC, the tradition was that they were set up as NDPBs, but now we suddenly break with that tradition and have this organisation with substantial functions that is only answerable to Parliament through the Minister. Our party’s vision is very different from that of the Conservative Party. On the whole, we feel that with the adult world, and given the blurring of boundaries between higher education and further education, the sensible thing is to expand HEFCE to include all adult education. The name that we have given to it is the council for adult skills and higher education—abbreviated, that becomes CASH, which is perhaps appropriate since we are still advocating that there should be no tuition fees. However, we believe that there is a lot behind these amendments and we have a lot of sympathy with them.