Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 213A and 213B. They are separate, as was the case on more than one occasion yesterday. I shall first speak to Amendment 198 and then address the others, which raise different issues, but I thought it best that they remained grouped together, partly for the sake of time. Clause 88 sets out the duty of the chief executive officer of the Skills Funding Agency to encourage post-19 education. There is an ambiguity in the Bill. Last night when we were addressing Clause 84, I spoke about what is reasonable and proper. Both clauses have ambiguous headings. Clause 88, which refers to Clause 84, is entitled: ""Encouragement of education and training for persons aged 19 or over and others subject to adult detention"." Clause 84 is entitled: ""Education and training for persons aged 19 or over and others subject to adult detention"." The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said my amendments to Clause 84 were inappropriate because he did not think that the issue of what is proper and reasonable necessarily applied to those in detention. However, Clause 84 states that the chief executive must promote the provision of reasonable facilities for, ""education suitable to the requirements of … persons who are aged 19 or over, other than persons aged under 25 who are subject to learning difficulty assessment, and … persons who are subject to adult detention"." I take it, therefore, that that applies to all adults. Perhaps the Minister could clarify this when he replies. Exactly the same wording applies in Clause 88, which is about encouraging education and training and applies to all those referred to in Clause 84(1)(a) within the chief executive’s remit. I take it that that applies to all those who are over 19, other than those who have a learning difficulty assessment, as well as those who are in adult detention. Therefore, it is not just related to those who are in adult detention, as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, implied in relation to my earlier amendments. I was a bit taken aback and, in the light of that, felt that my amendments were inappropriate. However, after thinking about it, it seems to me that the amendment actually applies to all those over 19. We are looking at the issue of the "encouragement" of education and training for all those who are over 19. This amendment comes from the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education. In general, as a society we want to encourage this ethos of lifelong learning, as the amendment sets out. There are all kinds of reasons as to why this is so: in lifelong learning when people stay in education, they remain happier, healthier and better socially adjusted. They contribute more to society as volunteers. There is a great deal of evidence for that among those who keep up their studies in one form or another, whether they are younger in terms of CPD and training or later on in adult life when they participate in adult learning of one sort or another. In the global society in which we now operate, we know also that we need to encourage people to maintain and upgrade their competencies and skills; and, on occasions, to switch careers and move into new areas. The Government have been anxious to emphasise that there are very good economic reasons for investing in lifelong learning. It is in the forefront of the Government’s skills agenda. The NIACE report Learning Through Life that I mentioned yesterday recognises that responsibility for learning through life should be shared between the individual, the employer and the Government—all should make contributions. We discussed yesterday NIACE’s idea that there should be the equivalent of what some people call a learning bank. The City and Guilds institute has also proposed ideas for what might be termed a learning bank. I also raised yesterday the concept of individual learning accounts and whether the Government were still backing some help for the individual, perhaps to encourage them to continue in lifelong learning. I was very encouraged by the Minister’s reply that these ideas are still very much on track. I hope that they will develop into something like a learning bank, to which the individual, the employer and the Government can all contribute. People will have a certain number of credit hours in the bank that they can take for their learning—this will encourage individual learning. The amendment seeks to take the spirit of encouraging lifelong learning and set it into Clause 88. The wording of Clause 88 is lifted straight from the Learning and Skills Act 2000. We propose a reformulation of the clause to capture more of the spirit of lifelong learning. We want the chief executive officer to be the champion of lifelong learning and to encourage individuals and employers to participate and employers to contribute. The new element that we are introducing is paragraph (d), which ensures better scrutiny of what the chief executive officer of the Skills Funding Agency achieves. The remit letter to the LSC required it to increase and widen participation in learning, and to improve levels of achievement and retention of adult basic skills. Both requirements had quantitative targets attached, yet because of the reasonable and proper distinction that I was talking about yesterday that was written into the Learning and Skills Act and repeated in this one, the LSC has always been able to evade the broader remit of promoting lifelong learning and concentrate on the narrower one of promoting basic skills—and even there, it has concentrated on 16 to 19 year-olds rather than adults. The notion put forward in paragraph (d) of the amendment is that scrutiny should be not only by the Secretary of State, but also by Parliament. This would keep the wider remit in the public arena. For that reason, it would be a very good idea if, in addition to the CEO acting as a champion for lifelong learning, there was greater scrutiny of what was achieved by the chief executive officer. Amendments 213A and 213B address a totally different issue. However, they pick up on the issue that I raised yesterday with the Minister about the letter from the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, to Jim Brathwaite at SEEDA, and the degree to which regional development agencies are now to play a substantive role in developing local skills strategies. Until the letter from the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, the position was that, with the exclusion of Greater London—one can see from Clause 110 that Greater London is excluded from the general SFA remit—local authorities were working with sub-regional groups to develop their strategies. In many senses, this is very sensible. In the south-east region, to which I belong, the issues facing employment and skills within, say, the Thanet area are totally different from those in the Guildford area, and in the Oxford area they are very different from those that we face in the Guildford area. Therefore, it seems to me very sensible to look at skills strategies within sub-regional groups. That is reinforced by another Bill that has been through this House this year—the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill. It was not a Bill that I think the House liked very much; nevertheless I think that there are repercussions regarding this issue. Clause 85 of that Bill encouraged local authorities to come together, as in London, to form statutory economic prosperity boards, and Clause 118 encouraged local authorities to formulate multiple area agreements listing partner authorities. Interestingly enough, within that remit Jobcentre Plus was mentioned as a partner authority but the LSC and skills issues were not mentioned as partner authorities. On top of that, in the 2009 Budget, Greater Manchester and Leeds were both designated as core cities, presumably with the idea that they, like Greater London, would create economic prosperity boards analogous to the London Skills and Employment Board, which has powers over adult SFA funding. Therefore, just as in London, Manchester and Leeds would effectively opt out of the SFA remit and do their own thing. Therefore, the questions raised by Amendments 213A and 213B are, first: how powerful will the RDAs be in developing skills strategies? We on these Benches have some scepticism about the extent to which RDAs should run the local skills strategies, partly because we think that the RDAs are too big and, as I explained a little earlier, the sub-regional groupings are in this sense more appropriate. As I said, we prefer the notion of local authorities working together. Therefore, Amendment 213B questions whether we want to have the RDAs playing a substantive role in this. The other question is: how far is this Bill compatible with the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act, which envisages these multiple area agreements? How far do the Government envisage areas such as Manchester and Leeds following along the lines of Greater London and taking over from the SFA adult skills policies and funding within their areas? Those are the three substantive questions that I put to the Minister in relation to the developments that are taking place, and they are, as noble Lords will recognise, totally different issues from those that I raised under Amendment 198, which is all about encouraging lifelong learning. I beg to move.