Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

Yes, I entirely understand the Minister. These powers were appropriate when they were given to a body that could be presumed in all cases to be entirely impartial in the way it acted because of the narrow focus of what it did. Now they are being given to a body with a whole multitude of other interests which it might want to pursue and bring to bear on sixth-form colleges. That is why a straight translation of these provisions will not do. I hope very much that I will have the support of my own and the Liberal Front Benches on this, because we will certainly come back to it on Report. There has to be a measure of sense imposed on this. Like the Learning and Skills Council, the YPLA is a body that does not have a lot of other interests. If the document prepared by the YPLA was binding on local authorities, I should be completely satisfied, but sixth-form colleges will be left at the mercy of LEAs. The noble Baroness knows that this will not be translated into action, but in many cases into threats of action. Authorities have governors on boards and very quickly they will come to know which sixth-form colleges have made themselves vulnerable under the extraordinarily hair-trigger arrangements set out in the Bill. They will then have the power to say, "You will do exactly what we say or we will come marching in and there is nothing you can do to stop us". That is not the right basis for a relationship. There ought to be more distance between the two because local education authorities have so many other fish to fry and reasons to want to intervene in the minutiae of what a sixth-form college is doing—perhaps, as they see it, to make the college work more efficiently with schools or blend with other policies—simply to satisfy the particular political predilections of the local authority at the time. That did not apply to the Learning and Skills Council but does so to all LEAs, and sixth-forms colleges must have protection.