Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 248, 259 and 250, which deal with fee capping. I am extremely grateful to the Minister for the time that she and her officials spent talking through this issue with me during the Recess. At the end of our discussions, we pretty well agreed to disagree on the issue. If, as I expect, my amendments are firmly turned down, as a fallback I would be very supportive of the Liberal Democrat amendments, because they at least provide some protection over the powers of fee capping. Throwing myself against the prison wires, perhaps I could just say why I believe that there is not only no need for Ofqual to have powers of fee capping but that it would be wrong for it to have such powers. It is unnecessary because examination bodies are highly competitive commercial organisations; they watch each other like hawks and are very careful to price their qualifications in relation to cost and what they know the market can bear. It is unnecessary also because it would not represent a protection of public money—which I would defend to the death—because the examination bodies are being paid from a capped pool. The money which the schools and colleges have to pay the examination bodies to provide examinations already comes from their capped allocation of income year on year. The examination experts within each school—the officers have various titles—are extremely knowledgeable. They, too, watch the market very carefully. They are very good at fighting for their students to have the best and most prestigious examinations at the most reasonable prices that the school can afford. In other words, we are describing an absolutely perfect market: the buyers and the sellers are extremely expert and price conscious. Much as I join the Committee in my wholehearted support for the setting up of Ofqual, there is more expertise between the buyers and sellers of examinations than there is in the regulators. It is slightly offensive to suppose that 30-odd semi-civil servants in Coventry would know better than the 2,000 or so examination officers in schools and the several thousand expert employees in the various examination boards and their academic advisers. I feel strongly about this, but I suspect that I shall be disappointed.