Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

That is an immensely sensible suggestion. I very much hope that our Front Bench will take this group of amendments seriously in going forward to Report. There are some deep-seated problems. First, it is clear from what the Minister said that small, specialised qualifications will be squeezed out by this process. They are necessarily more expensive, particularly if a young body is trying to develop a qualification in competition with one of the big established bodies. It has to provide something that is notably better but it will inevitably be more expensive, at least to begin with. If a fee cap is in place, that body will be unable to develop it. I suspect that fee capping will also suppress innovation in existing awarding bodies, which will find that their profitability is limited not in relation to the whole expenditure of their enterprise but merely to the costs of providing that particular examination. That is not the way in which the public sector deals with, say, the cost of medicines, where it is recognised that companies require substantial funds to innovate and advance their business. We have not applied that sort of mechanistic cap in that case, although it is similar to the public sector buying substantial amounts of privately produced commodities. I do not think that it is any more workable here than it would be with medicines. The Minister said that there could be a review to a third party. I see nothing in the Bill about what the basis of that review would be. If he has information on that, I should be interested to hear it, because it seems crucial. He objected to one of the Liberal Democrat amendments on the basis that conducting a full investigation would take too long and be too expensive. He is saying that Ofqual will reach its judgments on the basis of an inadequate investigation, a short and improperly researched investigation. In other words, it will be an arbitrary decision and it will just impose the caps and see what happens to the examination system. Most of all, I object because of the inherent conflict that Ofqual would face if it had those powers. Ofqual is setting the rules. Ofqual is essentially saying what an examination has to be like to maintain sufficient quality, so it is involved in influencing the whole system of examinations—how they are carried out how they are marked—all of which will have immense cost implications for the awarding bodies. Then, on the other hand, it is supposed to apply a cap to the costs. How on earth is it to resolve the conflict? Should it reduce its requirements on the examination bodies to reduce the costs, even if that would conflict with its other objectives? Or is it to pursue the route that John Prescott took when he was the Minister in charge of British Rail, putting so many obligations on it that the poor thing went bankrupt? It is ridiculous to make Ofqual face conflicts to which there is no sensible resolution. Ofqual needs to be clean. It needs a clean set of objectives. It needs absolute clarity and purity in what it is setting out to do. Giving it the capping powers is a pollution.