Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I very much welcome the replacement of the offensive word "scheme". That is a huge improvement and makes the proposal much more satisfactory. I am not entirely happy with what the Minister said about Amendment 110. It seems to me that this is a basic question about what we are offering our young people. If they are going down the full-time route, they are guaranteed progression; if they are going down the part-time route, they are not. It is as simple as that. If we were saying, "Can we do it?", obviously, the answer is that we could not do it tomorrow, but we are not saying that, we are saying that when the entitlement is introduced, it should include a guarantee of progression. If someone has already gone through an apprentice level 2, they will not be entitled to that option, if the amendment were passed, until 2015. We are talking about something six years hence and about building the basic skill formation system in this country for the following 20 years. It is not good enough to say that that is too difficult; we do many difficult things. On whose behalf should we do the most difficult things? On behalf of the more deprived members of the community, who are getting an extremely poor deal at the moment. We cannot be happy about what the Minister has said, and I think that we will have to come back to it, because it involves the central content of the Bill. We have a huge apparatus to set up an apprenticeship scheme, but the scheme has a major weakness at its heart, which we will have to revisit. I move to Amendment 129. I was very encouraged by what the Minister said, in particular about his personal commitment to ensure that the selling of apprenticeships to employers—making known the possibility for them to receive direct funding—is actively pursued. However, I think something more is needed: a set of regulations that make that route more attractive to employers. We must make apprenticeships much more attractive to employers if we are to implement the entitlements that we have been talking about. In the next six years, we must double the number of apprenticeships for young people under 19. That is a massive challenge, and it cannot be done unless we make apprenticeships more attractive to employers—especially those who do not currently take on apprentices. It is often not realised that most large employers do not employ any apprentices. Of employers employing more than 500 people, only 25 per cent have any apprentices. There is something very wrong in the way that we are structuring the incentives for employers. We will not engage enough further employers unless we can find new ways to motivate them. It will be just more of the same, which will not get us to where we need to be. The obvious method is to make it easier for them to get direct access to apprentice funding. At the moment, it is possible in theory, but in practice it happens extremely rarely, expect in the case of big national employers. There is simple evidence that the system is not structured to attract employers to do the things they need to do if we are to get the places we want. It seems to me that the existing system is doing a good job through the training companies—there is no question of wanting to displace that role, but we have got to open up a new route. The Government really need to produce new regulations which overcome some of the barriers that employers currently experience in thinking about accessing the funding directly. There needs to be a Government commitment to producing a new set of regulations that make the direct funding route more attractive to employers. Will the Minister, given his enthusiasm for this subject, commit to actually producing a scheme of regulations rather than just a promotional effort? I do not think that anything less will do.