Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

Like other noble Lords, I listened intently to what the Minister had to say and I was not wholly taken by all that he put forward. I also listened carefully to the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, who, as always, put her finger on some of the key issues. I have to say to the House, as I have said before, that I am deeply concerned about this Bill because of what it is storing up for the future. I mentioned the other day the words, "Auftragstaktik", "Fingerspitzengefuehl" and "simplification" and I fear that we are once again in those three areas. We are seeing two separate agendas being played out in parallel. One is being played out in this House, based on the Bill: the Ministers and we are engaged in a debate on what is or might be on the face of that Bill. Outside this House, another and totally separate agenda is being conducted within ministries, initiated, I believe, in the new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, from where a document has been sent to us all saying that there is no need for a legal framework for the dissolution of the Learning and Skills Council and transfer of functions and staff because it is provided for under the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill currently going through the Lords and expected to receive Royal Assent in the autumn of 2009. In other words, it does not matter a damn what we are doing in this House on this Bill because the Bill is going to pass and we are going ahead with it anyway; indeed, we have already started to make a lot of the provisions that are in the Bill for discussion. The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, put her finger on the fact that, when we started discussing this Bill in Committee in June, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills was adopting a bottom-up approach. That ministry no longer exists and the new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has inserted a top-down approach. Indeed, all the RDAs appear to have been gathered together into one department in the BIS where they sit together with the funding agencies under one empire, which is run by the Secretary of State. We are told that RDAs are responsible for the skills strategy and are required to produce regional plans. We are also told that regional plans are subsidiary to national plans. By regional plans, we are talking about the nine produced by the regional development agencies, each of which has a different strategy, because their areas are different, complicated by the multi-agency area agreements, with sub-regional strategies for places such as Manchester, Leeds and now London. These regional plans, including those of the sector skills councils, are meant to be approved by the Secretary of State to ensure—these are the words that I was given—that, ""there are no competing objectives"." Now, I am sorry, but that is an absurd objective because each of the regions has different capabilities, different perspectives and different strategies. Because of these regional differences, it is impossible to issue one coherent instruction without being involved in a compromise that may well damage all those strategies and sub-strategies that have been worked out to be appropriate for the regions. To complicate this, I understand that there is another area of committees, which are not mentioned in the Bill. There is another organisation, which I did not know about until earlier this week, called the Regional Economic Council. The Regional Economic Council is chaired jointly by the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, and the Chancellor and consists of the regional Ministers, the RDAs and the regional economic forums plus the chambers of commerce. They are responsible for reviewing what is happening around the country and how successful the Government have been at combating recession. At a recent meeting of the council, the chambers of commerce were extremely concerned that the RDAs were representing a very different picture of what was happening, and particularly the employers’ point of view, from what the chambers of commerce, which are in touch with the employers, felt to be accurate. In other words, there is a definite feeling that people are going to that forum and representing to Ministers what they think Ministers want to hear rather than what is actually happening. That is very dangerous. In the context of the Bill, there is also a new notion that, again, I had never heard of, called the NINJA, which stands for the new industry, new jobs agenda. We are talking about looking at the future of Britain and at the jobs that will be needed to take Britain out of the recession. In other words, we are looking at technologies 10 to 15 years ahead. If we were looking seriously at NINJA, surely to goodness we would be planning to make certain that not only are those technologies there and ready to go but the people to operate those technologies are trained and ready to go. If we think it through, that means that we ought to start influencing our 10 and 11 year-olds now to show an interest in all these activities. Those will not be the same in every region, so what is the point of having all this centralised, top-down direction when we know that each part of the country is different? All I can detect in what is going on is confusion. I am seriously worried. While I do not in any way disparage all the work that a lot of people are doing, I detect that it is not clearly directed, starting from the basic premise that the one raw material that every country has in common is its people and woe betide it if it does not identify, nurture and develop the talents of all its people; if it does not, it has only itself to blame if it fails. I fear that this enormously complex situation, with two separate agendas being run at the same time, is likely to make the situation worse, which will damage the future of our country.