Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, this amendment seeks to bring into the work of the YPLA and the SFA a proper arrangement for capital funding. In Committee I brought forward an amendment that would put a permanent committee within the YPLA to deal with capital funding. This amendment is a much improved one that would bring together the capital funding of the Skills Funding Agency and the Young People’s Learning Agency into the necessity of creating a single capital building strategy. I do not wish to repeat the arguments that I made in Committee and weary the House with that. Nevertheless it is as well to remind ourselves that capital funding is vital for the growth of this sector and in order to bring to fruition many of the aspirations expressed from time to time in the jungle that the Bill represents. Unless we have a single strategy between the two agencies, it will make life almost impossible for the many institutions that have to deal with both. The first paragraph of my amendment is an attempt to bring both agencies together in the formulation of a single strategy for England, leaving out the universities. Paragraph 2 would require the chief executive of both agencies to consult local education authorities and the providers of education, which would immediately bring it back down to a local level so that local authorities would have an opportunity to take an overall view of the building needs of the institutions within their authority and the institutions would be able to input their own strategies. To ensure that everything was kept on an even course, paragraph 3 would require that the strategy, as revised by the consultation with the institutions and the local authorities, should be approved by the Secretary of State and a copy laid before each House of Parliament. The Secretary of State, of course, would be free to engage in dialogue again should she or he so wish in order to ensure that the national strategy could be approved by the two government departments. I am not arguing for precisely where the clause should be located. It would probably be better slightly earlier on, not after Clause 121, but that is a minor point. However, I commend to the House that we have in the Bill something that deals with a strategy for capital building. It is vital to development, as I have said, it has gone badly wrong in the past and, after the discussion we had in Committee where the concept of having some kind of provision to deal with capital funding received approval from all sides of the House, I am frankly disappointed that the Government have not brought something forward themselves. I beg to move.