Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I give wholehearted support to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Perry. She is quite right that the question of who controls the capital budget has been left floating. The amendment has the great advantage that it sets up the joint committee, brings the two agencies together and provides a structure through which capital funding can be allocated. The mess that the Learning and Skills Council got into, even when there was one body, illustrates how difficult it is to keep control of the capital budget. If two or three agencies are involved with the capital budget, the ease with which it could fall between all those three stools is obvious.