Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

Madam Deputy Speaker, you and everyone else will be relieved that I do not have any musical, theatrical, cinematic, artistic or any other analogies to make in my short remarks. I am pleased that the Minister is so delighted by the capital investment in Hartlepool sixth-form college—he may indeed be its finest product—but that delight will not be shared by many of his Labour, let alone Opposition, colleagues, who have seen FE and sixth-form colleges in their constituencies starved of the funds they expected to receive following their capital programme bids over the past 12 months. My only concern about this group of amendments is essentially what the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes) alluded to—how long is the arm's length between the Ministry, the Minister and the quango or non-department public body? The hon. Gentleman mentioned the soon-to-be-lamented Learning and Skills Council. Whenever things are going right in the sector, Ministers are keen to crow and take the credit, but when things go wrong, it is someone else's fault. For instance, when the capital programme went wrong, it was all the fault of the poor chief executive of the LSC, but the same could happen to the chief executive of the QCA or any body. I would like the same clarification as the hon. Gentleman. What is the nature of the relationship between the new chief executive of the YPLA, the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills? How accountable is that individual and his or her successors to this House, directly through the Minister, or through other parts of the House, such as the Public Accounts Committee? In my first two and a half years as a Member of the House, like the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb), I was a member of the Education Committee, to which the head of Ofsted essentially reported. The head of Ofsted could be scrutinised directly by members of that Committee on how it was implementing policy—the Government were genuinely at arm's length. It would be good if the Minister could clarify how he sees the relationships to which I referred developing.