Apprenticeships

I was not going to make that claim. In fact, the Minister raises an important point. I would not in any way decry the upskilling of existing workers, and Train to Gain was very successful in doing that, but whether we want to call it ““apprenticeships”” is debateable. Perhaps we do, perhaps we do not, but statistics cannot be traded with the previous Government's apprenticeship statistics when such people were not included in them. That is my essential point. I am not decrying in any way the benefits of in-work training, but there is a genuine issue with measuring the enhanced employability of people who have undergone that training and the amount of money invested in it. Let me consider the Government's approach to the education maintenance allowance. One reason for scrapping it was the alleged deadweight cost of the fact that many young people would have taken courses irrespective of whether that allowance had been paid. The same sort of detailed scrutiny must take place of some of the post-24 training to ensure that we are not spending a vast sum of money—there is a lot of money involved—on providing people with training that they would have had anyway. A secondary issue is the fact that if we can retain the level of skills enhancement we have already and refocus some of the money that would be spent on it on other areas, we might well be able to enhance other apprenticeship provision in other areas, which is equally important. I could go on for a very long time about this—[Interruption.] But not today. My Committee will carry out a detailed inquiry, but I conclude by saying that we should get away from the rhetoric of apprenticeships and talk about general skills. There are a range of skill packages for different groups of different ages and different skill levels and we must ensure that they are supported rather than talk all the time about apprenticeships—