Let me start by thanking the Secretary of State for what I thought was a rather conciliatory speech. Hopefully, it will set the tone for this evening’s debate on a Bill that has already gone through the other place. We have seen a number of amendments tabled, not least the one on essay mills—I am very grateful to the Government for adding it to the Bill. That was the result of a cross-party effort, involving not just myself, but Lord Storey who has led the charge in the other place, I think, for the past five years. I hope that, in this place, we can try to build some cross-party consensus in order to improve the Bill, as the Lords have done.
In that spirit of cross-party consensus, I would like to reflect on the words of the Opposition Front Bench spokesperson, the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), who set out very clearly the challenge with the lifetime skills guarantee. At present, it is not a guarantee for all those who need lifetime skills. As the Secretary of State clearly set out in his speech, 80% of the adult population in 2030 are already in work. If we wish to grip the challenges that climate change presents and grip the challenges of the systems-based approach that will lead to net zero across all parts of this country, we will need new forms of skills, reskilling and upskilling in green technologies, in retrofitting boilers and in all those things that, at the moment, we struggle to be able to do. We will need those reskilling and retraining opportunities. Those will come only if we take this moment to expand the lifetime skills guarantee and, importantly, as the Secretary of State said, the lifetime loan entitlement, because nothing flows without the finance. We need to ensure that that is available to those who have a level 3 qualification or above. We must look to abolish the so-called equivalent, or lower, qualification rule.
I want to declare my interest as having established a new Lifelong Education Commission with ResPublica. I am not paid for doing it, but I want to make sure that it is on the record that I have this interest in running the commission. The commission has published its first
report, which looks in particular at what is needed when it comes to the frameworks. It is very easy to announce the lifetime skills guarantee—it sounds great. It is very easy to talk about a lifelong loan entitlement—it sounds marvellous—but unless we get the partnerships right in order to be able to deliver and implement this locally, they are just words. They are just a framework. I desperately want this to succeed.
I have been in this place for 11 years and, if I am honest, one of the greatest failures of my Government has been the decline in adult and part-time learning due to a lack of funding. We now have an opportunity to learn a lot of lessons from what went wrong there.