As someone who has spent the majority of his life in education or education policy, it is a real honour to be presenting this Bill on Second Reading. The Bill forms a cornerstone of some historic reforms that we are bringing to the skills agenda in our country: reforms that will help us more closely align skills training with the needs of employers; reforms that will help us to help all students, at all ages and stages, find more reliable routes to employment; and reforms that will help us level up our country and build back better.
This has been a long journey, and I want to thank some of the people who have been involved in it: not least, in the other place, Lord Sainsbury and Baroness Wolf, who have done enormous work to get us here, but also my right hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Gavin Williamson), the former Secretary of State, who gave such an impressive speech, and my hon. and glamorous Friend the Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan), the former Minister for apprenticeships and skills. I also feel the need to mention another noble Lord in the other place who wrote a report for the Government in 2012—Lord Lingfield, who is genuinely one of the unsung heroes of education reform over the past 30 years. I put on record my debt to him and to his thinking. All of their work—the cross-party work that we have heard so much about tonight—has shown us the importance of building a skills system that can work for everyone.
There have been some powerful speeches, many delivered at high speed, and some important arguments made. I will try to deal with as many as I can in the time I have available. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said at the outset, our reform agenda is about both local prosperity and global competitiveness. It is about the needs of labour market and the needs of the student, and it is about our collective need for a more prosperous future. That is why this Government are putting the money down to get the job done: £3.8 billion more for FE and skills over the Parliament, the biggest increase in over a decade; £1.6 billion more for education at 16 to 19; £554 million for adult skills, a 29% increase in real terms over four years; and £2.7 billion for apprenticeships by the end of this spending review period—all this and more, to give people the skills the economy needs.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), the Chair of the Education Committee, said that skills had often been the Cinderella service; well, tonight it continues its journey to the ball. But if it is Cinderella, I wonder who the fairy godmother is. Is it my right hon. Friend himself, is it the Secretary of State, or is it the Chancellor, who provided this money? The Opposition have talked about the state of funding over time. I taught history for quite a long time, and one of the things we learn when we study history is that the left
loves to rewrite it—when it is not destroying it. Some Conservative Members remember why there was a need for austerity in 2010. Indeed, in a powerful speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Lia Nici) talked about a time when the Opposition were in power and things were not quite so rosy as they seem to remember.