I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I am a politician, so I would never try to reinvent the wheel, but I think what we are trying to do in this Bill is learn from some of the problems that the Government at the time had with that situation, because lifelong learning is so important and people will need to retrain. People cycle in and out of work, and we will need to train people for jobs that none of us has even considered. Developed economies such as ours are historically bad at retraining people for new technology—it is not just a UK problem; it is a US problem too. All the developed economies find that difficult, so the Bill is an important way in which we can help people. That is before we consider the health and wellbeing advantages of lifelong learning, which are also well documented.
The Bill is set in the context of a couple of problems with which my right hon. Friend the Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education is familiar. One is access. It is still the case that access to certain universities is not what it should be. Disadvantaged young people find it difficult to get into certain universities, and we have to make better progress on that—some universities are still dominated by those from private schools, and that matters for everything we are training people for—and ditto the situation with international students. Some universities have made much better progress on getting international students rather than low-income students. They do that because it gives them a lot more money, but universities need to be making a good contribution to social mobility at home.
With this lifelong learning entitlement, I hope the Minister will, as with everything else, be applying two tests. First, what are the outcomes for people who undertake
certain courses? I am agnostic about whether it is level 4 or level 8 and whether it is academic or vocational; the thing I care about most is whether the course helps someone get a better outcome than they otherwise would have had if they had not done that qualification. That unfortunately has not been the case with lots of the university courses that people have done at 18. The second test is simply this: do disadvantaged young people or older people who have been disadvantaged get their fair share of the courses that will really help them to have those better outcomes? Across degrees and apprenticeships, too often it is the most affluent and the most privileged who take most of the spaces on the things that will give the best outcomes. All that being said, this is an important Bill that is trying to get us to that parity of esteem, and I am very pleased to support it.
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