My Lords, I, too, welcome the announcement, and I am sure that the noble Earl is not surprised at the depth of feeling I have in welcoming it. I see this as a step towards regulation. He might baulk at that but, as the noble Lord, Lord Willis, said, regulation is important for us, and I have been asking for it for a long time. However, I also have felt: what is it we are regulating in the sense of the absolute ultimate? So I think this gives us a very clear and descriptive way in which that can be measured.
I echo what the noble Lord, Lord Willis, said about “may”. That must be “must”, please, because “may” gives such a lot of flexibility that we may go back to exactly where we are right now if people are not required to carry this out. I very much agree that regulation helps in bringing value into the skill mix. My noble friend Lord Hunt referred to an aside by his colleague sitting alongside him. As somebody who is involved in skills heavily, whether it is NVQ level 1, 2 or 3—which I am sure my noble friend Lord Young was referring to—I know from the work that I have done with Skills for Care that the aim is that between level 2 and 3 will be competent level because obviously it depends very much on what people start with.
A final point, which the noble Lord, Lord Willis, picked up on and which we have in industry as well, is how we measure the skills and experience that people already have when we try to ascertain where they fit in. One of the dispiriting things that we find elsewhere is that, when people are asked to take a level 2 or 3, no recognition is made of what they have already gained while they have been doing the job. Skills for Care knows how to cope with that in the way that the skills levels are drawn up.
I thank the noble Earl very much. I spoke before about being tedious. I am sure that the way in which he has pursued this issue has nothing to do with me or other people being tedious; it is because he has a belief in it.