My Lords, we do not oppose those amendments, which, as the Minister rightly said, are technical and relate to the decision to transfer the duties.
However, I can resist anything except temptation, as someone once said. I cannot resist responding to the point made about having created approaching 2 million apprenticeships. I welcome the Government’s commitment to apprenticeships but I keep making the plea for that figure to be disaggregated. The Minister knows as well as I do that anywhere between 50% and 75% of those apprenticeships are over-25s and really ought to be described as re-skilled adults or adult apprenticeships. It is not that we reject the need to ensure that re-skilling takes place but a number of people have raised doubts about whether they really should qualify as apprenticeships.
Real progress has been made on apprenticeships but I wish we would refrain from quoting that figure as though it were the answer to all the problems. We still have a long way to go in increasing apprenticeships, and I shall quote the usual statistic: only one in five employers and a third of FTSE 100 companies have apprentices. Other than those comments, we are content to support the amendment.