My Lords, at the end of a long day I will endeavour to be as succinct and to the point as possible. We did think carefully about returning to this issue and I have today read through the comments made by the Minister in Committee. Given the importance of the issue, we felt that it was worth doing so. I shall quote the Minister from the previous proceedings:
“We have already delivered 2 million apprenticeship starts in this Parliament, and there are 20,000 apprentice vacancies around England at any one time. However, I share the noble Lord’s concern about getting enough young apprenticeships”.—[Official Report, 14/1/15; col. GC204.]
That goes to the heart of these amendments, although they are not necessarily aimed just at apprenticeships for the young. However, that is surely a primary concern given that there has been a decline in that area and given that in some parts of the country, despite welcome drops in unemployment, we still have significant high levels of youth unemployment. In that respect, I make no apology for returning to this matter.
I pay tribute to the Government’s commitment to apprenticeships but I have also complained in the past about simply quoting the number of 2 million, because the number is not particularly helpful. It needs to be disaggregated if we want to look at the figures for 16 to 24 year-olds. We can then see that more than 50% of those 2 million apprenticeships are in fact adult apprenticeships, and some of them would fall under the classification of reskilling rather than new jobs—not that I would dismiss that as unimportant. But I have yet to hear an argument from the Government or the Minister which is a rebuttal of our view that if we are talking about public procurement contracts, there should be a requirement on the part of those bidding for them to stipulate how many apprenticeships they will provide and what level of training will be available.
Of course this should not necessarily apply to all contracts. There needs to be a cut-off figure, which we have suggested should be for contracts worth £1 million or more. That is an appropriate level. The response from the Minister has been that this might be a deterrent
to smaller suppliers in the chain. I again cite the Crossrail model, where that has not proved to be the case. It remains a serious problem that only around one in five employers is recruiting apprentices, and that only about a third of FTSE 100 companies do so. The challenge is to involve a larger number of employers. One way to do that is for the Government to show that they are serious about this issue and that if companies want to bid for significant public procurement contracts they have to demonstrate the seriousness of their intention. I have looked carefully at what the Minister said and still cannot find any reason why we could not go down that road. We do not believe that there is any legal impediment to encouraging smaller employers or contractors to bid for such contracts.
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The Government should recognise that if they want to encourage more companies and more employers to get involved, the apparatus with which they replaced the RDAs, the local employment partnerships, should surely be part of the strategy. There should be a requirement on local employment partnerships to work with local employers and local authorities to produce the maximum number of apprenticeships within the geographical areas that they cover. That is a fairly modest aim in the circumstances, unless we feel that we are being so successful in apprenticeship provision that we do not have to worry about it. I do not believe that we have reached that situation.
That is why we suggest in Amendment 30 that there should be,
“duties on local employment partnerships to work with the relevant small and medium enterprise organisations to deliver an apprenticeship strategy”,
and an annual review. In that way, the Government would have real information on where the best practice and achievements were taking place and they would be able to focus on local employment partnerships that were not delivering.
The second part of the amendment refers to,
“duties on schools, colleges, university technical colleges … and other relevant education institutions to have established links with local businesses to encourage apprenticeship development”.
As I have said on a number of occasions, another challenge that we face—I see it in schools that I visit as part of the Lords outreach programme—is that far too many schools are still committed only to pushing the maximum number of their students through to A-levels, regardless of whether it is suitable for them. They do not carry out the legal requirement on them to give their pupils a wide range of career guidance which shows them that there is another, vocational route, that they can earn while they learn, and that it is just as successful a route—for some students, it is even more successful—to a very worthwhile career.
It is not as though there is not a real need to do this. We know that we have an enormous number of vacancies in engineering and construction. We know that there is a huge gender imbalance as well. There is an awful lot of work that schools and colleges need to do in establishing links with business.
I look forward to the Minister’s response. I hope she will use this as an opportunity to take away the
suggestions that we have proposed in these amendments and have another look at it before she comes back to us at Third Reading, rather than just giving us the arguments that we heard in Committee. On those grounds, I beg to move.