This is an important amendment. I very much enjoyed the exchange at Oral Questions today in which the noble Lord, Lord Prior, responded for the Government on the importance of employee engagement. I felt he really understands how important it is in the private sector and, in some ways most surprisingly, in the public sector, particularly from his comments about junior doctors. In that spirit, obviously I hope that apprentices who, as we have discussed this afternoon, are employees, will enjoy employee engagement with their employers, even though they are apprentices. It is equally important that the institute feels that it is accountable to learners and that the accountability of the institute is not more upwards to the Government than it is to employers and learners.
As I said last week in this Committee, I have general concerns that the dynamic, rapidly changing nature of the labour market presents ongoing challenges to the institute. I was set a challenge by my noble friend Lord Hunt to come up with a solution to some of that before Report. I have been mulling on that and may have at least the beginnings of a solution, but I shall wait to surprise the Minister with it at some future date. The point remains that, if the institute does not have within its structure a way of listening acutely to the learner experience, of assessing the relevance of the qualification in the labour market for learners not only while they are going through their apprenticeship but in the months immediately after they have completed it and of being accountable to employers of all sizes, as my noble friend pointed out,
I worry that our efforts in this Committee to try to help and advise the Government in making the institute a success will be in vain because it will too quickly become out of touch and out of date.