My Lords, I completely support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden. I do not think that any Peer who has been involved in the Bill wishes it anything other than complete success. We are all behind the objectives and the methodology which is set out in the Sainsbury report and what has been built upon that. We want to ensure in the passage of the Bill that what we are producing will work well.
In the process of putting the Bill together, certain ideas have been developed which will not weather exposure to practice. When it comes to sitting down with industries, awarding bodies and others, the ideas that are being touted as the way things will be under the Bill will not be the things that work out. I want to make sure that the Bill has sufficient flexibility built into it so that, if things need to take a different turn to make this project succeed, they will be able to, and we will not find ourselves hobbled by primary legislation.
I have one separate amendment in this group that is aimed at the question of multiple qualifications within one particular sub-route—I do not yet know what they will be called; in the picture supplied to us they look like the fingers of a hand, although I do not think they will be called fingers. To restrict yourself to one single awarding organisation creates a monopoly in the short term, and in the long term it reinforces it. If you take one particular skill set within the universe covered by the Bill, and you say, “Only this awarding organisation can create qualifications for this for the next seven years”, what other awarding organisation will maintain the ability to compete? None of them will. Why should they? There is no business for seven years and they cannot afford to do it. It is all based on a collection of people, and anyway it is not something that stays still; it continuously evolves. There is no way that they will remain in a position to compete, so when you come up to the renewal of this single licence, there will be only one competitor.
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This is not like the situation with schools. For school qualifications, you can imagine gathering together some teachers and putting an English qualification together. That is feasible, but who would you get to do it for plumbing? There are no schools of plumbing outside the awarding organisations with the same coherence and singleness of curriculum. As the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, said, if you are going to compete for the renewal of a franchise, you will have to build up all that expertise, creating it from nothing. Why should anyone do that if all they can do at the end of it is to challenge an incumbent? It is an inherently unstable, unrewarding way of dealing with things, as anyone who, like me, uses Southern Rail, knows only too well. It is not really something that we want to replicate; it is not a successful model elsewhere in the public sector. When we had the chance to adopt it in education—noble Lords will remember how hard the debate was at the time—the DfE settled firmly for multiple awarding bodies, and for very good reasons: that model gives you constant competition, it means that the organisations in question are always trying to improve, it means that if one is failing you have two alternatives, and everything becomes much easier.
However, the Bill is all right in that area because I am told—I hope that my noble friend will repeat it—that in fact nothing in the Bill will prevent multiple awarding organisations being chosen if that is what employers want. If my noble friend can confirm that, that will be fine but, because it is so unstable and full of dangers, the fact that the Government have been going down this route has led them to think that they have to own the whole of the intellectual property of the awarding organisation that has won the franchise.
Some of these awarding organisations have been going for a decent length of time. Over 100 years or so, they have built up expertise in assessment and qualification, but they are being asked to hand it to the Government for free in return for a seven-year franchise. What kind of business proposition is that? I have spoken to the chief executives of all the major awarding organisations. Not one of them will contemplate that sort of deal,
and I do not suppose that any noble Lord who is in business would contemplate that sort of deal for their own business either.
Where people have built something up, either you pay for it or you buy the awarding organisation and it is then nationalised—this being a Conservative Government, nationalisation is all the rage, but that is effectively what they are doing. They are not paying for it; they are demanding that the Government get it for free in return for a seven-year lease-back. If you go down that route, you will not have awarding organisations as we know them. You will not have City & Guilds; you will have Capita, because Capita’s business is the sort of turn-the-handle government contract where, if it loses at the end of the day, it does not matter because it has no great investment in the intellectual property. In the Institute for Apprenticeships you will need not 110 people but 10 or 20 times that number to do all the work that awarding organisations do now in maintaining the intellectual property.
We have had a comforting exchange or two with the Government since Committee and they say that they want to maintain the awarding organisations. That is great, but it cannot be done with the way in which IP is written into the Bill at the moment—or at least the way that it appears to be written in on the surface. Either the Bill has some hidden flexibilities and the relationship proposed in the amendments could be achieved—how that could be eludes me, but I am always happy to be educated—or we need something to loosen the bonds a bit so that, when the Bill leaves this House, we can be confident that it allows for a real commercial, practical arrangement with awarding organisations that will leave them strong, long-term guardians of quality and builders of high-quality assessment and qualification systems. These have a great reputation around the world, as do other parts of our education system, and we should not chuck them in the bin just because we have generated a set of fears which are, to my mind, needless.