My Lords, I am not sure I will be able to match the bravura performances that this Committee has already brought forward. I noted with great pleasure the speech of my noble friend Lord Adonis. I tried to make a speech like that at Second Reading. The only trouble is that at Second Reading you have five minutes, but being in Committee gives you much greater opportunity to expand as you wish.
For all the criticisms of the Bill, many of which I agree with, it does contain one major social reform which has the potential for improvement in the decade ahead: the extension of the student loan scheme to people doing training. We should all put on record clearly our welcome for that; it is very important.
I am no great expert in this field but I had a little encounter with it when I was involved, at the latter end of the Labour Government, with the North West Development Agency in my home area of Cumbria and saw the complexities of trying to improve the skills system. If the Committee will allow me, I would like to expand on that a little. It struck me that the problem with skills and further education was that provision was not demand-led but supply-led. It was led by people who wanted to fill the places on courses to get the money from the Skills Funding Agency to meet
their costs. For it to be supply-led by the providers—not demand-led by the needs of employers and the country—is clearly not a satisfactory way of doing things, so reform is needed.
However, the Government are saying that they are going to create committees dominated by employers to solve this problem—well, we have had a bit of a history of that. The great selling point of the RDAs that Labour established was that they were private sector led. I actually think that was a great mistake; they should have been locally and democratically led. We then would have had, in my view, a much more solid basis for English devolution. We had the local enterprise partnerships established by the right honourable Sir Vincent Cable, which Members on the Liberal Democrat Benches will doubtless be anxious to applaud in these debates. Again, those partnerships were intended to put employers at the forefront of local economic development. We now have this proposal for local skills improvement plans, led by employers.
However, getting the employer voice in an area is very difficult. In Cumbria there are some very big employers. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned Barrow and British Aerospace, and there is Sellafield on the west coast of the old Cumberland. These very big employers need to have relationships with universities and colleges to provide a ladder of opportunity for their people, from apprenticeships to master’s degrees, in the areas that they need. That is not satisfactorily done but it is a way forward. I am not sure whether skills improvement plans will result in that, but that is what needs to be done with large employers.
Then there are big sectors in which there are small employers and generally unsatisfactory standards: typically, hospitality, in the private sector, and social care, in the quasi-public sector—often privately provided, of course. In those areas we need a national sectoral approach. There are probably several hundred local hotelkeepers in the Lake District; putting a couple of them on the skills improvement board is not going to solve the problem. We need some national sectoral approaches, particularly to the sectors where there are chronic skills shortages.
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We cannot get cooks in the Lake District at the moment. That is a consequence of Brexit. Employers have to close their kitchens at lunchtime and on the early days of the week, because of the lack of availability of the labour from eastern Europe on which we formerly relied, which is causing a big problem.
If we want to resolve that dilemma, we need a national sectoral approach to encourage young people to go into social care and hospitality. We must establish a pathway for them, for gaining skills, and we must mandate for them minimum wages higher than the living wage to give them an incentive to do the training. That would raise productivity in those sectors. That is a way forward in some of the very low-paid, low-productivity, low-skilled sectors of the economy.
I wonder how these skills improvement boards are going to work. I just do not know. It will be difficult for us to come back after the Minister has spoken, but she has to answer all those sharp, precise questions
asked by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, in his opening speech. We need to know more about how this whole thing is going to work.
The other big gap, as many Members have pointed out, concerns how we get people who have not succeeded at school to a level at which they can benefit from the extension of training and further education opportunities. I am not sure whether that is a question for this Bill, but it should be a priority for the Government.
One of the things I regret about the Labour Government was that we never extended the brilliant London Challenge, which succeeded in transforming our London schools, to the north-west. Cumbria never benefited from anything like that, nor did the north-east. We could have done much more. That is not a criticism, but there is a sense of missed opportunity.
I do not know what the inspection and transformation regime for colleges of further education will be, but, as part of the politics of place—which the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, rightly mentioned—we should have a conscious policy, and a mechanism, to try to ensure that every reasonable-sized town has a decent further education college at its centre. How do we get that, and how do we sort things out? There is already a lot of good there, but there is also quite a lot of chaff. How we get rid of that, and how we amalgamate where necessary, and get co-operation, is a question that needs to be answered in these debates. We need to know much more about how the proposed arrangements will work. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, asked the Minister the right questions, and I hope that she will answer them.