My Lords, we listened with interest to some rather engaging and forceful Second Reading speeches on the first group this afternoon. I noted that my noble friend Lord Adonis took one view that this was a terrible Bill and my noble friend Lord Young of Norwood Green took a different one that this was actually a good Bill. I find myself somewhere in between, but I want to be more pragmatic than they are. This is Committee. We have some opportunities in Committee to make a Bill better. I hope that that is what we will achieve at least in some respects.
At Second Reading I chose to talk largely about the missed opportunity in the Bill to try to link what we do in the educational system with the huge challenges that climate change and getting to our net-zero target by 2050 pose for us. I hope the Government will take the amendments in this group really seriously, because they at least begin to do just that.
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I strongly support Amendments 3, 9 and 25, which are in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman and Lady Sheehan, my noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth and the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, who sadly is not here today. The others all spoke very eloquently and at some length on why it is important that the Bill should be amended to take account of the Government’s policies on climate change and their goal of a net-zero target on carbon emissions by the middle of the century. I do not want to add anything new to what the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said in her opening speech because she covered it all. I endorse with some passion the position they have taken.
I say to the Minister that if the Government reject these arguments and these amendments, it will demonstrate a lack of joined-up thinking across government between
those who are concerned primarily with climate change issues, such as Defra, and the Department for Education. As the noble Lord, Lord Baker, just said, other departments of course have a relevant interest in this, such as the DWP and the business department, but it would be perverse for the Government to push these amendments back.
I also very much support what my noble friend Lord Knight said. As I implied, he is absolutely right to want to link climate change issues and educational issues and objectives. He has come up with a mechanism in Amendment 52, to which I put my name, for how we might begin to do this. Before I get into that amendment, I will pick up what he said about students. We know from countless opinion polls that many young people are very concerned about these issues. We have some obligation to take them seriously in their wish for more to be done in their educational experience to discuss, debate and find routes through how we will prevent the planet collapsing under the serious impact of climate change later this century.
I turn to Amendment 52. There are in this country hundreds—indeed, thousands—of different qualifications in the wide range of skills that students seek to acquire after the age of 16 and then throughout their careers. I am talking not just about young people; this is a lifelong learning Bill. Indeed, there are probably too many of these qualifications. There have been countless attempts at rationalisation, including back in the days when I had ministerial responsibility in this area. I cannot say that I was all that successful and I do not think that people have been successful since. Any modernisation or restructuring of skills qualifications must surely take into account the importance of the climate change and biodiversity targets.
This would place a big responsibility on the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education in regulating qualifications. To create a genuinely green economy we must provide training and the skills required. We must also think, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said, about the large numbers of unemployed people. They must be given help to acquire some of these skills. To fail to meet our targets because there are not enough skilled and qualified people to undertake the challenging work needed across many different sectors of the economy would be a truly tragic failure.
The Bill has a role in trying to avoid that failure. It is a great opportunity to put in place the mechanisms needed to signal approval of qualifications that properly address needs in this area and disapproval of those that fail to do so and, worse, which incorporate approaches, whether in the materials or operations deployed, that damage the environment. It is key that we do something about this. I hope the Minister will agree that leadership, accompanied by transparency on the part of the regulators, will encourage apprenticeship and technical education systems to be at the forefront of the delivery of skills to the green economy.
Lastly, I will speak to Amendment 73, to which I have also added my name, along with the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan. The Secretary of State is to keep a list of relevant providers. It does not seem a lot to insist that one of the conditions to be on this list is that the provider should be committed to tackling climate
change and biodiversity loss by having created a strategy to do so that is made openly available by publishing it. I cannot think of any FE college given this challenge that would not want to rise to it—and it is true not only of FE colleges but of other providers in the skills training sector. So, once again, I hope the Government will take this seriously and come back with a response that will give us at least some hope of achieving in this Bill what I set out earlier in this short speech: the bringing together of education and climate change objectives.