My Lords, I agree with every word of what my noble friend Lord Layard and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, said. When I spoke in Committee, I gave the figures that show that the number of apprentices under the age of 25 is now lower than it was when the apprenticeship levy was introduced. Rarely has there been a policy which has failed so catastrophically to deliver its objective.
I do not want to repeat what my noble friend and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, said; their points about the failure to create apprenticeships in the private sector were very well made. The point I want to address to the Minister and introduce to the debate relates to one of the other really significant failures in the creation of apprenticeships, namely the failure to create apprentices in the public sector. This has been another very long-running and serious failure.
The worst provider of apprentices in the country among large organisations is the Civil Service, which had no scheme of creating apprentices at all before 2015. I met the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, who was the head of the Civil Service then, and some of us worked very closely with him to get the Civil Service apprenticeship scheme going. There was quite a lot of foot-dragging and reluctance to do it. The Civil Service has a graduate fast stream and recruits tens of thousands
of graduates each year across the different parts of the organisation, but had no apprenticeship scheme. An apprenticeship scheme was created and I checked before coming into the House where it had got to.
The other remarkable thing about it was the thing that persuaded the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, to go for it: it turned out that the department responsible for apprentices—it keeps changing its name; I think it was then called the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, but it may have been something else—had, I think, three apprentices under the age of 21. The department of apprentices was one of the worst apprenticeship providers in the entire country. That was the department, with its Ministers, that was supposed to preach to the private sector about how it should create apprenticeships.
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I checked where we are with apprentices now in the Civil Service. The state, which is the largest employer in the country, has an obvious capacity and indeed a duty. If everything that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, said is true about the economy at large, it is manifestly true that the Government themselves should create apprenticeships.
These are the statistics. According to the Civil Service statistical bulletin just out on the employment pattern in the Civil Service last year, since 2015, when the Civil Service apprenticeship scheme started, 29,000 apprenticeships have been created across the Civil Service at all levels. Across six years, that is about 5,000 apprentices in the Civil Service a year. The head count of the Civil Service, as of 1 January last year, was 456,410. Recruitment that year, which was lower because of Covid, was 40,680. There were 40,680 new recruits to the Civil Service last year and under 5,000 apprentices, so less than one in eight of all new recruits to the Civil Service is an apprentice. That is an apprentice at any age; it does not break it down by age, so I do not know how many of them are under 25.
It would be interesting to ask the Minister how many young apprentices, under 25, are in the Department for Education. Maybe the Box has time to provide her with a note by the end of the debate. She may not want to read it out, because it will be a very small figure. I will be surprised if the number of young apprentices in the Department for Education is into double figures—and this is the department, with its Minister, that is supposed to tell the rest of the country of the importance of apprentices.
That figure of 5,000 new apprenticeships a year created by the Civil Service is utterly pitiful. It should be many multiples of that. The idea that only one in eight new recruits to the Civil Service is an apprentice of any age, let alone a young apprentice, is a really serious condemnation of the state and the state’s leadership in the creation of apprenticeships. If the state does not lead on this business, there is no reason whatever to expect that the rest of the country will follow.