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Further and Higher Education (Employer Engagement)

: I am happy to. The picture is much more complicated. First, there is no way in which the Government can be described as underfunding the further education sector. Over the past eight years, we have increased funding to that sector by about 48 per cent. in real terms. I do not wish to make a crude party political point, but I will. The level of financing for further education colleges in the five years prior to 1997 was cut by 14 per cent. in real terms. Therefore, there has been a step change in funding. Money has to be spent on the right priorities. Those priorities were established through the Government's two skills White Papers, which received cross-party support and established consensus that they were the right priorities. Sixteen to 19-year-olds are a priority, but so are adult basic skills and the roll-out of the national employer training programme, on which I will comment later. I think that those are the right priorities. If we argue that, within a budget that is still increasing, more needs to be spent on those areas, it means that other areas, which one might crudely describe as adult leisure and recreation, will not receive as much funding. I say not that those courses should cease but that the individuals should be asked to pay a little more for them. Under the financial regime that we brought in, the average cost of an adult education class will rise over the next two years from approximately £1.42 an hour to £1.94 an hour. Alongside that there will be significant protection for people on means-tested benefits. That is the right strategy. As I go up and down the country talking to providers, I find that people understand the strategic direction in which we are moving, but we need constantly to explain and rationalise what we are doing.