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Further Education and Training Bill [HL]

My Lords, I come to this Bill fresh from 70 hours in the Chamber on the Education and Inspections Bill, which involved my inflicting on the House 94 speeches, which was marginally more than the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, I think, although only just. Your Lordships can imagine the relish with which I embark on yet another legislative project this evening, only a month later. I was fondly assured that this would be a largely technical and non-controversial Bill. After piloting four Bills through the House in 18 months as a Minister, I know that while every Bill is largely technical—or, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, put it, too technical and dense—there is no such thing as a non-controversial Bill. Perhaps it is just the case that I have neverhad the good fortune to be associated with a non-controversial Bill, which may say something more about me than about the intrinsic nature of legislation. Let me simply say that clearly there are degrees of controversy. After 30 speeches, all but five or six of which have dwelt long and hard on Clause 19, I can see the contours of our debates ahead. I say right at the outset—because I appreciate the points that have been made about consultation, about the need to get into the nature of the issues at stake and aboutthe impact on all the partners—that we wantthe collaborative arrangements that have been so carefully nurtured in recent years between universities and further education colleges to be furthered still. The best response that I can make—though I will of course deal with some of the points raised in my reply—is to assure noble Lords that my honourable friend Bill Rammell, the Minister for further and higher education, will be delighted to meet all those Peers who have concerns about Clause 19. It will be a quite a large meeting. He will be willing to do so before we go into Committee, so that we can go into these issues in rather more depth than I am able to do this evening. I hope that that will enable me not to have to give a detailed, blow-by-blow response from the pages of notes that I have here, since it is 8.50 pm. I hope that we can take forward an in-depth discussion about the implications of Clause 19 in that meeting, which will help to further inform the debate before Committee stage. Leaving Clause 19 aside, I thought that there was a fairly broad, although not complete, consensus on how to proceed. After the opening speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, I thought that it included agreement on the streamlining of the Learning and Skills Council. After the noble Lord, Lord Baker, had opined, we then discovered that it did not include agreement on that. I am slightly surprised that it does not, because I thought that the one thing on which we agreed across the House was the need to minimise bureaucracy and to cut waste and duplication. I readily accept that the Liberal Democrats got there before we did and realised that we should have had fewer learning and skills councils. My noble friend Lady Morris said that it had become clear some time ago that this was the direction of travel in which we were moving. I do not think that I am revealing any state secrets when I say that we considered long and hard at the time whether 47 was the optimum number. My noble friend Lady Blackstone will well remember those discussions. We thought that we might want to consolidate in due course, but in the process at the time we thought it right to phase these transitions. Remember that we were moving from a much larger number of training and enterprise councils—the history of this isalways important. We are also taking account of developments in the work of the Learning and Skills Council and of colleges since then. My noble friend Lady Blackstone asked for the regulatory impact assessment of the cost. The effect of this is part of a process that will save an estimated £40 million in the administration of the FE sector—money that can then go straight to the front linefor learners and for FE institutions. As the noble Baroness opposite will need a lot of money if she is to meet the spending commitments that her party has made, I would have thought that she would have grabbed the £40 million and not sought to keep in place the much more intensive bureaucracy in the FE sector that would be required to keep 47 learning and skills councils going. I will squirrel that one away, however, as I am always on the lookout for areas where I know that she is now committed to spending a great deal more money than we are.