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Further Education and Training Bill [HL]

There are a lot of figures here. It would be best for me to write to the noble Viscount to set out the run of figures. I am told that between the first two years that he mentioned, the council took on additional responsibilities, which accounts for the increase. The only figure for administration in the Secretary of State’s letter of 18 October is £219,495,000. The letter does not refer to figures for the other years, but I will willingly establish those. If there is to be a big reduction in administrative costs, the noble Viscount is quite right that the brunt of that will be borne by reductions in staff. It is not our view that a fixed quantity of staff is always needed to fulfil a set of functions. With technological improvements, changes in regulatory burdens—we have sought to reduce regulatory burdens and to enhance self-regulation in the sector—it is possible to provide a service of high quality and to fulfil the statutory responsibilities of the council with fewer staff. The provisions to which the noble Viscount referred are necessary to see that that reduction in staff is carried through in a fair and orderly way. However, the reductions that we are talking about need to be taken in a longer view too. The current Learning and Skills Council was established only in 2001. Before then there was the Further Education Funding Council for England and, I think I am right in saying, 72 training and enterprise councils, each of which had its own staff. The Learning and Skills Council therefore came in with an accumulated staff, which it has sought to reduce—in the ways that the noble Viscount set out—from a very much higher level, in many respects duplicating bureaucracy between the Further Education Funding Council and the training and enterprise councils. The reductions that we are seeing at the moment are to some extent a continuation of a process of making the Learning and Skills Council more fit for purpose, not simply in the functions and staff it inherited recently but in those it inherited from the 72 training and enterprise councils and the Further Education Funding Council. Taking that longer view, we believe that the reductions that we are carrying through are reasonable. We do not believe that it was a misjudgment to have more staff previously. To a substantial extent they were inherited from predecessor bodies. We have a duty to the public purse to see that that money is spent effectively and to reduce the staffing which is over and above that necessary to carry out the council’s functions. I will certainly look at the point that the noble Viscount raised about whether we know the destination of those who have left the council. I suspect that we probably do not have data on where staff who have left have gone to, but if there is information available I shall let him know. I have a feeling that the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, mentioned the need for local flexibility and sub-national structures some time ago. I was desperately trying to remember whether it was mentioned under this group of amendments or the previous group and whether I had already dealt with it. She was concerned that we might be unduly centralising and regionalising, removing the capacity of the Learning and Skills Council to respond properly to local needs. In that regard I should stress the importance of the 150 or so local partnership teams, to which I referred at Second Reading. The noble Viscount said that I did not set out sufficiently fully what they will do, so I shall do so now. These local partnership teams, of which there will be about one per local authority—we intend most of them to be coterminous with local authority boundaries precisely to enhance the interaction that the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, was seeking to promote—will have expert staff who understand local needs and can strengthen the Learning and Skills Council’s ability to contribute to wider social and economic objectives, including through stronger engagement with local authorities and children’s trusts. The local partnership director—each partnership will have its own director—will be fully accountable to the Learning and Skills Council’s area director, who in turn will be accountable to the Learning and Skills Council’s regional director. We believe that these local partnership teams will give the Learning and Skills Council flexible capacity to interact with local authorities and with other local partners within a strong and unified national framework. In other amendments the noble Viscount seeks to elucidate the detail on the proposed regional councils. The detail of the new regional councils will be set out in regulations rather than in the Bill. We have agreed that the first set of regulations will be subject to affirmative resolution following Royal Assent. We have made a draft of these regulations available to the Committee. I made them available with the draft of a number of other regulations concerning the London board and other aspects of organisation. I am happy to deal with other issues when we come to those matters. Taking stock of this as a whole, we believe that it is appropriate to remove the requirement for 47 local learning and skills councils, and that streamlining the bureaucratic functions of the council is a gain to the sector. It involves less unnecessary expenditure on administration. The introduction of the new local partnership teams will ensure sufficient local responsiveness, to which we attach great importance.