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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

I shall leave it to my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary to the Treasury to deal with that at the end of the debate. I shall concentrate on our priority of education. In the past five years, we have also successfully increased the completion rate of apprenticeships. I think that the hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) mixed up the figures recently announced by the Learning and Skills Council. I saw somewhere that he said that there was a 59 per cent. failure rate in apprenticeships. In fact, we inherited a dire 24 per cent. completion rate and the LSC has recently reported that that rate has increased since 2002 to almost 60 per cent.