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Further Education and Training Bill [Lords]

I welcome that intervention, which highlights the unity on this side of the House with regard to welcoming city academies. Over the next few years, city academies will provide benefits in terms of social mobility, which the current Government have stamped down on. I thank the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Gordon Banks) for raising the issue that the requirements of business are slightly different from those of universities. I also enjoyed the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, South (Mr. Binley), who made an energetic, enthusiastic and emphatic endorsement of the need for small and medium-sized enterprises to be involved in the definition or design of further education courses. One of the themes running through hon. Members’ contributions has been the provision of information that enables students, employers and colleges and other further education institutions to see clearly what is going on in the job market and with demand for courses. The Bill is a bit of a missed opportunity in several ways. Further education has been improving over the past few years, at least since 1992 when many organisations were released to a certain extent to do things in their own way. However, there are some concerns about what has been going on, and I should like to raise a couple as a backdrop to my comments. If this is the fourth restructuring of the Learning and Skills Council and the further education sector in four or five years, something must have been wrong with the earlier reforms. That is why we must scrutinise these changes carefully in Committee. For example, clause 15 abolishes the role of committees of young people. Can the Minister explain how those committees have failed? He may say that they did not fail but were surpassed or usurped by something new. If so, why does the Bill not specify what will replace them? The Learning and Skills Council has had a £15 million cost against it for redundancies, with about 1,300 staff being laid off. That excludes the cost of tribunals, consultancy, advice on outplacements, early retirement and several other factors. It is therefore rather bizarre that we are talking about another restructuring. Clause 4 does not specify which bodies will be able to formulate strategy. It mentions the Greater London authority and the Mayor of London but does not designate who the Secretary of State will empower to make strategy on behalf of further education. Given previous legislation involving the nimble fingers of Lord Adonis, I suspect that a lot might be hidden in the clause. Why is it necessary to confer a power without telling us on whom it is being conferred? That is an odd situation. I am sure that Labour Members will be concerned in view of their worries about city academies, which I suspect that they did not envisage were being created in the previous legislation. Another big question is whether the Bill enables the Government to redirect money into city academies. As the bodies have not been defined and the precise definition of ““further education”” is not completely clear, surely it would be possible to direct funds to city academies—perhaps even to enable new ones to be created. I am not against that, but I am curious to know whether the Bill is intended partly to open up these definitions. The Minister is shaking his head; I look forward to his comments when he winds up. I ask the question because the number of city academies is set to increase from 80 to 200, 300 or 400 over the next few years. If, under clause 21, all principals must be qualified to be in charge of a further education institution, that prompts the question of what qualifications they will need. In a freely operating market, where innovation is needed, straitjacketing people into a single sort of qualification to hold a post of leadership does not lead to the variety and differences that enable the development of better practices. I would be interested to hear a few words about the reason for clause 21’s insistence on what appears to be—until the regulations are published, we will not know—a specific sort of qualification for a principal of a further education institution. Earlier, I mentioned an overall theme. Many contributions revolved around information provision. I wonder whether the Government are attempting to straitjacket organisations and perceptions of further education, rather then releasing them to be responsive to employers and the market. I shall explain that a little further. The hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) said that he wanted to raise further education’s profile and remove the stigma from it. My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, South said that he wanted SMEs to play a role in defining courses. My hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Jeremy Wright) said that he was interested in lifelong learning. He said that we begin our careers in one specific role, but few of us remain in it later in life. He considered the lifelong learning pattern and the way in which further education could enable that. The Bill is a missed opportunity. We have modern technology, including the internet and websites. If we wanted to ensure that supply and demand were matched, providing information is the way to do that. Nowhere does the Bill enable or empower people who want to take up a course, or SMEs or large businesses that want to consider students, to obtain the information overtly. We have an opportunity to consider creating or enabling—perhaps simply through a website—a method of ascertaining demand throughout the UK for specific skills and qualifications. For example, when students embarked on a course in further education, they could see that there were 500 jobs and only 200 people studying for the relevant qualification. That would be helpful and a good method of matching supply and demand without top-down control or fixing a structure in further education.