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Further Education and Training Bill [Lords]

It was intimate, but improper. I am sorry, what I meant is, ““Minister, I am about to blight your expectations with my regret””. It is a regret shared by almost all of the very many people I spoke to who were connected with or concerned about skills. They regret, as I do, that the Bill is not fit for purpose. The Government must know that, and I cannot believe that the Minister is not embarrassed by its limited ambitions. So to my plea—that the Government should take their heads out of the sand and listen to their own advisers. Let us be clear. The Government were so concerned about further education that they commissioned the Foster review. Sir Andrew Foster recommended radical changes for colleges because he recognised that they are stifled by regulation and strangled by red tape. According to Foster, there are 17 bodies with a monitoring or regulatory role in FE, stifling innovation and excellence. Foster recommended ““less centralisation”” and moves to ““greater self-regulation””. There is none of that in the Bill. Worse, where the Government do not disappoint, they offend. Why on earth do they still think that the Learning and Skills Council should be given sweeping new powers to sack college principals and senior managers. Yet the Government do indeed think that, because we heard it confirmed in earlier exchanges. The Secretary of State can currently do some of that, but the new threat to colleges is more draconian. Indeed, I asked him earlier today how often the existing power had been exercised. He hesitatingly said that it had not, so let me clarify. In replying to a parliamentary question that I tabled last month, the Minister revealed that the existing powers had ““never been used”” except where, following the resignation of a governing body, the Secretary of State had been required to appoint new governors. I emphasise again that it has ““never been used””—not once. Is it any wonder that the other place voted against this part of the original Bill? The Association of Colleges, Opposition Front Benchers and others have urged the Government to think again and this evening, my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Jeremy Wright) amplified our appeal. Now, to be fair, the Government were so concerned about skills that they commissioned the Leitch report. Lord Leitch, like Sir Andrew Foster, recommended radical reform. This Bill contains nothing of Leitch. It is bizarre by any standards to ask for a detailed study and simultaneously to introduce a Bill to Parliament that pays no attention whatever to the report of that study. Lord Leitch’s review revealed just how much work still needs to be done. The scale of the challenge is formidable, as the hon. Member for City of Durham (Dr. Blackman-Woods) told us in her speech. Even if the Government were to meet their target to improve UK skills by 2020, at least 4 million adults will still not have the literary skills expected of an 11-year-old and 12 million would not have equivalent numeracy skills. Britain would continue to be, in Lord Leitch’s words,"““an ‘average performer’—positioned at best, in the middle of the OECD rankings””." We would continue to have smaller proportions of intermediate and higher level skills than key competitors such as France and America. Skills gaps hinder national progress, as the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Wright) pointed out, and much is getting worse. There are now 1.25 million young people aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training—NEETs. That figure is up 15 per cent. since 1997. While we waste a generation’s potential, we add to its number as 45,000 16-year-olds leave school each year functionally illiterate and/or innumerate. As my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson) said, it is time to champion the cause of those NEETs. What a tonic it was to hear from him! That is not the only thing that is getting worse. The right hon. Member for Torfaen (Mr. Murphy), who is not in his place at the moment, said that he celebrated the fact that 250,000 over-60-year-olds were engaged in adult education, yet this week the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education reported that 500,000 adult education places have been lost in the past year. The proportion of adults currently learning or having done so in the past three years has fallen to just 41 per cent. That means that fewer adults now have the opportunity to be inspired in the way that the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Ms Smith) described with such eloquence. The Learning and Skills Council has played a significant part in our discussions today. This year, the LSC will receive £11 billion of public money—more than the Royal Navy—yet too much of that funding is consumed by complex bureaucracy. Staff costs rose by 26 per cent. between 2001 and 2006, and there are more than 4,400 people directly employed by the LSC. None of them is democratically accountable to their locality, as the hon. Member for Brent, East (Sarah Teather) reminded us.