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Further Education and Training Bill [Lords]

I, too, want to speak briefly in support of the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes). There are four reasons why they are sensible. First, clause 17 is in many ways oddly placed in the Bill. Elsewhere in the Bill,, the Government are quite properly attempting to give more freedoms to FE institutions. In many cases, they are giving them the freedom to award foundation degrees, and in other places they are giving FE colleges more authority over what they do. Yet we now see a further restriction of that authority and further intervention by the LSC in the day-to-day management of the colleges. Of course, I entirely agree that it is not right that there should be no possibility to intervene when colleges are clearly going wrong, but that is a wholly different thing from the micro-management of the institution and the ability of the LSC to intervene in the way that is proposed. The second reason, to which my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings also referred, is that I remain unconvinced that the Government have worked out what all these changes will cost, not only for the reasons that he has given but because there could be legal costs if the LSC is responsible for deciding to remove members of the governing body. Again, we discussed that in Committee, but we still do not have a clear sense of what the Government believe these changes might cost the learning and skills councils. All that we know heretofore is that the Government expect an additional cost to fall on the LSC, but no one knows what that additional cost might be. That seems profoundly unsatisfactory. The third reason why these amendments are right is that what the Government are doing in the clause is setting up the LSC to do something different from what they and, indeed, we in the Opposition would like the LSC to do. We all want the LSC to be very much learner-focused and to encourage learners to find their own way through further education and to do the courses and acquire the skills that are most suited to them. Surely we do not want the LSC to become bogged down in the kind of management decisions in FE colleges that the clause gives it the opportunity and, indeed, encourages it, to do. The clause will create an LSC that none of us wants, doing things that none of us wants it to do. The fourth reason has become apparent only during the later stages of the proceedings on the Bill and as a result of the machinery of government changes that the Government have talked about in the past few days. As there is now undoubtedly a question mark over the future of the LSC in general, it seems crazy to start to discuss changes that will give it more power, more authority and more responsibility in specific areas, when we do not yet know what form the LSC, or any successor body, will have in the future. For all those reasons, my hon. Friend’s amendments are entirely right and deserve the support of the House.