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Education and Skills Bill

I hope to reassure the noble Lord in responding to his questions, but if I have not answered him fully by the end of my remarks, I will write to him and circulate my response to Members of the Committee in case others are interested as well. In considering these very technical clauses, it may be helpful if I set out why the Government believe that data on benefits, learning and employment need to be shared between Whitehall departments and the devolved Administrations. In the past, the biggest barrier to full employment was a shortage of jobs, but today and tomorrow it will be the shortage of the right skills that will lie between us and our goal of employment opportunity for all those we seek to serve. The Government are determined to help people get back into work and help them get on at work so they can build a good life for themselves and their families. As we all agreed in discussing the new rights to training established in Clause 71, having the right skills is crucial to achieving this goal. But too often in the past there have been unhelpful gaps between the support provided by Jobcentre Plus and that provided by colleges. On 12 June, the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions launched Work Skills, the Government’s next steps in the integration of welfare and skills services, to ensure they can respond to the needs and ambitions of both employers and individuals. This underpins the shared objective between my department and the Department for Work and Pensions of moving more people into sustainable employment and progression. The command paper sets out the steps we are taking to radically improve how our work and skills services are delivered. At the heart of this approach is a commitment to join up employment and skills services to make them more effective, and this is the key point. It means personal skills accounts to improve access to skills support, information and advice. It also means better advice on training, careers and job opportunities, with skills health checks to assess individual skill needs against job requirements and personal aspirations. Alongside this, Jobcentre Plus and the Learning and Skills Council and learning providers will work more closely together to ensure that benefit customers who need help with their skills are given what they need to get jobs, stay in work and progress in their skills and careers. If we are to make this joined-up approach work, it is clear that we need to do more than simply measure job outcomes and training outcomes in isolation. We need instead to know how well our programmes are doing in helping people off benefits and into sustainable employment, with continuing progression as they improve their skills in work. Currently, the Government do not have the necessary information to do that. The limited and tightly restricted sharing of data between researchers in government departments and the devolved Administrations in Wales and Scotland established by these clauses will make that analysis possible. These clauses provide for measuring the outcomes of the policy we have been debating. The information to be shared under Clauses 72 to 76 and the subsequent analysis will ensure that researchers are able to determine whether the qualifications and skills being achieved by adults are economically valuable. By economically valuable, I mean that individuals completing their learning achieve some increase in their employment chances and/or their wages over the medium to long term; that is, a measurable outcome in terms of improved salary or progression in work. As a result, the Government will be able to ensure not only that taxpayers’ money is being spent effectively, but also that these individuals are being helped to get a good job and improve their standard of living. The effect of this Bill in relation to the sharing of data is very specific. During consideration in another place, my honourable friend David Lammy, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, tabled a number of technical amendments to these clauses to improve the drafting and bring greater clarity about the information that can be disclosed and used. Clause 72(4) now makes clear the purposes for which the data can be used and disclosed. These are strictly limited to evaluating and assessing the effectiveness of education and training policies and social security or employment policies as they relate to education and training. I can reassure the Committee that the departments could not use the information in an operational context to pursue individuals. This information is not about Connexions and the sharing of knowledge which dominated much of the debate earlier in Committee; this is about research into the effectiveness of policies. At the point at which data will be used by researchers, items which might explicitly identify individuals will be removed. So we are talking about anonymised data. Clause 75 creates a new offence for the wrongful onward disclosure of data. Any onward disclosure of information outside the departments or the devolved Administrations concerned without lawful authority would be an offence. In addition, any disclosure of the data for uses other than those set out in the clauses without lawful authority would be an offence, as would disclosing data where identities are discoverable. It is a very high test. The new offence created through the Bill would sit alongside any new sanction for the most serious breaches of data principles on which the Government have agreed to consult following the recommendations of the Poynter review. Without the specific data sharing set out in the Bill, we will not be in a position to target government funding effectively to improve learning outcomes and employment prospects. Alternative methods such as destination surveys are prohibitively expensive and, given that the Government hold the data, we think this is the right approach. So, given the safeguards that are in place and the better informed debate that all those interested in these matters will be able to have, I hope the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his objection to the clause standing part of the Bill. I have a helpful diagram here. What will happen is that the departments will have their own non-anonymised data, for which they are responsible, and these will be passed to the DWP, which will carry out the anonymising. The DWP will then pass them back to the departments for the analysts to work on the data in an anonymised form for research purposes. The devolved Administrations, for example, will be able to receive data on a range of issues but they will not be able to see the individual to whom the data refer; they will know only that it is a recipient of training who has or has not progressed as a result of an investment made in their training. It is very much a resource for government researchers to track carefully the value of the investment that has been made in the education and training to which we are committing. With that explanation, I hope the noble Lord will feel able to support the clause.