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Employment, Universities and Skills and Housing

Members in all parts of the House who have an interest in skills and training and housing have had an unusual number of changes to the timing of the debate. We all understood the passions of the House on the very different matter that we have just debated. The present debate was originally planned for Thursday, and we are at last having it now, until 11 pm. One of the compensations of holding the debate today is that my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes) was not able to join us on the Front Bench on Thursday. He had a commitment to take part in the Moulton village pantomime in his constituency, ““Flinderella””, in the starring role of Baron of Boston. We are grateful that he is able to join us after his theatrical triumph last week. Contrary to the extraordinary straw man so savagely attacked time after time by the Secretary of State, the Opposition fully understand the scale of the crisis facing our country as the economy heads into recession, and we fully understand the need for serious measures to tackle the crisis. The first thing to do is to recognise what is going wrong with skills and training in our country. The Secretary of State was far too complacent about that. He spoke, as he so often does, of the extraordinary success in the number of apprenticeships, but the number at level 3—which is what apprenticeships are in many advanced western countries, not level 2; advanced apprenticeships, as they are now called—has been falling in each of the past seven years. The number has fallen from 112,00 to 110,000 to 105,000 and in 2006-07 it was down to 97,000. The Secretary of State failed to engage with the problem that there is a decline in the number of level 3 apprenticeships, compensated for only by an increase in the number of level 2 apprenticeships, which would not even have been called apprenticeships in the past.