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Employment, Universities and Skills and Housing

My hon. Friend is right and, contrary to the caricature painted by the Secretary of State, one of our many proposals is to refocus Train to Gain on supporting apprenticeships by ensuring that that completely unacceptable age discrimination is abolished. No longer will people get full funding for an apprenticeship only if they are under 19 and receive 50 per cent. funding after that. We believe—especially in tough times, when there will be people over 19 who, sadly, will lose their jobs, seek a new career or try to get training—that using the Train to Gain budget to support them in their apprenticeship is the single best thing that we could be doing. It is a great pity that the Secretary of State presides over a system that is so clearly biased against anyone over the age 19. We hope that the proposals for ““time to train”” will work, but the Secretary of State will doubtless be aware of the comments of the CBI, for example, which is concerned that the impact of ““time to train”” on employers"““would have to be carefully monitored given the large number of employees who will be eligible to submit requests.””" It would be very useful to hear from the Secretary of State about something that he did not cover in his speech: the steps that he will be taking to ensure that employers are not overburdened as a result of the new right that he is proposing to implement. Surely, as a minimum, he needs to make a commitment to this House that he will monitor the effectiveness of this new right, to ensure that it is not coming with a disproportionate burden for employers. On apprenticeships, we also need to be confident that we can do far better than the Government have done. Their approach in the Queen's Speech has been not to do anything real to encourage apprenticeships, but instead to pass new legal rights. Again, we do not have a problem with people having a legal right to an apprenticeship, but legal rights is not the crucial issue—any more than passing legislation with a commitment to abolishing child poverty by 2020 will, of itself, miraculously solve the problems of poverty. In fact, there seems to be a pattern in this Queen's Speech, whereby the Government pass law requiring virtue and forbidding vice in all the areas where they seem to be making least progress in the real world in achieving their objectives. A report today shows how badly the Government are doing on child poverty, and we are invited to support the aim of abolishing it by 2020. We have clear evidence that they are doing badly on apprenticeships, and we are invited to support a new legal right for an apprenticeship, without any clear evidence of how it is to be achieved. This seems extremely odd, and I should be grateful if the Secretary of State helped us on this issue. In the draft Apprenticeships Bill—of course, we have yet to see the new combined legislation—there was a proposal that, in order to be an apprentice, one had genuinely to be employed. We Conservatives had been pressing for that, because we think that for most people, an apprenticeship means that they are in employment and receiving training in addition. A lot of damage is done to the brand if large numbers of other training schemes that are not linked to employment in any way can be called apprenticeships. The proposal in the Bill was that any apprenticeship had to be linked to employment. However, we understand that in addition the new legislation will include an entitlement for every young person to have an apprenticeship. If to be in an apprenticeship a person has to be in employment, and if we are passing a law giving everyone an entitlement to an apprenticeship, we will be interested to hear how the Secretary of State believes that the entitlement will be delivered. Ultimately, we are in a free economy in which employers cannot be required by law to take on an apprentice—although, of course, we want many more employers to do so.