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Employment, Universities and Skills and Housing

I absolutely wish to see more apprenticeships across the public sector. One of the reasons why I tabled the parliamentary questions that showed how few apprenticeships there were across central Government was to try to get the Government to do something about the scandal of how low that level is. Let me repeat again for the benefit of the Secretary of State and the hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) that we want more people of all ages to be in apprenticeships. We have practical proposals to increase the number of people in apprenticeships; what we have from the Secretary of State is rhetoric without any explanation of how he will achieve the ambitious targets and legal requirements that he proposes. That is the history of his party's approach to apprenticeships—an endless stream of ambitious targets, none of which are ever met. They are not met because the Government have not made the practical proposals that we have made to ensure that they are spread. That is the problem that the Secretary of State's proposals face. I turn briefly to the subject of universities, about which the Secretary of State spoke. The Government have failed to achieve their apprenticeship targets, the Learning and Skills Council has failed and Train to Gain has failed. On top of all that, this is the last Session before the Government face the truth of their failure to achieve their target for university participation, which, we should recall, was that 50 per cent. of young people should participate in university education by 2010.