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Employment, Universities and Skills and Housing

I am sure that my hon. Friends on the Front Bench appreciate the role played by local government in apprenticeships. I am encouraged that local groups of SMEs are coming together to consider the provision of support and training as a group, often on a self-help, mutual basis. That is certainly happening in my constituency. However, business is suspicious of Government involvement in apprenticeships and training for good reason. The Train to Gain exercise is widely seen as a one-size-fits-all approach that takes no account of the specific needs of areas, even within an area such as a constituency, and it is widely seen as complex and confusing. Furthermore, there are doubts about whether it adds anything new and whether there is any real test of additionality in what it delivers. No one will miss the Learning and Skills Council, but there is no confidence that what replaces it will be any better. After all, its constant reform has been described by the general director of the British Chambers of Commerce as a constant reshuffling of deck chairs that has held back progress in vocational qualifications. There is no confidence that the Government will be able to simplify matters or avoid interference. Even where there has been a transfer of funds to local government, one need only see the constant stream of circulars and departmental memos that hit the desks of almost all senior council officers to realise that the Government regard local government as nothing more than their own local Executive arm. We need to ensure that bureaucracy is genuinely removed. Let me turn finally to the provision of employment training. The Government have consistently missed the point as regards the difficulty of providing skills and employment services in a rural environment. A rural environment involves greater expense. Fewer providers operate in it, there is less choice for the individual, and there is almost no travel to get about in order to do the training. That has an impact on the job prospects of some of the most vulnerable people. Let me give two examples from my own constituency that arose as recently as last week. A training and support consultancy for horticulturalists, which is doing extremely good work with people with various disabilities, is likely to have great difficulties in continuing because of the burdens placed on it as a result of the shake-up of procurement within the Government. If it does continue, there is likely to be a reduction in the amount of time that people with disabilities spend on individual modules in the training schemes. That is a great shame, because this is an example of tackling the barriers that people face while providing them with real experience. The second example concerns ex-offenders in my constituency—even Henley has some ex-offenders—who have been ordered to get on to courses but have to go as far as Oxford. That may not seem a huge distance to Members, but it is a very tortuous route. The buses do not run on time, and it may be necessary to take several different ones. The scheme is designed for failure. That is not how we should proceed. The Government need to acknowledge that the rural dimension is special and that we need to take that into account.