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Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I support the amendment. As the Minister will know, colleges have been much embarrassed by the developments in the college capital building programme this year. I believe that I am right in saying that because the colleges span both 16-to-19 and adult provision, the capital programme for colleges will be split between the YPLA and the SFA. Therefore, it is important not only that the YPLA ensures that it has an appropriate committee structure but that there is a committee structure to bring the two together to run a coherent programme. In many senses, that poses a bigger challenge than the YPLA itself. One may despair about what happened with the LSC, but when two separate authorities are trying to run a single capital budget, many difficulties may arise. As I understand it, once the basic funding for Building Colleges for the Future was allocated some four or five years ago, the initial bids were very low. That led the LSC to more or less send out messages to its local arms to see whether they could drum up some bids. That is not surprising, given that if you were going to put in a bid, you had to have at least outline planning permission from your local authority. That takes a lot of time. Perhaps I should declare an interest, because I sit on the board of Guildford College, which has been caught up in the funding problem. Fortunately, we have not had a building demolished; we are not halfway through a building programme. However, we have lost a substantial sum of money in consultants’ fees, which we will not get back. I believe that the total of consultants’ fees across all colleges is in the region of £200 million. That money should have gone to provide for students at colleges and it has been diverted into the pockets of the PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Tribals and all the rest of the many consultants that gather around once a capital programme is announced. There needs to be a very careful watch on capital programmes. What happened with the LSC, in a sense, was that having been a trickle, it became a waterfall, and it could not cope. It was quite extraordinary that the total amount that was bid for a year ago was four times the capital sum available and nobody in the LSC or the department seemed to be saying, "Hey! Watch it!". Having a proper committee structure in place is important, but I stress that since the capital programme is going to be shared between the two organisations, and sixth- form colleges are going to be separate and have their own programme, there needs to be a committee structure to link the appropriate parts of the system.