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Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I entirely support what my noble friend has just said. A fundamental problem with the Civil Service as it has emerged in the past 12 years is the continuing divorce of delivery from policy. If you operate the two separately, policy never learns from the problems that arrive in delivery, which just produces new policy with a whole fresh set of problems rather than building on what has gone before. We have seen that with this endless cycling of initiatives and destruction of institutions before they have had time to establish themselves. That must be the wrong way in which to run the Civil Service; delivery must be an integral part of the whole process of managing a department. I agree with the noble Baroness that I would not have the Minister setting the examinations. As I said under an earlier amendment, I would have that done professionally, as GCSEs and many other examinations are done, by organisations set up for that purpose. I do not see why it has to be retained within government. However, the idea that separation produces anything other than confusion, bad policy and bad delivery is very much given the lie by the performance of this Government and department over the past 12 years.