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Skills for Growth

I welcome the fact that the Minister of State has come to the House today to make a statement on this announcement, in stark contrast to his colleague, the Minister for Higher Education and Intellectual Property, who on Monday made a written statement on the long-awaited fees review, which has angered thousands of students throughout the country, including about 100 presidents of student unions, who are gathered upstairs in Committee Room 11 at present—and I hope to speak to them shortly. We thought we had had the Government's vision for skills—the 2020 vision for skills—three years ago in the Leitch report, but the world has, of course, changed completely since then: the United Kingdom economy has experienced six quarters of contraction, and unemployment has increased again today, particularly for young people, among whom unemployment has risen by 15,000. The unemployment rate among 16 to 24-year-olds is 19.8 per cent., which is a far greater proportion than for the population as a whole. Young people have borne the brunt of this recession. Many of them are graduates who had never expected to be in this situation, but the vast bulk are those with skills up to, or including, level 2, thus compounding the long-entrenched problem of those not in education, employment or training. We need emergency measures to deal with the recession, as well as a long-term vision for the future of our economy. Does the Minister agree that it is simply ludicrous to expect young people under 24 who are unemployed to have to wait up to 12 months for what he himself described as ““crisis help””? It is a pretty strange crisis if they have to wait 12 months for help. Instead, my party has proposed a 90-day guarantee. We welcome some of the announcements in the statement. We certainly welcome—I am sure it is a welcome that will be echoed by employers around the country—any proposal to rationalise the quangos that proliferate in the entire skills labyrinth. The most common complaint I hear from all the employers I meet is that they find the skills labyrinth bewildering to negotiate. Does the Minister not agree that sector skills councils ought to be the organisations in the driving seat in respect of saying what are the skills needs of their industry, rather than the RDAs, as seems to be the case under the Government's preferred model? If any headline comes out of this statement, I guess it will be yet another target: that 75 per cent. of those aged under 30 should attain either a higher education qualification or an advanced apprenticeship. After 12 years of targets, I wonder whether we need another one in the fag-end period of this Government. Perhaps this is intended to obscure the fact that they will fail to meet the 50 per cent. target for participation in higher education by 2010. The statement referred to new university technical colleges. The Government's further education capital programme has been a complete fiasco, so I imagine this does not mean there will be new build. Will the Minister therefore confirm what these new university technical colleges will actually be? Will they be just a rebadging of existing FE provision? FE colleges will also be quite alarmed by the Minister's comment that there will be cuts in what he calls low-priority courses. Will he define what a low-priority course is, or at least give an example of one, from the Dispatch Box today? Much of the emphasis in the statement and in the report is on formal provision, but does the Minister agree that there is an important role to be played not only by further education and by government but by social enterprise and charities? I have been impressed by the work done by Fairbridge in my constituency and by the Bristol foyer. Often, that informal provision can lead people, particularly those not in education, employment or training, back into formal learning. We will agree—I am sure that there will be a broad consensus on this—that the future needs of this country will be high-tech and low-carbon, but does he agree that in order to get young people to take the relevant courses, they need good, well resourced and independent advice and guidance from the age of 13 right through their education and their working lives? It is not clear to me that the resources are in place to deliver that. The report is all about long-term vision, but I suspect that the tragedy for the Government is that they are not going to be there to deliver it.