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Skills for Growth

I assure noble Lords that we will do all we possibly can to protect training programmes, courses and places. The noble Lord can be assured that that will have my absolute commitment and that of my colleagues. I am not hiding from him the fact that we are entering a period in which we shall experience constraints in public spending, but that makes it all the more necessary and important that we get the best value from what we are already doing. However, we must also carry out reforms in what we are doing to raise the performance of these programmes. If we stand still and stop reforming, we will get less value for money and more people will be disappointed as a result.