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Building a High-Skilled Economy

I am slightly surprised by that comment, because the hon. Gentleman seemed at first in his speech to be criticising us for making those necessary savings, but later to be saying that we should have made them earlier. I am not quite sure why that suddenly became the point on which he wanted to intervene. However, he can intervene as often as he likes; I am happy to give way to him on any number of occasions, as he knows. What does the hon. Gentleman propose to do with the strong, powerful and compelling legacy that I have just outlined to the House? First, his Department is cutting by 10,000 the number of university places that would have been on offer this autumn. That is despite he and his colleagues persistently claiming—and actually bringing my colleagues and me to the House, when we were the Ministers, to boast about the fact—that they were committed to creating an extra 10,000 university places over and above what the Government were committed to through a sort of "buy now, pay later" student loan early payback scheme, which we argued was entirely bogus, and which appears to have been wiped from the collective memories of the Government Front Benchers during their coalition reprogramming course. Perhaps when the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr Davey) winds up, he can tell us what happened to the pet scheme to conjure up more student places for free. The Minister for Universities and Science explained in the House on many occasions how it would work, despite our scepticism. Has the Treasury finally explained to him and his colleagues what we told him all along—that it was Mickey Mouse maths and would not work? I think that the Under-Secretary agrees that it is Mickey Mouse maths—he did when he was in opposition. What else have the Administration done on skills apart from announcing cuts to university places and budgets? They have tried to soften the Department's pain of being the Chancellor's whipping boy so far in the £6 billion in-year cuts package by recycling £200 million from the skills budget—from the Train to Gain programme—into additional apprenticeship places costing £150 million, and, as the Minister outlined, into capital for further education colleges of £50 million. The Secretary of State bragged about that yesterday in the Chamber. He tried to give the impression that it was year zero and that he was the first Minister ever to come to the Dispatch Box to announce anything about spending on further education capital and apprenticeships. On capital, the Secretary of State has been done over by the oldest Treasury trick in the book—converting revenue into capital. He claimed that he kept back £200 million from the package when he is doing no such thing. The £50 million on capital, as the Minister generously admitted in his remarks, is for this year only. The Chancellor has picked the Secretary of State's skills budget pocket for future years to the tune of £50 million per annum and that should be acknowledged. The Secretary of State should have made the case for capital separately, if he wanted to make such a case to the Treasury in the spending review. Instead, he has allowed the Treasury to deny the skills budget £50 million a year from next year onwards—in perpetuity—even before the Budget and the spending review. That is a little naive. He has been had and he ought to have known better. Let us consider the apprenticeships proposal. There are no stronger supporters of apprenticeships than me, Labour Members and the previous Labour Government. No Government did more than the previous Government to rescue apprenticeships from the almost criminal indifference of the previous Tory Government, who allowed apprenticeships to fall to only 65,000 and a completion rate of only a third. The Secretary of State should be more candid about the proposals. He is not trying to do the difficult, but most important things on apprenticeships. He is after the low-hanging fruit—and I hope he will think carefully about that—because he hopes to claim a quick victory on apprenticeship numbers. For the benefit of the House and all concerned, let us be clear about what he is doing. Despite his trying to give an impression to the contrary yesterday, he is not creating new training opportunities apprenticeships for the youngest and most difficult to place. He is not—as we pledged to do and he must still deliver, unless he wants to tell us that he will abandon the policy; I do not think that he will—trying to create more advanced apprenticeships for young adults. He is not aiming to support a particular number of new jobs. He is transferring funding in the training and skills budget from one form of funding for those who are in work into another—good, but more expensive—form of training, which he knows is overwhelmingly likely to be taken up not by employers looking to take on new young workers who are currently out of work, but by those who will train a smaller number of older workers currently in work than they would have done under Train to Gain. Now that is fine—it is a legitimate decision for the Government to make—but the Secretary of State should not try to give the impression that the announcement and the programme is likely to result in 50,000 new job opportunities for young people, or even new jobs for older workers.