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Building a High-Skilled Economy

It is a joy to listen to the Minister, and I am glad that he at last came up with some poetry and quoted Tennyson's words that one should wear learning lightly. Perhaps I could come back with some Alexander Pope:""A little learning is a dang'rous thing;""Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring"." The vast number of people who will take up the Minister's proposals will already be in work, and they will be in the older, not the younger, age bracket. He may prove my prediction wrong in future, but he does not have a rule to ensure that the apprenticeships are for younger workers—under 25s—or one to ensure that apprenticeships are for new starts only. If he wants to talk about dead weight, he should calculate the dead weight of his proposal in respect of the training that would have happened anyway. The Minister also needs to tell us how he will drive up apprenticeships elsewhere—in the public sector, for example. How will he use procurement to help that? Unless he shows leadership—I say this to him candidly and sincerely—and knocks heads together in the Government, that will not happen. All he will get from his colleagues will be that one-note symphony that we have heard so far from the Government, like the vuvuzelas in the World cup, with their saying that nothing can be done on public sector apprenticeships because of cuts. That is what he will be told. My advice to him is this: he needs to fight, fight and fight again against Treasury orthodoxy on behalf of apprenticeships if he wants to make an impact as a Minister. It is clear that the Minister's enjoyable and occasionally flowery rhetoric—if he will forgive me for saying so—hides a prosaic reality in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. The Secretary of State really wants to be in charge of the banks but has been walked all over by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in that ambition and, in an age-old Treasury way, has had his pocket picked over FE, skills, capital and revenue; and the Universities and Science Minister, who really wants to be the Secretary of State and deeply resents the Liberal Democrat succubus who now has his job, has, in his absent-minded, dual-brained, batty, professorial way, carelessly mislaid 10,000 university places since the election. It is no wonder that in the confusion, the Treasury has been able to bamboozle a Department that has two heads and three brains. Now we have proposals for capital and apprenticeships that are not all that they seem. If we are going to build Britain's skills for the future, we need strong, united leadership from the Department, not weak, divided leadership hidden by the Minister's baroque oratory. His words are fine for now, but unless he starts standing up for skills, his flowery rhetoric will wilt under the heat of political reality.