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Opportunities for the Next Generation

I shall try to make progress. Those are real apprenticeships. The shadow Secretary of State said that they were short-term apprenticeships; let me make absolutely clear how we are financing them. We are doing so from the savings that we are making on Train to Gain, which my party in opposition and the Liberal Democrats in opposition rightly criticised as an ineffective programme with a large amount of dead-weight. The average number of hours of training received under a Train to Gain place was 33. We are replacing that with apprenticeships, in which the minimum number of hours of training and directed learning are 280. That is what we are putting in the place of Train to Gain. For the shadow Secretary of State to complain about short-term training when we are providing real apprenticeships instead of his Train to Gain is a bit rich.