The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Henig) (Lab)
My Lords, the next business is the first day of Committee on the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill. I will call Members to speak in the order listed. During the debate on each group, I invite Members, including Members in the Chamber, to email the clerk if they wish to speak after the Minister. I will call Members to speak in order of request. The groupings are binding. Participants who might wish to press an amendment other than the lead amendment in a group to a Division must give notice in the debate or by emailing the clerk. Leave should be given to withdraw amendments. When putting the Question, I will collect voices in the Chamber only. If a Member taking part remotely wants their voice accounted for if the Question is put, they must make this clear when speaking on the group.
1: Clause 1, page 1, line 11, at end insert “potential students resident in and”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to ensure that the interests of students whose needs are not encompassed by local employers are included.
My Lords, I declare an interest as editor of The Good Schools Guide and a member of City & Guilds Council.
I welcome the local skills improvement plans. A strong link between local business and local skills provision for local people is a very good idea; it will build a set of relationships which will be long-lasting and much valued. However, how exactly do the Government think this process is going to work? I hope that the Minister will be able to give us an outline of how the Government now see the local skills improvement plans actually working. Are they intended to be comprehensive, covering the entire needs of an area, or are they sector-specific, as I understand some of the bids for the pilots are? Are they intended to be inclusive of independent training providers? Will the local FE college be the dominant force or just a part? Is it intended that funds will be channelled through the local skills improvement plans? If they will, at what sort of level and with what sort of scope? How do the Government see this working in terms of local relationships? How exactly will the local skills improvement plans be held to account for their results? Will the decisions they reach be easily open to challenge, and if so, how? What is the interface locally with careers information advice and guidance and the Careers & Enterprise Company? There are a lot of things I would like to understand better about the direction in which the Government are intending to take us.
Whatever those answers, there is one big thing missing from the Bill: the interests of potential students, and that is what my amendment addresses. I want to see a reference to what local people need, from their point of view. The young people in Eastbourne, where I live, are pretty average—they are not in any way lacking compared to the national average. Business in Eastbourne, however, which is a coastal community, is typically very skewed. There are some areas in which we are very strong—hospitality, obviously, building and allied trades, education—but when it comes to cyber-security, IT generally, engineering, writing, creative careers, and management and science-based careers, all of which go on in London, there is really not much around. This is not surprising or unusual, but many of these are the growth areas of the economy. It is absolutely in the best interests of our people here—not only the young people, but career-changers and others—that they have good access to the skills necessary to those parts of the economy, not least because it will encourage such businesses to move down here or, in the new fashion of remote working, employ people here. That way, we as a community will have access to the more prosperous, higher growth, higher wage parts of the economy that we do not currently have.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the very clear introduction to this group from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. Having listened to his explanation, I rather regret not having attached my name to his amendment, as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, did. He really has nailed the key problem with this Bill and the reason for many of these amendments: the Government’s focus on employers, presumably existing employers, fails to explain how a local skills improvement plan can actually help an area to improve. By focusing on potential students, Amendment 1 really helps us to think about how people might also want to get the skills to be part of communities, to run community groups, to be involved in cultural activities or to be voters or parents. All of these are areas in which people might want to improve their skills. It would also help communities that are subject to the Government’s levelling-up agenda, which are often lacking in social capital. We are talking about skills that pretty well every community is short of. Any community group that any noble Lord has ever known has had to find a treasurer—someone who is prepared to take on doing the books, even if there is not much money in those books. These are skills that every community needs, but they might not actually be a business need.
However, I shall speak chiefly to Amendment 2, which is in my name. It tries to get at another aspect of the Bill addressing the so-called economy by adding in to consult in the skills improvement plans
“potential employers, start-up businesses and the self-employed.”
Looking at recent figures from the pre-Covid time, there were 5 million self-employed in the UK, up from 3.2 million in 2000. They are a very major part of our workforce and, if they are running a business, what they may need to help them find work, and improve the work that they find, is not necessarily going to be reflected by the employers in a town. I think here of a very old-fashioned term, perhaps—the “company town”.
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 11 and 81. I also support the first three amendments spoken to, and I am grateful for the support of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for my amendments. I declare interests as a fellow and former chair of the Working Men’s College, chair of the education department’s stakeholders’ group and other relevant interests as in the register.
The rationale of my amendments is that this potentially most useful Bill will not have the national impact it might, unless more provision is made to get a very large number of young people and others to the starting block. Amendments 11 and 81 are designed to do just that. I am most grateful for the support of the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. The reason they are not speaking is entirely due to the complexity of arrangements, which I fervently hope will be simplified in September. They all tried to put their names forward. I also thank the Association of Colleges for its helpful advice.
At Second Reading, I set out the fact that more than one-third of young people in secondary school do not achieve the requisite GCSE grades in English and maths to qualify for entry to the further education and training so enticingly proposed in the Bill. I asked the Minister what provision had been or could be made for this very large number who, for various reasons, among which lack of innate ability has not been cited, could not access the educational opportunities in the Bill. She was not able to give me an answer, nor did one appear in the letter she helpfully sent to Peers after Second Reading, and nor have I had a reply to a request I made to her team for an answer. As this is unusual for the noble Baroness, I conclude that there is no answer and there are no such comprehensive arrangements in place.
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Current arrangements do provide for resits of GCSEs, but this is not working. It is clearly a strain on young people, whose funding is complex, and on FE colleges, where most resits take place and which on average have more than 1,000 taking them, only for an average of 75% to fail again. Schools have even more of a gap now, after the effects of the lockdown. Our public examination systems in schools were long predicated on failing a proportion—now a discredited policy—but it is especially absurd and unjust when it crops up again in those skills which enable earning a living. Among those who fail are a large proportion of Gypsy, Traveller and Roma young people, as well as those from other minority ethnic groups, and people of all ages, for other reasons unconnected with ability. This is without counting those who dropped out even before the exam years.
This is not only a matter of stark inequality; it is a deeply concerning national educational failure which ignores potential, hampers life chances and deprives our economy of its full power. It is a devastating waste of our greatest national asset: our young people. So, our Amendment 81 would require the Government to fulfil the Prime Minister’s promise that no child shall be left behind, and to devise a national strategy to enable very many more of our young people to make the jump into useful and rewarding qualifications. Amendment 11 proposes a corresponding duty on providers and employer bodies to have regard to this strategy, so that it is locally implemented.
We do not prescribe details: there are several causes for failure, and there could be different arrangements for foundation courses and funding; there could be tutoring and mentoring; and there could be elements in teacher training and the Office for Students targeted at addressing the obstacles students face, which in some cases, notably that of Gypsies, Travellers and Roma young people, include cultural prejudice. The Runnymede Trust’s latest report says that only 12% of secondary school teachers have any material on how to talk about race in their initial teacher training. There are willing and expert hands in institutions and there is capacity in the department to work out a strategy. It is political will that is required. There is ample scope for levelling up here.
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 1 and 6, to which I have added my name, and to Amendment 20 in my name and that of my colleague and noble friend Lord Storey. I declare an interest for the whole Bill: I am a vice-president of City & Guilds, an organisation for which I worked for some 20 years.
On Amendments 1 and 6, I have been crossing out what I would have said as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has said it far more effectively than I could. I do not believe in repeating what others have said, even if I have not said it myself, so I shall just agree with what he said. It is essential that we take into account potential students—and not just the young people of Eastbourne, I suggest—who should surely be important players in any discussion. If there are no students, there is no point in employers wishing to train them. It is not just the views and interests of students but those of student unions, trade unions, relevant community groups, agencies and local government that need to be taken into account. There should also be constant dialogue with careers advisers.
Funding must be made available for social mobility. An aspiring blacksmith or chef should not be disadvantaged if local needs are engineering-based. Dyslexic students should not be disadvantaged if their skillset is different from local needs. Amendment 20 ensures that providers of distance learning are brought into play. As the Explanatory Notes set out, the role in the local skills ecosystem played by providers without a local bricks and mortar presence in a particular area is taken into account in local skills improvement plans. Of course, it may not be bricks and mortar. It could be any skills area, but distance learning is truly important, as the work of the Open University and other distance providers makes clear. The OU has been a life-changer for many who could not study residentially.
My Lords, this is one of those debates when everybody has said and everybody is going to agree with everybody, so let try to do it in as precised a way as possible. Before, I do, I should remind the Committee of my declared interests and let the Committee know that I have become an adviser to Genius Within, which looks at neurodiversity with Birkbeck, University of London.
The basic thrust of this is: what will be put into the plans, how flexible will it be and how will it adjust to the needs of those people who are supposed to be covered by it? We have heard about many subjects. When someone mentions dyslexia in front of me in one of these debates, I give myself a little cheer because, hopefully, the word is getting out.
The most important thing about my Amendment 22, if you throw everything away, is identification. Most people in the neurodiverse sector or with any special educational need have moderate or lower-level needs that, if not addressed or supported, can lead to failure to get academic qualifications giving access to training. The noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, and I might argue about GCSEs and certain points, but the essential thrust of what she said carries through to these groups. Someone who has trouble in that learning environment will always have trouble. If we suddenly get—as I did with the officials who the Minister was kind enough to give me access to, for which I am eternally thankful—“Oh but we have a high-needs strategy”, well, that is great, but what happens to the 18% of the population who are identified as having special educational needs but who are not in the high-needs group? They will become your workforce. They are the people who are underachieving and either do not get jobs or get jobs which they do not fulfil or can access other qualifications with.
Please, when we are doing this, can we build in a capacity to identify people who have already failed in the school system? As adults, they will be presenting differently, with established types of behaviour, which may mean that they are resistant to certain activities because who on earth wants to be told again: “You’ve failed, you can’t do something”? Let us take everybody who is scared of heights and stick them up that ladder and shake it. Let us make sure that it is uncomfortable and that something that you do not like to have gone through again. What will happen about identifying the people in these groups, people with ADHD, people who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, with parents with the same problems, who do not have the type of parents that I had behind me?
My Lords, I support these amendments and the thrust of the debate so far, particularly with what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said in moving the amendment, every word of which I agreed with, as I have with most of the other speakers so far, so I will try not to repeat myself.
There is something of a dilemma. It is very difficult to be against a local skills plan, and I am not. It is a really good thing. I believe in this notion of place, which I think we have lost recently in school and skills. It is very important, and I can see that these local skills partnerships adopt that notion of place and that one place is different from others. I am absolutely in favour of that. It is very difficult to argue against employers being involved, and I would not. I have moved, over the course of this debate, from being very much in favour of those two things to having difficulty visualising what it will be like when it is in a good form. The more you talk about it, the most difficulties you see emerging. I hope that this means no more than that there are a lot of details to sort out. I am not trying to be difficult on this, but I wonder whether a number of issues will be resolved by this structure.
I shall raise two concerns reflecting the debate so far, which are around whether an employer-led body is likely to deal with these issues. It is not that they cannot be dealt with, but employers are different organisations, representing different things and have different experiences. It might be that in some circumstances they are not the best to deal with certain issues. My first concern regards Amendment 1 and potential students. Are current employers with current businesses the best people to scope the future economy? I am not saying that they have nothing to offer, because they do, but they have got a lot to protect in the here and now. A successful employer will be successful only if he or she scopes the future, but it is an uneasy thing that we are having to do. I would welcome the Minister’s comments on that. How do we keep their eyes to the future if they are leading this plan?
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My worry over that is: in an employer-led skills plan, where will the knowledge, experience and capacity come from to support and skill up those people who have not got the basic qualifications or skills to be part of the current skills plan? I would include in that digital learning, which other people have referred to, and the Open University in particular, because from my own experience I know that because organisations such as the Open University are so different from other institutions in how they work, they very often get left out of legislation, and you end up trying to solve the problem of having excluded them later on.
My last point is this: when you look through the Bill, it is often the case that local plans will have to have regard to national plans, national frameworks and national guidance. So when does a local plan stop being a local plan and just become a mirror image of everyone else’s local plan, which makes up the national plan? My question to the Minister on that would be: how brave are the Government going to be in allowing local plans to do their own thing, which might not always accord with the national plan? Who is going to prioritise this big list of things they have to do, and what will the Government do to welcome innovation, which might be ideas they themselves have not yet thought of?
My Lords, this Bill is largely a Bill in search of a policy, and indeed a Bill that is a substitute for policy. It does almost nothing that actually requires legislation. As far as I can tell, there is only one aspect that actually requires a change of the law to be accomplished, which is the extension of student loans to further education courses—a reform I support. But all the rest of it is the enshrining in legislation of policy goals—some of which are inherently contradictory —which do not require legislation at all.
I am surrounded by former Ministers on all sides, and we all know that whenever you do not have a policy and cannot quite work out what to do, but want to proclaim a priority, you produce a Bill. The Civil Service loves producing Bills. It has Bill teams. The one thing you can do from Whitehall and that big building on Great Smith Street is produce reams of paper—White Papers, Bills and all that. It does not actually mean you do anything to improve skills levels in the country, but you do produce Bills and White Papers and requirements on other people to produce plans and so on themselves.
In my experience of big change in education, the biggest changes are usually produced by the smallest pieces of legislation that focus in particular on funding—because the one thing the Government control in this is funding. In parenthesis, further education funding is declining; let us not get away from that. No amounts of legislation, no White Papers extending to whatever this latest one is—it is in very large type, but it extends to 73 pages—can make up for the fact that funding is being cut. There is some opportunity for substituting public funding with private funding through the loans scheme, but public funding is being cut.
That is one way you can do it. The second is by great ministerial and Civil Service drive on the ground, which we desperately need in this sector. But this sector has had, by my calculation, one Minister of Further Education each year since 2010. The only one who was any good was sacked and now chairs the Select Committee in the House of Commons—I think because he was actually too committed to making a reality of further education.
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The interests of individual people, potential students, are not congruent with those of employers and providers. In the interests of our people, we must offer training locally in the main growth areas of the economy. I do not mind whether it is through independent training providers or remote training, but it must be substantially good.
I will not speak at length to the other amendments in this group, many of which I have a lot of sympathy for, except to mention that in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, on getting people a base level of skills in maths and English. That is absolutely key to raising the level of the economy locally. Somebody locally must have responsibility for that. We need something better than GCSEs here. GCSEs are aimed at the requirements of an academic curriculum; what we need is a test aimed at the base skills needed by employers. Those are two different things. We test English competence extremely well when students come to this country or want to be employed as doctors, for example. We have skills-centred tests aimed at establishing competence. We need something like that for our own people in English and maths, so that everybody has a chance of getting through and we do not continue to suffer the comparable outcomes system, which condemns 40% of our young people to having substandard English and maths qualifications. I beg to move.
A few years ago, I visited Barrow-in-Furness where the top employer, by a scale of many thousands, is of course the shipyards. The next two biggest employers, of around 1,000 each, are the largest supermarket and the local hospital. Barrow-in-Furness, as I said when I was there, clearly needs to diversify its economy and develop things such as local food-growing and tourism businesses, through all kinds of objectives. How are those three top employers going to provide advice on the skills needed for that?
At the moment, the Bill feels really half baked. I am in a difficult position in speaking before many of these amendments have been explained, but I support the sentiments behind them all. I shall pick out a couple briefly. As the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said about the two amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker—particularly, perhaps, Amendment 81, which has broad support—the focus on the attainment gap is crucial. There are many people whom schooling has failed in the past; they need support with the right kind of courses, the right way to improve and lift their skills, not just for their jobs but for their lives.
I also particularly support Amendments 20 and 21, both of which address, in different ways, distance learning. We are not going to be able to put into every village and town every course that might be of use to everyone. It is crucial that we have, in the Open University, a very successful and important structure; something that people can use to advance their knowledge, as well as their skills, and get into the practice of lifelong learning. That is such a crucial skill that we are going to need for the coming decades. The number of amendments tabled to this clause really shows that the Government need to go away, having listened to today’s debate, and think about how they can improve not just the Bill, but their thinking about how we provide the skills needed for a very different age.
Often, people may wish to study for employment not directly available in their area but for which they can develop skills and earn qualifications which will serve them well in other parts of the country. We should not be depriving them of the wherewithal to do just that. Throughout the Bill we shall seek to ensure that distance learning is taken into account. This amendment will do that and provide opportunities for learning to those without local provision.
I add my support to Amendments 11 and 81, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, a staunch supporter of the Gypsy, Traveller and Roma communities, but these proposals go much broader, to those who have problems with GCSE English and maths which, for so many skill areas, are not essential. To have an academic qualification in English and maths is not necessary for a whole range of perfectly useful employment opportunities. I also support the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Addington, who will be following me to speak for himself. They are important amendments too.
I hope that the Minister will be able to look favourably on the amendments in this group.
I appreciate that this is all that you can do here, but what steps will be taken to ensure that everybody gets through and is supported? The idea that you need only a functional grasp of English and maths is a step forward, but we must embrace the fact that there is now technology available that can do most of this for you, at least at a functional level. If you can talk, you can word-process now. Can we ensure that this is taken into account in the plans because the groups who are unskilled, which we are addressing, will be helped?
My Amendment 26 is about looking slightly wider than just at one area. It came from a conversation that I had with someone at the British Dyslexia Association, who said, if someone feels that they would be happier in something that uses hand skills and is slightly out of area, please can they be supported to get there? This is true of virtually all groups but is probably slightly more intense in this situation. If you are living in an area which is just on the boundary, the thing that you may want to train in is probably in the next area. All of us have done this for schools to work. Arguments about constituency boundaries go to an audience where many may have an interest. Can we please take that into account? When the Minister comes to answer, or at a later stage, can he give some idea of how these group plans or areas of concentration will work together? If they do not, we will be excluding large numbers of people from getting the support that they need where that is a local employment opportunity for them. We are still assuming that they will stay in their local areas for jobs for long periods. If we are doing that, then let us at least be realistic about it.
The second is: is an employer-led skills plan going to be the most effective at looking after the groups of people who are often left out, whether it is the Travellers, the underachievers, the marginalised or those who have not got qualifications? The traditional role of employers is often as gatekeepers: they let the successful through to be their employees, but they do not have an ongoing responsibility for the ones they have rejected. They often fall to other organisations, which have or develop the experience to deal with them.
The one big reform in this area, which is the apprenticeship levy, has been so badly mishandled that, astonishingly, it has managed to lead to a decline in the number of apprentices, particularly at entry level, which is the area where we have the biggest skills failures. So this is an absolutely farcical piece of legislation. The Minister has my deep commiserations on having to spend hour after hour camped in this House proclaiming mantras and platitudes that will have been written for her by civil servants and will do absolutely zero to improve further education or the skills level.
Producing local skills improvement plans does not require legislation. The Government could today announce —and, with funding, incentivise and require—public authorities to do them. I can assure noble Lords that employers’ bodies, if some money was waved in front of them, would willingly co-operate in the production of local skills improvement plans. So legislation is absolutely not necessary.
But, because one always hopes the Government are actually producing a policy that is well thought out and crafted and has a proper chain of connection between the conception of the policy and the levers, goals and outcomes, I actually read the White Paper. It is always a big mistake to read the actual policy statement that underpins the legislation. The White Paper says on page 14, in one of its many platitudinous statements:
“At the moment, employers do not have enough influence over the skills provision offered in their local area or enough say in how all technical training and qualifications are developed.”
We are then referred to footnote 14, which states:
“See for example England’s Skills Puzzle: Piecing Together Further Education Training & Employment (Policy Connect Learning & Work Institute, 2020.”
Well, I read that report. It is not a survey of employers; it is not even a proper study of employers. It is a report of an ad hoc commission chaired by Conservative MP Sir John Hayes, one of the former Ministers of Further Education. Having done a few dipstick surveys in different parts of the country, it makes five recommendations, none of which is for these local skills improvement plans.
The first of the five recommendations is that there should be national targets, monitored by the new skills and productivity board in the way the Climate Change Commission monitors its targets. I am not up on the creation of the latest quangos, so I am not yet fully familiar with the skills and productivity board. No doubt the Minister will tell us what this new quango is doing. But that does not require this reform. The second recommendation is for further devolution of budgets. That may be a worthwhile thing to do but, since the budgets are declining, that does not inherently help. As King Lear told us:
“Nothing will come of nothing,”
But, in any case, devolving budgets does not require these skills plans; it can be done by fiat from the department tomorrow.
The third recommendation is further funding incentives for collaboration—which, again, can be done without any of these local skills improvement plans. The fourth is a national campaign to recruit teachers to further education. I entirely support that; again, it does not require this reform. The fifth is piloting personal learning accounts. I strongly urge the Government to be cautious about that one; some of us on this side of the House are deeply scarred by things called individual learning accounts, which turned out to be a massive scam for rapidly created local skills organisations to cream off all the money. They certainly should not go there at all; the extension of the student loans reform would be much better. So the statements that underlie this are not rooted in any evidence base.
We then come to the skills plans themselves. I thought that, since this Government are deeply versed in evidence-based policy, they would have piloted these properly so we can see: what these local skills plans are going to look like; what employer bodies are going to produce them; and what the relationships are with the local further education colleges, the mayoral authorities and the other public authorities. I thought we could perhaps read one or two of them. I am very keen to read them because, from my experience of the centre trying to mandate other people to produce plans, it is not the bodies charged with producing the plans that produce the plans; it is consultants employed by the bodies, who are paid a fortune and have no responsibility whatever for delivery of any of the outcomes. Some of us on this side of the House will remember the words “education action zones.” A whole army of consultants grew up to produce the plans for education action zones, which led to precious little further education and no action—except by the people producing the plans for the education action zones, who made tens of millions of pounds. I see this happening again.
But I thought, “Well, maybe it’s being piloted”. So I googled “pilots,” because the White Paper’s pages 15 and 16 refer to pilots of these local skills improvement plans. The pilots have not started. There was an article on 20 April in a magazine called FE Week—which is after my time, a new entrant to the block, and seems to provide a lot of good information on what is going on—and the headline was:
“Hunt begins for ‘employer representative bodies’ to pilot local skills improvement plans.”
There is not long between 20 April and 6 July, but none of these bodies has yet appeared. It turns out that these local skills improvement plans are to be piloted in six to eight “trailblazer” areas. “Trailblazers” is a word the Government always use when they want to proclaim action when absolutely nothing is happening—so we are having six to eight trailblazers that do not exist.
Now, bids for those trailblazers, which are to be backed by £4 million of revenue funding—all of which will go to the consultants charged with writing these plans—were being sought by 25 May. Perhaps the Minister can tell us how many bids had been entered by that date, give us some description of who they are, tell us when they will start and tell us what indication there is that they will be coherent. I do not want to detain the Committee unduly, but all the indications as to who the bodies are reference bodies that do not exist at the moment.
We have a whole box on page 15 headed “Case study: German Chambers of Commerce”. I strongly welcome the Government’s study of Germany and aligning more closely with the European Union; it is something that I have spent my political life seeking to do. If we had taken our membership of the European Union more seriously and done a better job of learning from the Scandinavian countries, Holland and Germany, our skills system would have made a much better start. So it is good that, as we leave Europe, we none the less regard as a model for policy the German Chambers of Commerce. However, there is nothing in these proposals that will lead to anything like the construction of the German Chambers of Commerce. There is no statutory power for the establishment of chambers of commerce. There is no requirement on employers to be members of these bodies and no public duties are imposed on them.
So who are the bodies that will be the skills-based bodies that will produce these local skills improvement plans? I should say “employer bodies” because the Government say that they must be employer bodies. Who are they? I look forward to the Minister telling us so that, by the time we come to Report, we will have been able to test this and perhaps propose a few amendments—perhaps, indeed, to remove this entire provision, save the public tens of millions of pounds and have some real action in terms of further education skills and what they will be.
My further remark is one that causes me real concern. The one area of policy that has at least taken some steps forward in this area over the past 10 years is the development of the mayors. For the first time, we actually have public authorities outside London with some real strength and political credibility. Andy Street is a great guy and is doing a fantastic job in Birmingham and the West Midlands. There is Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester. Ben Houchen has created a big name for himself and is perhaps the only major recognisable political figure apart from Tony Blair to have come out of the north-east in recent times. This is very welcome. It is something that, at the political level, England desperately needs.
However, the one body specifically banned from producing these local skills improvement plans—I must get the jargon right—are the mayors. The reason why, it turns out, is that they are not employers. Well, as a definitional thing, obviously they are not employers—they are mayors—but they are the people who have the capacity to generate real activity and engagement by employers and colleges in a serious way. They should be tasked with this mission, but instead they are totally isolated from the process on the grounds that they are not employers and the Government want to be promoting employers.
Instead, in paragraph 8 on page 16 of the White Paper, Mayor Burnham, Mayor Street and Mayor Sadiq Khan—very big political figures whom we want to seize this agenda—are told this:
“Mayoral Combined Authorities will be consulted in the development of these plans.”
That is a fat lot of good, is it not? The most dynamic, potentially active and crucial agents of the state—they are also the people who, as public authorities, are closest to employers—are simply going to be consulted by bodies that do not for the most part exist at the moment. They are going to engage consultants who also do not exist; I suppose at least the consultants can engage with the consultees quite easily because they both have “consult” at the root of their job descriptions. However, the one thing that this is not going to do of its own volition is produce more skills education and training.
My noble friend Lady Whitaker made the point that the fundamental problems with the education system in these areas—I look at the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who wrestled with these problems 40 years ago; we wrestled with them too—is that basic skills are still too low and we have do not have high-quality apprenticeship routes for those who do not go on to university. This is not rocket science. It is simple. If we got this right, employers would be cheering from the rafters and we would not need this whole new panorama of local skills improvement plans, which I suspect will simply lead us to have exactly the same debates with very little progress having been made in 10 years’ time.