Contribution
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 15, to which I have put my name, and in support of Amendment 9.
Everybody here is agreed that apprenticeship is hugely important for productivity and growth, and in offering young people a valuable and valued route into skilled employment and adult life. When IfATE—it started off as the IfA—was created, it was seen as a major step in the ongoing recreation and revalidation of apprenticeship and was praised as such by all major parties. It was thought that it could be an independent structure with the convening power that is critical to that mission.
I certainly hope that we might be creating something like the BIBB—the German Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training—which is a wonderful institution that convenes employers, unions, government officials at all levels and researchers, all of whom have an established and major role, and one which everyone in Germany knows about. That did not happen overnight; it was built up over the years. None the less, it has been absolutely critical to the huge role that apprenticeship has played in German life and in the German economy, in its ability to change and develop when economic circumstances change, and, most dramatically, to recreate and revitalise apprenticeship in what was East Germany.
I know that the Government agree about the importance of apprenticeship and that Skills England is designed to support apprenticeship as well as to signal the importance of skills more generally. But there is a cost associated with the reassertion of a habitual and deeply ingrained pattern in this country of constantly reinventing institutions and public and quasi-public bodies, especially in the skills area. It is a real problem because, although skills professionals can just about keep up, most of the people who are actually involved in delivering skills—employers and people on the shop floor, in local government, in colleges and in unions: people who are not professionally engaged in following skills policy—find this very difficult.
Although I hanker after a statutory body, because it has the visibility and the power to convene people in a way that something inside the Department for Education never can, what worries me most is the fact that we have reintroduced instability and uncertainty into the skills world at a time when we are also really aware of the huge importance of developing our skills policy and continuing to grow apprenticeships. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, I am very concerned by the fact that we have this drop-off in level 2 and 3 and with young people. So I feel that Amendment 15 offers a clear signal to people about when change is coming, which could be extraordinarily helpful to those who are actually involved in developing, amending and delivering standards, and in planning apprenticeships.
Obviously, I was reassured to hear from the Minister that it was unlikely that IfATE powers would be moved immediately, but I have to say that, although that and the direction that Skills England is going in may be clear to her, out there it really is not clear. People are in a complete fog. They are going, “Yes, I’m sure it’s a great idea. What is it? What is happening?” If it could be made really clear to people that there will be a year’s delay before IfATE powers are transferred, at which point Skills England will be in much better shape, everything will be much clearer, and lots of the other things that have to be done will be done, I think that would be really helpful to everybody concerned.
This is not about having something that you put on the statute book but it never happens—which does occur: quite a major clause in the last piece of skills legislation has never been activated. It is not about that. The transfer of functions will be on the statute book, and it will be very clear that this is going to happen, but it will also be clear to people when it is going to happen, and I think that would be enormously helpful.