Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con)

My Lords, I want to speak to the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lady Barran, raising the issues that arise from the fact that Skills England, for all the hype, is to all intents and purposes the DfE. As others have mentioned, it will not have a statutory basis of its own. It might have a grand name and have been billed heavily in advance by the Government, but it is not a non-departmental public body which would be legally separate from the department and staffed by public servants rather than civil servants; it will be created by simple administrative action rather than legal instrument, meaning that it is basically just the department. Executive agencies, of which Skills England will be one, are units of central government, perhaps administratively distinct to some extent but remaining legally very much part of it. What does this mean in practice? In some ways, it could be good. Potentially, it means a shorter feedback loop into Ministers’ red boxes, where responsibility for overarching skills policy rightly resides—there will be no room for excuses; the buck will stop with the Secretary of State for Skills England’s performance; and there will be no excuses for any failure of Skills England to work successfully across government departments and to corral Treasury to fund our skills system appropriately. However, that is the upside and, to be honest, I think there is potentially rather more downside from this change, because it is a misdiagnosis of where priorities need to be right now. A prerequisite for a successful skills system is a reasonable degree of stability and certainty necessary to get businesses to invest in training, and there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that our businesses are not investing enough in training their workforce—as we all know, we are spending less than half the OECD average. Instead, we have near-permanent policy churn in this area. Supposedly once-in-a-generation reforms take place nearly every Parliament, sometimes every other year, creating chronic instability in the policy framework for investment for skills. Now we have a massive machinery of government change with the abolition of IfATE, which was created less than seven years ago. Machinery of government changes are rarely worth the cost, disruption and distraction from other necessary priorities. This really is not what we should be debating right now. Machinery of government changes are no substitute for Ministers driving their teams hard, doing the difficult work of policy development and securing funding for skills from a very sceptical Treasury. I am worried, therefore, that we are losing focus on the real issues. To my mind, there are two very big areas where I would prefer us all to focus our attention right now. The first is securing clarity from the Government on their plans for the defunding of applied general qualifications. I appreciate that there has been considerable movement from the Government on this matter since they took office in July, but further clarity is still needed on which qualifications that were due to be defunded next year will now be retained and when providers will get that vital information. The second area I would prefer us to focus on is how we can end the confusion over the future of the lifelong learning entitlement, which has been delayed yet again in recent weeks and now will not start until sometime in 2027, and the provision by the Government of a clear statement as no one knows how the LLE will interact with their planned new growth and skills levy. These are two really important reforms and there is a desperate lack of clarity across our system on how they will work together. I would be very grateful if the Minister could help us with those two issues and take the opportunity to confirm that, in her mind, the LLE will still deliver the skills revolution that the last Government wanted from it and that Skills England will not quietly be asked to kill it off in the months to come.