Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con)

My Lords, I shall speak briefly. I think that this amendment is worth very serious consideration. When I was Science Minister, I saw up close—as the whole country did during the pandemic—the value of the Chief Scientific Adviser and the network of scientific advisers across government departments. They play a really useful role in ensuring that policy is informed by the strongest possible understanding of science and in bringing the scientific method to policy-making. They have had a huge impact and made a huge contribution. However, I would just flag that this raises an interesting question about what exactly the role of Skills England is. My understanding, from what the Government have said so far about Skills England, is that it was meant to be a body working across government and doing the difficult job of ensuring that all the different interests of different government departments in the skills agenda are given appropriate balance and focus. To my mind, that may be somewhat duplicative of what Skills England is itself seeking to do. In that sense, it may be a perfectly good alternative to Skills England if you have a chief skills adviser, informed by skills advisers in the various departments, feeding into the DfE; then, you may not need the horizon-scanning, policy-making function that Skills England is proposing to offer. I suggest that you have either one or the other; you probably do not need both.