Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill
12:00 pm
Ruth Serwotka: I do not think that I have an answer for Jim about a better way of doing it, but we have concerns about the proposals. Taking London as an example, you have, I think, 33 authorities that will combine in a single sub-regional group and are then supposed to commission learning across boundaries, but have no statutory implement or authority to do so. They are supposed to be commissioning and planning on quite an informal basis.
Trying to get 33 local authorities to agree on priorities and on the complexity of the cross-boundary travel-to-learn patterns and so on is going to be very challenging indeed. One of our previous proposals, which I doubt everyone on this panel would accept, is that instead of arrangements being made around sub-regional groupings and staff being transferred to local authorities to set up those commissioning relationships, there should be more centralism with regard to the YPLA and Governments should have a closer relationship with the commissioning, especially when, in the current climate, bogus providers, as The Observer recently reported, are setting themselves up and pretending to deliver courses to the unemployed. That could be abused in the current system, so we need to think about the current climate and maybe review some of those structures, because they are very informal.