10:30 am
Jim Knight: The only other option given serious consideration—Siôn will forgive me for responding to this, because I was around when these debates were taking place—was whether we had a discrete NAS outside the Skills Funding Agency. There is merit in having sharply focused separate bodies, but you do not want them to proliferate out of control. Where you can see synergy between the functions that could be performed by what would otherwise be separate bodies, it makes sense to bring them together. Undoubtedly, in presentational terms, it might have been easier to have a separate NAS with dual accountability to the Secretaries of State, and we could all have explained that clearly. However, in practice, given the relationship with employers that would be common across the SFA and the NAS, potentially creating more of a single conversation with employers meant that it was worth trying to bring them together to create that coherence, rather than just making it easier for us to design the infrastructure.