10:30 am
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland and The Deepings, Conservative)
With respect, it will be the Skills Funding Agency that releases specifications for apprenticeships. I am very happy for sector skills councils to be at the pivot of that process. However, as I said earlier, the Bill does not mention sector skills councils, except in a cursory fashion. I acknowledge that the explanatory notes refer to them. The real point is that the National Apprenticeship Service will be responsible specifically and explicitly for modelling the developing apprenticeships and the apprenticeship frameworks specified by the SFA. It would be entirely possible to have a National Apprenticeship Service with that competence working with sector skills councils, would it not?