Clause 57
6:00 pm
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, Conservative)
I want to speak to amendment 105, which is tabled in my name and that of my hon. Friends. Clause 57 creates the Young People’s Learning Agency as part of the range of quangos replacing the Learning and Skills Council. As the National Union of Teachers so pithily put it:
“We are concerned about the creation of a plethora of new agencies, with the Skills Funding Agency and the Young People’s Learning Agency. We are in danger of exchanging the bureaucracy of the LSC for two new agencies.”
And the rest. As my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) said,
“The Government’s answer to more bureaucracy is another bureaucratic reorganisation. They are going to replace the Learning and Skills Council with the Skills Funding Agency...and a sub-quango, the National Apprenticeship Service, as well as with another quango, the Young People’s Learning Agency.”—[Official Report, 23 February 2009; Vol. 488, c. 47.]
I fear that that reorganisation may lead only to greater bureaucratic overload.
My hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) described this as
“a good example of a Government running out of steam and having to reorganise their own reforms...They inherited the Further Education Funding Council, which they abolished in 2001 in order to create the Learning and Skills Council. In 2008, the 47 local learning and skills councils were abolished and replaced by nine regional bodies and 150 local partnerships. In 2010, the Learning and Skills Council that this Government created is to be abolished and replaced by the Skills Funding Agency, the Young People’s Learning Agency and the National Apprenticeship Service. This is an example of endless reorganisation.”—[Official Report, 23 February 2009; Vol. 488, c. 115.]
Furthermore, the YPLA and the SFA will, I understand, occupy the same premises as the LSC in Coventry. In fact, the very same people will occupy the very same premises in Coventry.
The LSC employs 3,300 staff. 1,000 of them will transfer to local authorities, 500 will transfer to the YPLA and 1,800 will transfer to the SFA. In an evidence session, the Under-Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mr. Simon), in answer to a question put by my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings about the cost implications of this reorganisation, said:
“The cost is already set out in the impact assessment; we have not memorised it. It is on the record.”
Again in response to my hon. Friend, he went on to say:
“This change is not a cost-saving exercise; that is not why we are making it. In the immediate term, it will be cost-neutral; in the long term, my expectation is that the new structures will be more efficient and cost-effective than the LSC.”
The Minister for Schools and Learners said:
“For clarity’s sake, the administrative cost of the new system, including staffing and on-costs, will be met...by the LSC’s current staffing budget. We expect that to be revenue-neutral, but there will be some additional transitional costs. Savings will be made by operating from a smaller estate of office premises...the SFA will require fewer premises...Sharing will be facilitated by the fact that the SFA and YPLA head offices will be located together in Coventry.”
When my hon. Friend asked again what the “transitional costs” would be, he was, alas, referred again to the impact assessment. As the right hon. Gentleman said in the same evidence session:
“That is certainly set out in full in the impact assessment. We can obviously return to that during our debate.”——[Official Report, Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Public Bill Committee, 10 March 2009; c. 179-180, Q427, 428 and 429.]
Here we are, returning to it during our debate.
I have the impact assessment here. On page 33, under a heading of “Transition costs”, it states:
“Although on-going costs of the new system will be revenue neutral there are likely to be transition costs relating to premises and pensions and, potentially, the transfer of the people from the LSC to their new employers. There will be assets that can be realised to offset these costs, such as the premises, though the current economic climate will make the calculations more complex. Work on calculating these is on-going and will proceed alongside the development of the designs for the Young People’s Funding Agency and Skills Funding Agency.”
The YPFA appears to be another quango that we are not aware of, unless there is a typo in the impact assessment, because I thought that it was called something else.