Neil O'Brien

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3,280 lines on record for Neil O'Brien, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, without an account. Most recent 500 lines shown. Search to find more. Page 8 of 10.

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1. “The Confederation of School Trusts is really worried about that and has suggested a way to bring such unlimited power under some limits. They say: “We do have concerns about the power to direct…It is too broad and it is too wide. We would like to work with Government to restrict it to create some greater limits. Those limits should be around statutory duties…statutory guidance, the provisions in the funding agreement”. –– [ Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 81, Q169.] Yet Ministers voted down our amendment to put that suggestion from schools into effect. Likewise, as we discovered in Committee, clause 34(5)(2) will require academy schools to get permission from the Secretary of State to make any change to the buildings they occupy.”

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2. “Ministers claim that is vital, but a footnote at the bottom of page 24 of the impact assessment reveals it would, in fact, not be applied to lots of different types of schools, including 14 to 19 academies, 16 to 19 academies, university technical colleges, studio schools, further education colleges and non-maintained school early years settings. It is supposedly vital but is not being applied to loads of different types of school. Yet Ministers are imposing it on loads of other schools. As the former head of Ofsted pointed out this week, taking that flexibility out of the system feels like a retrograde step, and she is right. Under the Bill, Whitehall micromanagement is back, too. Clause 44 allows the Secretary of State to direct academy schools to do pretty much anything.”

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3. “Former headteacher David Thomas told us in Committee that this freedom allows them to recruit people who may be at the end of their career, who have a huge amount of experience that they want to give back to the community. They do not want to go through the bureaucracy, and if we put up barriers, they will not end up in the state sector. Ministers have not produced a single shred of evidence that teachers without QTS are of lower quality, or for why they cannot be a good supplement to QTS teachers. Ministers have never explained why they, sitting in Whitehall, think that they are in a better position to judge who to employ than headteachers on the frontline.”

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4. “Because I was in Wakefield, it was rugby league: I had rugby league professionals working with about a quarter of the schools in Wakefield at one point..” –– [ Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 49, Q108.] Brilliant. The Government’s own impact assessment to the Bill says of this change: “some schools may struggle to find the teachers that they need.” Rebecca Leek from the Suffolk Association of Headteachers gave a good example of how this freedom is currently used. She said that she urgently needed an early years lead, and was able to take on someone who had run an outstanding nursery, even though they did not have QTS and nor did they plan to get it. But in future, she would not be able to do that.”

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5. “My right hon. Friend is completely correct. Some Government Members have reflected on this: the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh) said that the proposal to make it compulsory for academies to teach the national curriculum was of particular concern to her, and she is right. Ministers have never explained what they are trying to solve with this change, but the unions like it, so into the Bill it goes. We have tabled further amendments on qualified teacher status. The Government are getting rid of academy freedoms over recruitment and the freedom to employ non-QTS teachers. Sir Martyn Oliver from Ofsted gave us a good example of how these freedoms are used. He said: “In the past, I have brought in professional sportspeople to teach alongside PE teachers, and they have run sessions.”

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6. “It is tragic. It is not us criticising the Bill; it is the professionals—the people who have given their lives to education. I will give another example. Gareth Stevens, leader of Inspiration Trust, another high-performing trust, gives the example of his local council wanting to halve places at an outstanding school to prop up other schools. He says that “the idea that we could have the rug pulled out from under us and the number of places in our high performing school cut is the most worrying thing…It will mean fewer places at high performing good or outstanding schools”.”

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7. “We all agree that it is about making sure that children are not just “not in school”; however, the provisions really are overly burdensome. The hon. Members for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) and for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade) and lots of Conservative colleagues pointed out the same thing. I have to say that my jaw hit the floor when I first read the Bill and saw the provisions that treat the parents of children in special schools the same as people who are being investigated by social services. Those people are not criminals, they are not doing the wrong thing and sometimes they need to move to look after their vulnerable children. I hope the Government will think again in the other place.”

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8. “With the leave of the House, we have had an excellent debate this afternoon, as we did in Committee. I will pick out only a few of the contributions. We had important words from the Chair of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), who pointed out how quickly the Bill had been prepared and pushed through. That is why we have so many amendments on Report and, to be honest, one reason that the Bill has run into such trouble. My right hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) gave a great speech, drawing on his experience as the Chair of the Select Committee, and the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed) gave an excellent speech, laying out why the provisions on home schooling are an excessive burden and go too far.”

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9. “It concludes that the explanation for lower educational performance is not ethnicity or deprivation, and that it “is much more likely to reflect longstanding differences in policy and approach, such as lower levels of external accountability and less use of data.” That is the damning indictment of the IFS. As Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things”. We have seen what this agenda does in Wales. It is a disaster, and those who are the most deprived are the ones who lose out the most. That is why this afternoon we are going to be pushing our amendments to protect academy freedoms, to protect the ability of good schools to grow and to protect parental choice. This Bill shifts power from parents to politicians, and we will always resist that.”

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10. “This brought scores in Wales to their lowest ever level, significantly below the average across OECD countries and significantly below those seen across the rest of the UK…Lower scores in Wales cannot be explained by higher levels of poverty. In PISA, disadvantaged children in England score about 30 points higher, on average, than disadvantaged children in Wales. This is a large gap…Even more remarkably, the performance of disadvantaged children in England is either above or similar to the average for all children in Wales.” Disadvantaged children in England are doing better than all children in Wales, and the IFS also points out that the disadvantage gap is bigger in Wales.”

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11. “But let us just have a look at the numbers to see what that has done. The PISA tables show that, under the last Government, England went from 11th to ninth on science, 19th to ninth on reading and 21st to seventh on maths. That is a huge increase. In Wales, the best bit was on maths, where they went from 29th to 27th. They were flat at 28th on reading and collapsed from 21st to 29th on science. A pretty dismal record, really. I would encourage those who say that things are brilliant in Wales to read the searing report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which is known for its mild-mannered work and cautious judgments. The report states: “PISA scores declined by more in Wales than in most other countries in 2022, with scores declining by about 20 points (equivalent to about 20% of a standard deviation, which is a big decline).”

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12. “We then realise the energy required to be a teacher and to keep that up all day, so I absolutely pay tribute to those who are doing this noble work. One of the most interesting speeches this afternoon was the one from the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr (Steve Witherden). Various Labour Members said that things under the last Government were not nirvana, and that is right. Various people said that there were more things to fix, and that is right too. We absolutely agree with that. But the hon. Member said that things were so much better in Wales because they had avoided the Blair-era reforming agenda, they had avoided academies, they had got rid of league tables for a time, they were still using other methods such as cueing rather than phonics, and so on and so forth.”

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13. “He also talked about the free school breakfast numbers that the Government have used and the claim that they are going to save parents £450. This is a mysterious figure, because if we want to give £450 to every primary school child, that will cost north of £2 billion, but the Government are spending £33 million, so they are two orders of magnitude apart. Why will the Government not publish the workings behind this figure? I think the truth is that the source is the back of a spad’s fag packet, to be completely honest. The hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) gave a good speech, and the thing I absolutely agree with him about is the importance of teaching. It is one of the best and most noble things anyone can do with their life. All of us as MPs do school visits, and we might do an hour of highly energetic chat with people in year 6.”

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14. “Member for Coventry South (Zarah Sultana), but I do agree with her on Andrew Tate, whom I regard as totally abhorrent. I am glad that my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), the shadow Justice Secretary, is leading the charge to get the Tates deported to this country so that they can face justice here. I find their work utterly, utterly abhorrent. My brilliant hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy) contrasted the reforming rhetoric that we at least see in other Departments with the rather retro agenda in the Department for Education. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), who did so much work in Committee, gave us another brilliant and witty speech. He talked about how Labour reformers had always been swimming against the tide, and I think that is right.”

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15. “We have a limited number of things that we can press to a vote, but I hope, as we go to the debate in the other place, that we are in complete agreement on the excessive nature of some of the requirements being made of home schoolers, who we must not treat as illegitimate just because they choose to educate their children in a certain way. My hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) used his huge experience to take us on a rather bleak journey from the reforming agenda of the early Blair years to the regress that we are seeing now. My hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) explained why this was such a mistake and took us through the Bill in bleak detail. I do not always agree with the hon.”

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16. “According to the Office for National Statistics, one in five children aged 10 to 15 says they have been bullied online, and 72% of that is happening during school time. As well as being bad in their own right, these negative effects come together to damage education. Although a ban of phones in schools cannot fix everything, it is a vital first step and can make a big difference in itself. I spoke to one headteacher who said that when they went from a policy of phones not being out to a full, “start of the day to end of the day” ban, with phones being handed in, the number of detentions they had to hand out fell by 40%, and teacher recruitment and retention improved, too.”

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17. “Children are tired in school, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has increased massively and concentration is impaired. This is a feature, not a bug. Apps are designed to be addictive and drip feed users dopamine. At a recent school meeting that I organised in my constituency, I heard from local doctors about how excessive screen time is damaging eyesight and giving young kids the kind of back problems that one might expect from someone in late middle age. Eight out of 10 children are exposed to violent porn before the age of 18, many at a really young age. The average age at which kids see porn is now 13. The shift to a smartphone-based childhood is also leading children to be exposed to graphic violence, sextortion and self-harm encouragement, and is doing terrible things to girls’ self-image.”

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18. “The growth in mental health problems is focused almost entirely on young people, not older people. Children now get smartphones at a very early age. As the Education Committee pointed out in a good report last year, one in five of the UK’s three and four-year-olds now has their own smartphone. By the end of primary school, four out of five kids have a smartphone. There are many different ways in which smartphones and social media cause problems for children. They displace time in the real world with friends. US data, for example, shows that prior to 2012 children spent over two hours a day with friends, but that had halved by 2019. The proportion of children feeling lonely and isolated at school has exploded all over the developed world. But smartphones are not just a time sink; there is also the lack of sleep.”

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19. “I want to concentrate today on our new clause 36, which would ban phones from our schools. The new clause would also write into law some of the content of the very good private Member’s Bill drafted by the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), because this does not need to be a party political issue. When I was on the Science and Technology Committee back in 2018, I got us to do a report on screen time, social media and children’s mental health. Back then, the evidence was already very concerning, but by now every alarm bell should be ringing. Over the last decade, there has been an explosion in mental health problems among young people all over the world, over the exact same period that smartphones and social media have become dominant in children’s lives.”

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20. “Over the last year they have gained hundreds of thousands of members and together with the shadow Secretary of State and the Leader of the Opposition we met some of them this morning and I pay tribute to them for their work.”

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21. “As with smoking, a powerful social gradient is also developing with smartphones and social media. That is going to widen gaps in school achievement unless something decisive is done. Sadly, many people still do not know about the risks from smartphones but a growing number of parents do know and are worried about the problems with smartphones and social media, but we face a collective action problem: we worry that our kids will miss out if they are the only ones without them, and that is the problem that needs solving and Government need to be part of that. Across this country there has been an explosion of parent-powered campaign groups aiming to fight back including Smartphone Free Childhood, Safe Screens, Delay Smartphones and the new “Rage Against the Screen” campaign.”

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22. “The hon. Member has brilliantly anticipated a point I was going to make, and if he looks at the text of the amendment he will see it is carefully drafted exactly to allow carve-outs for those who need them, for example as health devices, so I hope he is reassured on that point. Attempts by the tech industry to lobby, to muddy the water, to run interference and to sow confusion are unconvincing. The problems hitting our children all over the world are not just a coincidence; there is more and more evidence for a causal link. For example, Sapien Labs asked questions about adults’ mental health and combined them into a mental health quotient score. They asked the same people when they first got a smartphone and the results were stark: the earlier someone gets a phone, the worse their mental health, particularly for girls.”

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23. “Schools should be the beachhead and the first place where we re-create the smartphone-free childhood that most of us got to enjoy—seven hours in which we de-normalise being on the phone all the time for young people. A ban on smartphones in schools will, of course, not solve all the problems overnight, but it is a vital first step. When I was a Health Minister, I wanted us to develop an equivalent of the five bits of fruit and veg a day campaign, or public health campaigns such as “Don’t Die of Ignorance” or “Clunk Click Every Trip”, which older Members might remember. We need to do some big things to reset the culture. The heavy exposure of our kids to addictive-by-design products from the tech industry is the smoking of our generation.”

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24. “I know from speaking to teachers and school leaders that the pressures from a minority of parents to allow phones can be very severe. A minority of parents can be unreasonably determined that they must be able to contact their child directly at any minute of the day, but unfortunately that comes at a cost to everyone else’s education. As my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest (Dr Hudson) pointed out, a national ban would make things much simpler. We, the politicians, should take the flack and take the heat off schools. Thirdly, a full and full-on ban is needed as the start of a wider resetting of social norms about children and smartphones and social media. We need a proper ban so that kids’ smartphones are put away for a whole day, including breaks. Breaks should be about physical activity, not just scrolling and scrolling.”

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25. “The Department for Education’s own national behaviour survey published in April last year found that 35% of secondary school teachers reported mobile phones being used during lessons without permission, and the problem was more pronounced for older children: 46% of pupils in years 10 to 11 reported mobile phones being used when they should not have been during most or all lessons, and last month a survey by Parentkind found that nearly half of secondary school children say they see phones being used in class where they should not be every single day. So the idea that the guidance has done the trick and there is no longer a problem to solve is contradicted by the Department’s and the Government’s own data. Secondly, we need to support schools and have their back.”

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26. “I have had many teachers say to me, “This takes up so much time. It’s a huge distraction. It interferes with learning.” That is right and we are now in the strange situation where Labour MPs and the Conservative party agree that the guidance has turned out not to be enough, but the Labour Front Bench is insisting that it is; we are through the looking glass. Why do we need a full ban, not just guidance? Our general approach is of course to give autonomy to schools but, first, the guidance is not working.”

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27. “While 90% of schools say they have some sort of policy or some sort of ban, a survey by Policy Exchange last year found that only one in 10 secondary schools has a full start-to-finish ban, the policy that works best. Lots of schools are still trying policies where kids have their phones on them but are not supposed to have them out. The effect is that the kids are distracted, the teachers have to stop lessons to tell them to put them away, and we get all of the issues about bullying and social media during break times and more. As the hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan), a Labour Member, pointed out the other day, guidance introduced by the previous Government is not working. We still have students using phones during break time and during lessons and this causes significant problems.”

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28. “My hon. Friend is completely correct, and I was going to come on to that very point. The Children’s Commissioner has said, “I honestly think that we will look back in 20 years’ time and be absolutely horrified by what we allowed our children to be exposed to”, and she is right. the very first thing Government could do is implement a proper ban on phones in our schools. Parentkind recently said to me, “Effectively, we are allowing our kids to be fed digital drugs and we are even allowing the dealers into the schools.” That has to change. The last Government issued guidance; it was a good start, but it is not enough and is not working.”

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29. “There were other good speeches that I have not mentioned, but we ended on an excellent note with the contribution made by the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Bobby Dean). He made the case for kinship care powerfully; we are in agreement on that, and I hope that we will make progress on the issue as the Bill goes to the other place. It was a wonderful speech, and he was completely correct that his grandparents would have been very proud to see him in this House.”

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30. “Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) raised important questions about unique identifiers, on which we all agree in principle, but getting it right will be crucial. One of the most important speeches was the excellent contribution by the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh). She talked good sense and gave the Government good advice on part 2 of the Bill, and on schools. She also proposed sensible measures, which we support, to ensure that the flow of information around the system is all that it should be, and that the same kind of information that is provided to the Department is provided to those working on the frontline with children. My hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith) gave bleak but important testimony. Her idea of a covenant was important.”

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31. “Member for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern), said that they would not be voting for the smartphone ban today, I could sense chinks of light in what they were saying; perhaps they were starting to come round to the idea. My right hon. Friend the Member for North East Cambridgeshire (Steve Barclay) gave a great speech, in which he mentioned the challenge posed by the large number of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in the system, who now represent a third of all looked-after children in some local authorities. The hon. Member for Woking (Mr Forster) gave a fantastically powerful speech about safeguarding, in which he spoke about the tragic case of Sara Sharif. Although we will have to disagree about the policy, the hon. Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) gave a good speech arguing for a smacking ban. My right hon.”

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32. “We have heard some superb speeches this afternoon. The Chair of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), gave a brilliant and thoughtful speech, which ended with her talking about the welfare reforms that the Government will propose tomorrow. Our proposal for a ban on smartphones in schools is part of a general drive to undo the damage that a smartphone childhood is doing to young people’s mental health. We see that the driver of ballooning welfare claims, which the Government are really worried about, is young people and their mental health claims. If we want to be serious about prevention, a good place to start is with the amendment that we will vote on in a few moments. I am a glass-half-full kind of person. Although various Labour Members, including the hon.”

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33. “That was why we put the system more into the hands of employers.”

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34. “On that basis, I really do want to press clause 1 to a vote, and we will vote against it.”

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35. “Combined with what is happening with IfATE, that is causing a lot of concern.”

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36. “Likewise, the Institute of the Motor Industry, representing employers and professionals across the UK automotive sector, says in its evidence to this Committee that it has “significant concerns about the abolition of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education…and the transfer of its functions to Skills England.””

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37. “In its briefing on the Bill, the Construction Industry Training Board noted that this was “contrary to the previous characterisation of Skills England that was outlined in the…King’s Speech…and contrary to the vision for Skills England to be an independent body, established in law, with a cross-governmental role”. Obviously, those two points are linked. If it is going to be cross-government, it is easier for it to be independent of the DFE rather than part of one Department. The CITB makes an important point. IfATE existed to serve all employers, both public and private, and across every Department. In contrast, Skills England will be firmly part of the DFE. The chief executive officer of Skills England will be a job share between the two civil servants who currently run the post-16 skills bit of the DFE.”

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38. “Clause 1 introduces schedule 1, which transfers functions from IfATE to the Secretary of State. It does not transfer them to Skills England, but to the Secretary of State. The words “Secretary of State” appear, amazingly, 90 times in this short Bill. That is one reason why the Bill has come in for criticism from a number of different sides of politics. Instead of setting up Skills England as an independent body, which is what a lot of people—including many in the Labour party—assumed it would be, it is going to be part of the Department for Education.”

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39. “This is yet more reorganisation, rather than focusing on the real issues. IfATE will now follow a long list of predecessors, including the Manpower Services Commission, the Learning and Skills Council, the Skills Funding Agency, skills advisory panels, the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, training and enterprise councils and more, into the lengthening history of skills acronyms. We have a bad history of institutional churn in this country generally, and particularly in this area. Thirdly, we have real concerns that this reorganisation of the machinery of government will lead to harmful delays in addressing some of the most important strategic issues that we face. Those concerns are in fact borne out by the Government’s impact assessment. As the Minister just said, the first three clauses are all about abolishing IfATE.”

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40. “It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. The Opposition have three main concerns about the Bill, which are all relevant to this group. First, there were good reasons why standards setting was put at arm’s length and closer to employers. As we heard from Members on both sides of the House of Lords, this Bill is a centralisation. Alongside other changes that the Government are making, it risks directly damaging the status of the qualifications. Secondly, the Government are doing several things that will make it less likely that businesses will take on apprenticeships. Rather than fixing the problems, the Government are reorganising. Skills England will be the 13th skills body in 50 years. The Government are abolishing IfATE, which was created only seven years ago.”

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41. “The criticisms from different people in industry of the move away from independence and employer ownership —those two things go hand in hand—take us back to the origin of IfATE. It was set up alongside the introduction of the apprenticeship levy. It was, in a sense, a quid pro quo. There was employers’ money and, in return, employer ownership of the system, for the first time. The move away from this being something independent and properly arm’s length to it being run by a bit of the DFE, by just some DFE officials, is a move away from that sense of employer ownership.”

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42. “Its evidence states: “Without dedicated attention to the unique challenges faced by the automotive industry, Skills England risks creating further disconnection between education policy and real-world workforce demands.” It talks about the risk of losing employer-led standards: “Transitioning to Skills England could introduce additional confusion and delays, undermining apprenticeship approvals and disrupting funding streams critical to maintaining employer confidence.” In fairness, that is what the Government’s impact assessment said. It stated that the issues around transition are likely to lead to delays, which will have a real-world impact. I will come back to that point in a second.”

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43. “I saw that, and I wonder whether the hon. Lady noted in that submission the organisation’s pretty strong criticisms of the Government’s decision to cut adult skills spending. That is an example of what I was just talking about. Instead of addressing the real issues, we have reorganisation. I was not going to bring up the document from the Association of Colleges, but I am glad that the hon. Lady has. Let me return to the Institute of the Motor Industry.”

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44. “That meant doing something controversial, which in effect was requiring them to pay into the levy—in many ways, it is like a tax—but they could get their money back through the apprenticeship levy. However, in return for that big change, requiring larger employers to put their own money into skills, we wanted to ensure that the whole thing would be truly employer-led, rather than politician-led. Of course, current Ministers are brilliant—this is not any criticism of them—but we legislate for the ages, not for whoever is currently the Minister. Ministers change, and sometimes there have been instances—I am horrified to tell the Committee—where politicians have foibles or funny ideas of their own, which are not necessarily reflected in the wishes of employers and what they want from the skills system.”

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45. “That is a perfectly good question. Of course, this Government are a big fan of quangos and have, I think, created—net—28 more quangos since it came to office. Some can be the right thing to do, so I am not necessarily criticising the Government for that. In this case—I cannot remember if the hon. Lady was around when we were creating the apprenticeship levy—the reason why it was made independent of Government and an employer-owned body was that we were, for the first time, creating something that is quite common in the rest of Europe, the apprenticeship levy. The levy is intended to stop—to be blunt—good employers who invest in their workforce and the skills of their workforce being taken advantage of by those who do not.”

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46. “In a moment, I will talk about some of the challenges that will be thrown up by the Government’s proposals to move large amounts of money out of apprenticeships through the reforms to the levy.”

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47. “To reduce the idea to absurdity, if we were to say that employers can spend the apprenticeship levy on whatever they like, there is no point in having a levy, is there? That is because we would have just gone around in a circle. There is no point taking money off people and saying, “You can do whatever you want.” The whole point of containing that expenditure to apprenticeships was, as well as wanting to prioritise apprenticeships, to avoid the very real problems that the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out with previous schemes such as Train to Gain, where we ended up with huge amounts of dead-weight. It did not work, and the amount of money spent by employers on such things went down. I am absolutely ready to hear criticisms of, and improvements to, the idea of the levy.”

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48. “Even before we set up the levy, I always heard employers expressing concerns about the idea of a levy of any kind. In many instances, they would prefer just to keep their money and not spend it on skills at all. The fact that they were not spending on skills is the reason why we brought in a levy—it was quite a contentious thing, and quite a centrist thing in lots of ways. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out in its recent paper on the Government’s proposals to change the levy, the danger, if we start to make these things too open-ended, is that we completely collapse the concept. It notes what happened with things before, such as Train to Gain, where what we end up with is pure dead-weight—we get zero additionality.”

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49. “It is a binary thing: it either is 50% or is not. I would love the Minister to tell us the answer one way or another. At the moment, the levy raises about £2 billion a year. If the Government take 50% of that money out, they might think that is a good thing. They might say, “Yes, we want employers to be able to spend a billion quid on other stuff.” But if they take all that money out of apprenticeships, one thing they will definitely have is fewer apprenticeships. They could say it is fine—”

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50. “Then, as the election drew nearer, that idea seemed to disappear and did not feature any more. Lots of people assumed that it was gone. Then I assumed it was definitely gone, because I asked the current Minister—whom we have here today—in Westminster Hall whether the 50% target still stood, and the Minister said that the policy was under review. Then a couple of weeks later, in oral questions, when we asked the Secretary of State whether the 50% target still stood, she said that it did, even though lots of people in industry think that that is not the plan. This whole question about how much of the money will be taken out of apprenticeships and put elsewhere is shrouded in confusion. I would love it—I would be delighted—if the Minister could talk about that point today and tell us whether it is still 50%.”

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