Apprenticeship Levy
Debate between Baroness Barran and Lord Trefgarne(1 year ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
The apprenticeship scheme has two important objectives. One, as the noble Lord touched on, is to give young people a choice of opportunities as they enter their career—training, work experience and so forth. The other is to give our employers the skills they need in their workforce. The scheme is currently balancing those two things.
Lord Trefgarne (Con)
My Lords, as a former chairman of the Engineering Training Authority I am clearly very conscious of the work in that particular sector. What is the position today? Is a sufficient number of young people coming forward for apprenticeships in the engineering sector?
Baroness Barran (Con)
Engineering and manufacturing technologies account for about 14% of all the apprenticeship starts. Last year that was about 49,000 apprentices.
BBC: TV Licence Evasion
Debate between Baroness Barran and Lord Trefgarne(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Barran
As the noble Lord, knows, very few people have been jailed—only five. We are consulting because we think that it is right to look again at whether the criminal sanction is appropriate. There are ongoing concerns that it could be seen as unfair and disproportionate, but at the risk of stating the obvious, the point of a consultation—and this is an open consultation without a recommended approach —is to get to the truth. There is enormous interest. Over 2,000 responses have been received already, and the consultation only opened at 11 am. There is a lot of public interest in this.
The noble Lord rightly probed whether this will be sufficient time. The Government may need to consult further on the detail of any potential changes before taking a decision, but not before we have found out what the public think.
Lord Trefgarne (Con)
My Lords, following the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, I heard recently of a case in which an unmarried mother with four children who had not paid her TV licence was sent to prison for a month. Her children had to go into care, with a cost to the public purse of many tens of thousands.
Baroness Barran
I am very sorry to hear of that case. As we know, women and people from black and minority ethnic communities are overly represented among those who are sanctioned for evasion. One of the things that we want to explore though this consultation is the impact of a changed approach on those groups.