INDUSTRIAL TRAINING BILL

HC Deb 10 February 1970 vol 795 cc1101-68

Order for Second Reading read.

4.32 p.m.

The Minister of State, Department of Employment and Productivity (Mr. Edmund Dell)

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

This Bill, amending the Industrial Training Act and extending its coverage, would not be justified if one could not claim with some confidence that the 1964 Act has provided a sound basis on which to build.

There has recently been in this House some implied criticism of the industrial training board system and of some of its results. I will, therefore, start my speech by arguing that the progress so far made in promoting industrial training since the Industrial Training Act justifies the extensions in coverage established by the Bill. I will also have to show how far this amending Bill will link in with current operations under the Industrial Training Act and in the field of industrial training generally.

The Industrial Training Act commanded—and, I hope, still commands—the support of all political parties and of both sides of industry. It is not difficult to see why it should have that support. Industrial training spreads its rewards widely. For the individual worker, training releases his potential skill, improves his efficiency, boosts his confidence and increases his earning power.

For industry, training gives a pay-off in greater productivity, higher quality of workmanship and a more flexible work-force able to adapt quickly to industrial and technological changes. For the country as a whole, these benefits of industrial training and of the further education associated with it are essential factors in promoting the present and future prosperity of the nation.

Twenty-eight industrial training boards, covering about 16 million workers, have now been established under the Act. Another—to cover banking, insurance and other financial activities—has been announced and should be set up before long. Under the Bill, which it has been estimated brings something over 2 million workers into scope, the functions of some of the industrial training boards may, by order, be extended to cover the activities specified in Clause 1.

A few figures will illustrate the progress that has been made so far. During the first four years of the operation of the Act the numbers under training in the manufacturing industries rose by about 15 per cent. In the important group of industries covered by the Engineering Industry Training Board the increase was still higher—at least 25 per cent. Results are now available from a new survey carried out by my Department in September, 1968, and these show that at that time the total numbers under training in all industries in Great Britain were about 1,500,000, including 500,000 apprentices.

Since 1964 the proportion of boys getting an apprenticeship on leaving school has risen by nearly one-fifth to the record level of 43 per cent. in 1968. There was a slight falling off in this percentage in 1969 due entirely to the more difficult circumstances of the construction industry. Since the Act was passed, more than 4,000 students have attended introductory courses for the training of training officers. The number of off-the-job training places in the engineering, shipbuilding and steel industries has more than doubled. Many other instances of progress in promoting the quantity of training can be found in the annual reports of the individual training boards.

These achievements deserve much more publicity than they are normally given and it is a purpose of this Bill to create yet further opportunities to raise the quantity and quality of training provided in this country.

The quality of training has certainly been raised as a result of the 1964 Act. Over 120 training recommendations produced by the training boards have been approved and published for the guidance of their industries. These cover training for all types of occupations—apprentices, operators, technicians, clerical workers, supervisors, managers, technologists and professional people. As the payment of grant is progressively linked to the higher standards and more systematic methods of training laid down in these recommendations, so the quality of training is raised in individual firms. Under the Bill, all this important work in raising the quality of training will begin to exercise its influence in the new areas brought by it within the scope of the legislation.

In terms of numbers most training must be carried out in industry, but substantial progress has also been made in the development of Government training schemes. The Bill in no way affects the importance of continuing the development of G.T.C.s. On the contrary, our aim is to ensure that the training carried out in Government training centres complements and supports the work of the boards, including any that might be set up as a result of the Bill.

The biggest innovation in Government training in recent years has been the introduction of the sponsored training scheme. This offers employers the opportunity of sending their own workers to the Centres for free training which is tailored to meet the needs of the firm and the individual. Under this scheme we are upgrading workers from unskilled or semi-skilled to skilled work; giving skilled workers a higher level of skill; or converting a worker's existing skill into a new one. About 750 sponsored workers have already been trained since the scheme started last year and 350 are undergoing training at present. This scheme has the backing of both the C.B.I. and the T.U.C. and employers are discovering that it provides a ready means of overcoming particular shortages of skill.

Naturally, the work of the training boards, like that of any new machinery, has thrown up a number of problem areas which are the subject of continuing study by the Central Training Council, the training boards themselves and my Department. Many questions are currently being asked about the actual working of the industrial training board system. Does more need to be done to co-ordinate the work of the training boards at both national and regional levels? Are the levy/grant schemes the most effective way of providing the necessary incentive to improve and extend industrial training? Is the system fair to small firms? How do we assess the work of the boards and evaluate the developments that are taking place?

Can the boards do more to help with the retraining of redundant workers who cannot easily be redeployed in new jobs, or is there scope here for an extension of the schemes of training provided by the Government? Is there a sufficiently close relationship between the boards and the industries on behalf of which they are operating?

These are questions about which the boards and the Government must be concerned, even more if we pass this Bill extending the scope of the original Act. The Cousins Committee, which is reviewing the functions and organisation of the Central Training Council, is necessarily considering the basic framework of the system established under the Act. I pause here to pay a tribute to the work of Frank Cousins and to wish him a speedy return to health. Consideration to these questions has also been given both in my Department and in several training boards. I should not wish the House to think that the short Bill we are to debate today, important though it is, in any way exhausts our thinking about future industrial training policy.

The Bill does two things. First, it extends the range of activities which may be brought within scope of industrial training boards. Second, it adds to the categories of working people for whom training boards may provide services.

It will help the House if I deal with these two matters separately. So, first, I will say a word about the range of activities or the areas of employment which are being brought within scope of the Secretary of State's powers by the Bill.

The Act of 1964 already has a wide coverage. Section 1 of that Act empowers the Secretary of State to establish industrial training boards in respect of such activities of industry or commerce as may be specified in an order laid before the House. The key phrase is "activities of industry or commerce". That is a very broad phrase. It was, I believe, drafted with the intention that it should include not only activities in industry and commerce, as we normally understand that expression, but also similar activities going on in bodies or organisations which were not themselves organised for commercial purposes.

On this basis, some of the orders made over the last five years or so setting up industrial training boards, have covered some activities similar to those of industry or commerce. But, as hon. Members know, in May of last year a judgment was given in another place in the case between the Hotel and Catering Industry Training Board and the Royal Automobile Club which had the effect of confining the scope of the 1964 Act to activities actually carried on in industrial or commercial establishments. About half a million workpeople hitherto within the scope of training boards were thereby deemed to be outside scope.

The first purpose of the Bill, therefore, is to restore the scope of the Industrial Training Act to what it was formerly thought to be. The employments excluded by the judgment require training provisions similar to those of industry or commerce and are as much in need of the guidance and encouragement of the training boards. Clause 1 tackles this in two ways. First, in subsection (1)(a) by reference to activities similar to those of industry or commerce. This would have the effect, for example, of putting catering in schools or other educational institutions on the same footing under the Act as commercial catering activities; or local authority building workers on the same footing as other construction workers; or the employees of a friendly society engaged in insurance business on the same footing as those of insurance companies constituted on normal commercial lines.

Mr. David Mitchell (Basingstoke)

Will the right hon. Gentleman clarify one small point? Does the Bill extend the activities to include, for example, canteen workers in Government Departments?

Mr. Dell

As the hon. Gentleman may know, no provision is made in the Bill in respect of Crown employment. Perhaps I should also make clear that the Bill extends the operations of industrial training boards only to the extent that orders are subsequently laid before the House. As I shall explain in a moment, it is an enabling Bill and, to enable the powers within the Bill to be used, there has to be an order before the House.

Mr. Kenneth Lewis (Rutland and Stamford)

It would help the House in the general debate if the Minister will say what orders he is likely to lay before the House. Does he intend to cover clubs by an order, and to what extent does he intend to make use of the Bill?

Mr. Dell

If the hon. Gentleman is referring to members' clubs, they may be referred to during the debate, and I shall be answering the debate. If we extend the existing industrial training boards, or introduce new industrial training boards under the Bill when it is an Act, there will be full consultation before we do so and, therefore, full warning to everyone involved.

Second, the Bill sets out to restore the scope of the Act by referring in Clause 1(1)(b) to bodies having statutory powers. This will cover a wide variety of bodies. Examples are—and there is no special significance in this selection—river and harbour authorities, marketing boards and the B.B.C. It might be held that some of the activities of such bodies are similar to those of industry or commerce and therefore covered by Clause 1(1)(a). I suppose, for example, that this is true for B.B.C. television since it may be regarded as being similar to commercial television which, being commercial, is clearly within scope. But does it hold for B.B.C. radio services? The answer is not so clear. To avoid future doubts arising on issues of this kind, the Bill sets out in the two ways I have described to restore the scope of the Act to what it was previously thought to be.

Clause 1(1)(b) also extends the scope by bringing in the whole of local authority employment. Some local authority activities, such as municipal bus companies, are already in scope. Others, such as the school meals service and local authority manual workers, were regarded as being in scope until the judgment to which I have referred. It is proposed in the Bill not simply to bring back these excluded sectors, but to bring in the main areas of local authority employment as well.

This means that when the Bill comes into operation, it will be possible, subject to necessary consultations, to lay an order before the House to establish a statutory training board for local government. But I want to impress on the House today that there is no question of our having decided there is now a need for such a statutory board. I am impressed with the initiative taken by local authority associations in England and Wales to set up their own local government training board on a voluntary basis.

I understand, too, that, in common with the statutory boards, it has made good progress in its first two years of work. While it is some way yet from getting support from all authorities for its levy and grant operations, it is achieving a substantial measure of support.

In these circumstances, it may be asked why power is being taken in the Bill to provide a statutory board for local government. Is it not better to let the voluntary arrangements proceed? My answer is that we are ready to be convinced of this, but at the moment it is an open question. The chairman of the board recently asked, "Will the voluntary board be able to fulfil the task?" and then went on to say: The Local Government Board has been very progressive and has looked at the requirements, and it has 'upped' its levies very well But many people, and many of the trade unions, do not feel too sure that enough money will be forthcoming. Local authorities are very much aware that they are dealing with public money and that they have been elected by the public as custodians for the proper and economic use of that money. There are people who feel that it may be difficult to get a large enough levy for a voluntary board. That remains to be seen, but, as I have said, the levy has so far risen pretty steeply. However, there is certainly a tremendous lot still to be done; and also 100 per cent. still needs to be done in relation to the manual workers. There is, as Lord Morris of Grasmere said, much to be done, and it is not yet certain that it can be done by a voluntary board. This being the case, we feel bound to take these powers. But there will be no question of using these powers without the fullest possible consultation with local authority associations, trade unions and others concerned.

Mr. Dudley Smith (Warwick and Leamington)

Will the Minister confirm that this order, if it is ever laid, will be debatable in the House? I am sure that the local authorities will be relieved to hear that he has gone some way towards meeting them on this point.

Mr. Dell

It is always possible to debate orders establishing training boards on a statutory basis by means of a Prayer tabled against them.

This, of course, applies to the whole of Clause 1. The passage of the Bill will not have any automatic effect on the range of activities within scope of training boards. Such changes depend on the amendment of industrial training orders or the laying of new orders, and such action will not be taken without full consultation first with the interests affected.

The Bill is an enabling measure. This is why it is drawn in broad terms. The place for defining specific activities, for determining what should be brought within scope of a statutory board and what kept out, is in the industrial training orders concerned. Clause I certainly covers some activities and some bodies which we shall not want to bring within scope of boards. It includes some charities, for instance, although there is no intention of bringing charities generally within scope of boards. But it is better to deal with this sort of problem in industrial training orders after full consultation and necessary examination of particular cases.

The only exclusion written into Clause 1 concerns teaching, and this for quite special reasons. Teachers, particularly those in technical education, are partners with the training boards and industrial training personnel in promoting and developing training in accordance with the 1964 Act. This partnership and cooperation are quite crucial. It was thought desirable in the Bill to avoid even the appearance of a suggestion that teachers might be brought within scope of training boards so that this balanced partnership should not be disturbed. So much for Clause 1.

Sir Spencer Summers (Aylesbury)

The hon. Gentleman has said that there is no intention at the moment to bring charities in to the scheme of the Bill. There are activities which are carried out by local authorities and also by charities. Will the hon. Gentleman see to it that when consultation takes place with the local authorities opinions are also sought from charities engaged in similar work, even if there is no intention to include them?

Mr. Dell

We can make our consultations as wide as necessary in particular cases. I would emphasise that there are certain charities which might be brought within scope by an order presented to the House.

Clause 2 concerns employers and self-employed persons who do not have any employees. Section 2(1)(a) of the 1964 Act lays a duty on training boards to provide or secure the provision of necessary training for persons employed or intending to be employed in their industries. Experience has shown that this restriction of boards' training services to employees leaves certain important areas of training untouched. Clause 2 seeks to repair this by giving boards power—and I emphasise power, and not a duty—to provide such services as may be required to employers or self-employed people in their industry.

First, a word about employers. There is evidence from a good number of industries, particularly those having large numbers of small establishments, that employers themselves often stand to gain as much from opportunities for relevant training as any of their employees. In some small businesses the outstanding need is for the principal or owner to he assisted with management training. But, as things stand, boards are unable to help, whereas by contrast they can already assist with the training of working directors of limited companies. Clause 2 will rectify this anomaly and give boards discretion to provide services to employers subject to the Secretary of State's approval.

There is not the same general demand for boards to be able to give services to self-employed people who are not also employers. But there is a need of this kind in agriculture, and we foresee other instances which could arise with special groups of workers such as outworkers or freelance workers. It is, of course, important that boards should concentrate their efforts on areas of material need and not disperse their resources too widely. For this reason we intend to control very closely the use which may be made of this new power in relation to the self-employed by use of Sections 2(5) and 7(2) of the 1964 Act.

There is also a distinction to be drawn between employers and other self-employed people in regard to the financing of training. There is no power in the 1964 Act to raise a levy on self-employed people, and it is not proposed to seek such power. This means that any services provided to the self-employed will have to be on a basis of direct payment. It will similarly be open to boards, if they wish, to provide services to employers in return for fees. But, equally, it will be open to boards under existing powers to finance such services by levy. This will be a matter for boards themselves to consider and to submit proposals as they see fit.

Finally, I should like to give the House notice of a new Clause that I shall be proposing to add to the Bill in Committee. It will be chiefly concerned with two matters that have lately become urgent. First, it will enable boards to pay to their members allowances for loss of remuneration through attendance at board and committee meetings. Second, it will enable the payment of fees to members of the Central Training Council who participate in special survey work. I will explain these matters more fully when the Clause is put down. But I wished to mention them briefly to give the House warning of this intention.

I hope that the House will give the Bill an unopposed Second Reading.

Mr. Peter Emery (Honiton)

Why have the Government sought in the Bill to deal only with the fairly minor points mentioned by the hon. Gentleman and listed in the Clauses rather than to deal with the overall problem faced by the Central Training Council and to wait for the recommendations of the review body to carry out the recommendations which he knows are already in draft?

Mr. Dell

A committee of the Central Training Council is currently carrying on a review of the operations of the council, and one of the powers proposed to be taken in the further Clause to which I referred at the end of my remarks may be relevant to one of the committee's proposals.

4.55 p.m.

Mr. Dudley Smith (Warwick and Leamington)

I am sure the House will be grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his lucid explanation why the Bill has come before us today and for giving us the background to the judgment in another place which led to large numbers of people being exempted and which was against the spirit and idea behind the original Act. In many ways we would regard this provision as a tidying-up and amending Measure. I understand that the right hon. Gentleman will be seeking the leave of the House to reply to the debate later on, and I am sure he will be granted it, since I have a number of points for clarification, as I am sure have other hon. Members.

The 1964 Industrial Training Act was one of the last pieces of legislation introduced by the Conservative Government. I would agree with the hon. Gentleman that it was necessary and few would doubt that. The Minister referred to the quality and quantity of industrial training. It is worth recalling that the Act aimed orginally at increasing both the quality and quantity of training and at sharing costs more fairly throughout the industry.

The present Government have been responsible for implementing that Act and most fair-minded people would agree that the overall effect has been beneficial. There is plenty of evidence that the quality and quantity of training have increased. We were given a number of figures today. Nevertheless, we on these benches are also concerned about the rising tide of criticism directed at particular training boards at present and the detailed aspects of their work.

I believe that these valid criticisms, which have been reaching me and my right hon. and hon. Friends, and, I am sure, the Minister, since he referred obliquely to the matter, are sufficiently serious to justify a careful examination at Ministerial level of the whole operation of the industrial training board's system. I am disappointed, despite the right hon. Gentleman's final remark about his new Clause, that an opportunity has not been taken in the presentation of this Bill to go further into this aspect. In recent months, the House will know, the Construction Industry Training Board has been the target of much complaint and this has tended to concentrate on the operation of its particular levy grant system which many small and medium-sized firms consider to be unfair. There has been criticism of their finances and of their announced possible deficit of £6 million when we reach March.

The Central Training Council has already attracted adverse comment. I appreciate the hon. Gentleman's comments about the inquiry which is now taking place, and we support his remarks about Mr. Cousins' health. Can he say when that committee will report? It will be useful to get some sort of time scale in this connection.

One has heard comments about other individual boards, for example, the Engineering Training Industry Board, since some employers say that it does not understand the situation and does not provide exactly the right training for small firms. But, to be fair, the comment is not all adverse. In fact I should like to draw attention to an article in The Times Business News of yesterday in which it was said that it was the view of the industrial training board all too widely held among managers of small or medium-sized businesses that They are very good at spending our money but they give us little in return. It's all too formal and academic to be useful to us. The article continues: The Rubber and Plastics Process Industry Training Board can, however, quote concrete instances where the training of shop-floor employees has actually saved firms hard cash. It points out that often there is initial resistance to training, particularly among long-term employees, but that when they see examples of the work they come round and give it extra support. Therefore, I think that one has to bear in mind that there are supporting claims in addition to the criticisms which are made.

In our view, it is essential that great care should be taken to avoid a build-up of unnecessary and wasteful bureaucracy in the operation of the boards. It is equally essential for everyone concerned to be convinced that the levy-grant system is operated fairly and reasonably. Self-criticism is not always seen to be a virtue by the training boards, and more of it might be helpful. There should be a continuous evaluation of their work and performances, encouraged by the right hon. Lady and her Department. The opportunity for a review has been missed today by the Government. However, I can give industry and those who are worried about the situation the assurance that the next Conservative Government will look closely into these questions, if the present Government fail to act in due course.

At the outset, we on this side of the House believed in the basic principle that if an employer draws on a pool of skilled labour, he ought to contribute either by taking part in training or paying a levy to enable others to do so. The words "levy" and "grant" have become somewhat emotive in recent times, and that is a pity. In the end, it may be that the only possible way of achieving further progress in industrial training will be in other directions. It was always felt that, to be fair, the Act should be applied all the way down. However, the application has to be practical, and this has been realised. I welcome the move of those boards which have raised the exemption limit, and I would be pleased to see some go even further, because that would be appreciated by industry.

Some of the most pertinent complaints that we get against the operation of the Act can be summarised by saying that some people believe that the boards are too quick to move to specific recommendations before they have made a fundamental assessment of the training needs in their industries. The boards have also tended to favour established forms of training, rather than innovations. This encourages unimaginative training by companies. The operation of the levy-grant system discriminates against the firm which has a stable work force. Obviously there is a limit to the amount of training which can be absorbed by such a firm. In the end, if it goes on too long, it becomes counter-productive. In addition, because of the levy-grant system, the boards do not always have the strict financial discipline under which industrial companies have to operate, and companies tend to become resentful of what they regard as the bureaucratic interference associated with the boards. Many companies also regret that there is so much paper work involved in applying for grant, which represents an extra burden on top of other Government interference. I will not go into questions of S.E.T. and the other form-filling which is required of them. It is an additional aggravation and is not calculated to make them quite so keen on industrial training.

Then there is the point which I raised in a supplementary question to the right hon. Gentleman at Question Time the other day. He gave me a rather scornful reply. However, there is evidence that there is a good deal of training for training's sake. Some companies devote their energies to maximising their grant and getting all that they are able to claim. This provides for quantity, but it is undesirable and is against the principle of the Act. I hope that something will be done about it.

A chance has been missed to put right a number of basic wrongs in what is an excellent scheme that needs to be put back on the right path. I am sure that we are all agreed that it would be disastrous if large sections of industry became hostile to the concept of industrial training. Certainly we need industrial training if we are to retain our competitive position both at home and abroad.

I turn now to the Bill's proposals which have been enumerated by the right hon. Gentleman. I have been talking so far about what is not contained in the Bill and what, in my view, should have been. The specific proposals include a change back to the original intention by specifically including welfare and other noncommercial activities, extending the scope of the original Act by including local authorities and other statutory bodies, and also by including self-employed persons and employers.

The first of those points arises from the need to cancel the effect of the judicial decision taken in another place. The other two are new but very important propositions. It is a pity that Crown establishments are not included, as the Minister confirmed when he answered a question put to him by one of my hon. Friends. Undoubtedly that is a point with which we can deal in Committee.

I remind the House that over a million employees were within the scope of the Hotel and Catering Industry Training Board as originally conceived. I believe that that Board is one of the better ones. It has done an efficient and good job. The judgment excluded about 200,000, of whom some 14,000 were employed by members' clubs. The bulk of the 200,000 excluded were employed in the school meals service. Because the case was contested by this Board, some people tended to lose sight of the fact that it was Parliament's original intention that these people should be caught by the original Act, and not the board's. There was no vindictiveness on the part of the board in taking the action that it did. The right hon. Gentleman has quoted examples of employees who have come under the ju risdiction of other boards.

The Hotel and Catering Industry Training Board has a cut-off in its levy system at the level of the £4,000 per annum wage bill. The effect of that is to exclude 70,000 of the 80,000 listed employers from liability to levy. Over 85 per cent. of employers on the register, therefore, are not required to pay levy. The remaining 10,000 employers operate about 40,000 establishments and employ over 80 per cent. of the total labour force.

The effect of the £20 abatement is to reduce the nominal 1 per cent. levy to half per cent. for the smallest employer, so that an employer with a payroll of £4,000 pays £20 and not £40. Surely that is not a great burden, especially when one remembers that he has still a chance of getting tax deductible allowances.

The scope of the Hotel and Catering Industry Training Board is different from that of some of the other boards in that it includes the catering workers from all other industries in addition to the minority employments in its own industry.

Having given the background to the Hotel and Catering Industry Training Board, I come to the contentious matter about which a number of my hon. Friends wish to speak, including my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, North (Mr. Iremonger). It concerns members' clubs. Naturally, such clubs are worried. However, it is fair first to put into perspective the board's position in relation to them.

From my researches, I find that the number of clubs in the country is about 1,250, and they have about 13,900 employees. These are non-profit making members' clubs which provide services like meals and accommodation for members. They are not proprietorial clubs in the sense of the gambling or drinking club which is there to make a profit. Of these clubs, about 1.000, with 6,450 employees, have payrolls below the £4,000 cut-off, so that they are not subject to levy. These include many of the type that we know like working men's clubs and golf clubs which have perhaps a steward, a stewardess and a part-time barman and do not fulfil the criterion of a £4,000 wage bill.

The key remaining 250 clubs employ about 7,450 people. They contributed about 42,000 to the board's first levy, which works out at an average of about £170 per club. In the Greater London area there are 290 members' clubs of which 212 fall outside the current £4,000 levy limit. Of the 78 London clubs that remain which are liable to levy, the largest has about 100 employees with a levy of about £584. The smallest has only ten employees with a £24 levy.

The protagonists for bringing back the clubs submit that more than half of their activity is an hotel operation, because they provide meals and accommodation. The board is keen to have them back again, even though they are comparatively small, because it regards them as part of the hotel and catering industry and as they are using the type of people trained in that industry.

But the clubs are reluctant candidates to become members of the training club. Their case is that they are private establishments and not part of the industry. This is a very good point. I know that the Bill extends the scope outside industry, but they do not in any way measure up to the other examples that the right hon. Gentleman gave. They are a section entirely apart.

To be fair, I cannot share the view that the clubs are essentially private houses, run for the mutual benefit of their members. They are non-profit making, but they are a peculiar institution of their own, and I think that they should be regarded as private establishments rather than private houses.

The clubs also claim that their staff are often not typical of the hotel and catering industry. The movement of their trained staff is usually the other way. They go into industry, but those who have been trained in industry seldom come through to them. They have a large number of long service club servants who have been in the club business most of their working lives. Many are not keen to work outside in the ordinary hotel and catering industry. Many are foreigners, students and temporary workers; housewives doing part-time work. The staff generally has an esprit de corps often not found in other establishments outside.

It is also fair to say that the clubs resent having their court decision—which was, after all, taken by the highest court in the land—overturned by a new Act of Parliament. There is a feeling of resentment, and it is right to express it.

But the most pertinent point is the ever mounting financial costs of members' clubs. They are assailed by S.E.T. and other rising costs caused by inflation, and they lack any tax allowance for depreciation as they are non-profit-making. Many, as we know and have read, are in financial difficulties. Some have had to close down; others have had to amalgamate.

There are many views on clubs. Some people do not like them. Some clubs are political; most are not. Most of them fulfil a good purpose. In many cases they are gatherings of people of identical interest. Many of them serve ex-officers or people connected with the arts and various other facets of activity. I believe that they perform a useful function.

I always see red when people refer to the House of Commons as being "the best club in the world." They do not appreciate how hard we work. We might, however, even think of incorporating the House of Commons, if the clubs are caught, because certain people here could do with a good deal of training.

I submit, without pressing the point too hard— I hope that some of my hon. Friends will deal with it—that the argument for and against clubs being included is finely balanced. I am sure that it will be developed not only this afternoon, but in Committee.

There is no doubt that clubs merit serious consideration, and perhaps there is a good case for exempting the smallest ones caught by the board's operations. I am sure that it is not the spirit and intention of the Industrial Training Bill to be oppressive to anybody. We want to generate a good spirit of co-operation. We shall return to this matter in Committee.

I now turn to the local authorities who, we are told, will now come within the scope of the Bill. I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman went into the matter in some detail, because we regard this as important and many hon. Members have had representations from various local authority bodies.

The Local Government Training Board was set up on a voluntary basis in 1967 by the associations of local authorities and by the G.L.C. Its main aim is similar to that of the statutory boards. It has begun to achieve its aims very successfully. It has accomplished a great deal in selection and training, and in the proper use of staff at various levels. I was interested to learn recently that its plans for advancement are well established.

The vast majority of local authorities support the board, and it raises 92 per cent. of the potential levy. That is excellent. Nearly all the boroughs and counties are members of it, and they employ about 84 per cent. of all local government employees of England and Wales.

One of the great bull points in favour of the voluntary board is that it has kept its administrative costs down to about 4 per cent. of its levy—much lower than the majority of statutory boards.

I am told by both the Association of Municipal Corporations and the County Councils' Association that they feel that the creation of a statutory training board is unnecessary. I agree. I welcome the semi-assurance of the right hon. Gentleman this afternoon, but I feel that they will have a sword of Damocles hanging over them. I believe that the right hon. Lady should use her powers only if the voluntary board gets into difficulties in future and there is a need to supersede it.

Surely this is not the time to start interfering with local government on the question of training just as we are about to throw the whole of it into the melting pot. I quarrel with many aspects of the Redcliffe-Maud Report and the Government's White Paper, but I should be out of order if I went into them now. However, we all accept that whoever forms the next Government, local government will be reformed. If we are to have a statutory board for local government training I believe that it should await the new legislation which will come forth in due course—probably in the next Parliament.

The right hon. Gentleman referred to employers and self-employed. Here again, although the idea and intention is probably good—it is probably forward looking—I think that there is a case to consolidate the current work that is going on, because there are criticisms of it, before embarking on new ventures like this. I believe that a distinction should be clearly drawn between the self-employed person who employs other people and the purely self-employed person who does not. In training terms, these two categories are quite different. A self-employed employer requires training, at least in part, for the benefit of his employees who are already within the scope of the Bill, because in a small business he will probably be the sole instructor available to them. But the self-employed person with no employees comes into a different category and therefore should not have the same consideration. We are now told that the self-employed are to be included for training purposes. But are they to be included for levy purposes? I am not sure.

Mr. Dell

I will clarify that now. I made clear in my speech that there would be no question of raising a levy on self-employed people.

While I am on my feet, may I ask the hon. Gentleman, as he is making this exclusion of self-employed people who do not employ others, how he would deal with the situation in agriculture?

Mr. Dudley Smith

The right hon. Gentleman has anticipated me. I am grateful for his information about the levy. However, I think the self-employed idea is unlikely to work well under any board, except agriculture, where the levy is to be deducted from Government support funds and is not raised by direct imposition on businesses. But the proposal generally is interesting and we shall want to return to the point in Committee.

Employers are now counted in the levy. I agree that in small and middle sized businesses the employer can often benefit from the right kind of industrial training. I do not think that it applies so much to large companies which have large training schemes, anyway. These do not necessarily affect the chief executives.

My view is that in the 'seventies training will take on new dimensions not envisaged in the Bill or even in the 1964 Act, and that there will be new functions which will need constant Government attention. One thing is absolutely certain—training is here to stay, and if it is properly organised, industry as a whole can get immeasurable benefit both for the individual and for the nation. Because we support training and because we gave it its first national impetus, we shall support the Bill, although we reserve the right to criticise some of the details in Committee.

But our priority and that of the Government must surely be that the boards must get it right, that they must gain the co-operation and not the resentment of all those who come within their purview. If that happens, the Indus-trail Training Act will be seen to work efficiently. If not, this hostility will grow and it will be very serious for the industrial life of the nation.

5.21 p.m.

Mr. Reg Prentice (East Ham, North)

I came into the Chamber without intending to take part in the debate but I feel drawn towards intervention by a kind of nostalgia, because six years ago I was quite active in these subjects. It is a nostalgia which I see reflected on the face of the Opposition Chief Whip. Perhaps this would be an appropriate occasion for him to break the traditional silence of Chief Whips, because he was Parliamentary Secretary at the then Ministry of Labour and played an active part in these matters.

I welcome the Bill, particularly that part which extends the operations of the Industrial Training Scheme to employers. This was an omission from the original Act, one which was not noticed by the Opposition at the time any more than by the Government, and one which should be put right. The hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Mr. Dudley Smith) thought that it would have little practical application outside agriculture. It is certainly needed badly there and possibly in other industries with a number of small employers. It might apply in part of the construction industry and elsewhere.

There are too many small employers—too many people in management structure generally, but particularly in small firms—who tend to think that training is for other people. There are too many tired clichés about having learned it all in "the school of experience" from people who need training and retraining to keep up to date with the changing pattern of the technology of their industries. This should be a major field of development in future—extension of management training, which would include employers and self-employed.

I cannot resist commenting on the fact that the hon. Member spoke about the interest which his party had in these matters and said that it had given the first national impetus to training. It is true that they passed the Industrial Training Act, but they did so in 1964, and they passed it after many years in which some of us had been demanding such legislation. They passed it after many years in which it had become clear to progressive employers and trade unionists and to many in this House, particularly to the then Opposition, that legislation of this kind was needed. I do not know how many years we spent asking for something like this and pointing to the example of France, where there had been a levy rebate scheme, on a somewhat different scale, ever since the 1920s, with particularly good results. So, although this was part of the death-bed repentance of the Conservative Government, it was very long overdue.

Mr. Robert Carr (Mitcham)

I think that the right hon. Gentleman is giving a rather warped historical account of the situation. When I was Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour between 1955 and 1958, I was the chairman of a committee which produced a report entitled "Training For Skill". I can speak, therefore, from experience. I certainly do not wish to criticise either the employer or the trade union members of my committee, but it would not be true to say that there was any pressure in that committee for legislation. Rather, the pressure to do something was to draw on both employers' and unions' representatives and not to hold them back.

Mr. Prentice

It is a tragedy that the doctrine in the report, "Training For Skill", remained the official policy for so many years. I agree that, when the right hon. Gentleman's committee was sitting, there was no considerable pressure either from employers or from unions for a changed system, but he and the Government of which he was a member gave no lead for a change, and they should have done. Even at that stage, some of us were asking that it should be done.

But, in the years between the report of what has become known as the Carr Committee and the industrial training White Paper which preceded the Industrial Training Act, many people came around to the view that a new system was necessary. It was in those years that the Conservative Government were dragging their feet. They should have acted earlier, and if they had, our industry would have been in a much better condition to face the stresses and strains which the economic situation has presented it with over many years.

I referred to the past only because I was worried about some of the other passages in the speech of the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington. He seemed to be paying too much lip-service to some of the fears of employers in certain industries about the progress of the industrial training boards. It has surely been clear from the very beginning that the people who would sit on these boards from the employers' side and from the trade union side would be those with more forward-looking ideas on training. They have been selected with that in view. It was, therefore, clear that, in many cases, the boards would produce a scheme and a levy on a scale which, in their view, was necessary for a proper training scheme for the industry concerned, and that this would be unpopular with large sections of the employers who were unwilling to pay the levy, unwilling to fill up the forms and all the rest of it.

But surely it is the duty of everyone in the House, particularly those speaking on these matters from the two Front Benches, to encourage the work of the boards and, on the employers' side, to encourage the more progressive and forward-looking people, and to discourage the criticism which has been made of the boards for agriculture and the construction industry in the past—

Mr. Dudley Smith

I think that I did encourage and support them, but the boards are not above criticism and surely they are not perfect. I should have thought that the volume of complaints which we have had shows that there are some genuine grievances.

Mr. Prentice

Of course I am not suggesting that the boards are above criticism, and of course it should be voiced. But where there is a general resentment by sections of the employers in particular industries against the whole industrial training board operation because they regard it as a new form of State interference with their business, it is broadly the duty of all parties in this House who supported the original Act to support the work of the boards and the philosophy which lies behind it.

As an ex-Minister of Public Building and Works, I think that this is particularly needed in the construction industry, an industry with enormous contrasts between the more and the less efficient units. In the more efficient parts of the building and civil engineering industry, there are first-class training schemes at all levels, including management training. Over a great part of the industry, particularly among some—not all—smaller and medium-sized firms, there is a need for a shake-up, a training revolution. Now that the Construction Industry Training Board has adopted proposals for a more ambitious levy grant system, it deserves the support of all of us.

I was very impressed by the figures which my right hon. Friend gave about the growth of industrial training in recent years. He concentrated on the manufacturing industries and particularly on engineering. Can we be given information about the spread of training into less conventional spheres? When the Act was passed many of us wanted to see a spread of organised training into fields of employment in which training was not considered necessary in the past.

For example, in the manufacturing industries there has for far too long been a division between the skilled worker, who served his time as a craft apprentice, and the other workers, whom we too loosely categorise as unskilled or semiskilled. The trend is for modern industry to blur these distinctions, and today more operatives require training to carry out their work efficiently.

One of the conservative forces in the training sphere has operated in the craft unions; and I speak as a member of a general workers' union. As such, I believe that adequate training is the right of every worker in every job. Thus, in respect of manufacturing industry, I want more information about the spread of training schemes into activities outside the traditional craft apprenticeships.

This, of course, is not confined to manufacturing industries, and I am con- cerned with training in, for example, white-collar work, agriculture and the distributive trades. Many of these pursuits have had training boards for some time and I am sure that there is on record reports of those boards telling of their progress. May we be given information about the broad trends? Not only should it be the right of every entrant into these trades to be given good training, but the provision of good training must be in the national interest. Considering the manpower needs of the years ahead, we cannot afford, in any important activity, to fall short of the training standards that are required.

I hope that my right hon. Friend will consider two important aspects; first, the way in which industrial training boards can help with the training of people from developing countries overseas. I speak on this subject as a former Minister of Overseas Development. As the Secretary of State is also a former holder of that office—and as the original Act included powers for the boards to organise training for people from developing countries and to operate a grants system for those trainees—it would be helpful if my right hon. Friend could supply the latest information on the subject.

A number of people from developing countries are receiving training in Britain. They come here under various arrangements. Sometimes they are employed overseas by companies which also operate in this country and are brought here by their employers; sometimes they come here at their own expense or at the expense of their families; and sometimes they come under arrangements organised by the Ministry in conjunction with the D.E.P., although the numbers in this category are not as great as one would like. Discussions have been going on among Departments about this problem, and I hope that some progress has been made with a view to activating that part of the Act which would help in the matter.

Secondly, it has always seemed to me that each industrial training board requires a view of future manpower needs in the sphere in which it operates. This is a difficult thing to achieve. Ideally, it would be of great help, not only to the boards but to many people in, for example, higher and further education, if we could have a kind of rolling manpower budget which gave a picture of the skills and the number of people who would be required in various categories in five, 10 or 20 years' time.

Some clever people have tried to produce figures of this sort on computers. The trouble is that it is not clear what data should be fed into the computer in the first instance. It is far better to be roughly accurate in this sphere than to be absolutely wrong. A great deal of work has been going on in various parts of Whitehall in recent years into this matter but, as far as I know, without reaching any stage of great sophistication.

Although the manpower research units of the D.E.P. have produced some important reports, this sort of work must be extended and, as far as possible, the training boards should be fed with whatever data can be made available to them about the future needs of their industries.

Training is a long process, particularly for certain categories of workers. It is easy to react to the training needs that are clear now, in 1970, but difficult to assess the training needs of 1980 and what sort of plans we should be making now to deal with them. This is a sphere of activity in which a great deal more work is needed so that we may play our full part in planning for the years ahead.

5.36 p.m.

Mr. Joseph Hiley (Pudsey)

The most useful contribution that I can make to this debate is to refer to the training board connected with the wool textile industry, which has many similarities to the board covering local government.

We have been told that a training board for local government has been established on a voluntary basis, that it is doing excellent work and that its administrative costs account for only 4 per cent. of its income, which is much cheaper than the costs of running the statutory bodies.

The same pattern applies to the board covering the textile industry. If hon. Members feel that we in the textile trade are not aware of the importance of training, I remind them that the wool industry was the first to set up a training board on a voluntary basis, and that was 25 years ago. It was then called "The recruitment, educational and training department of the textile industry", and it appointed an excellent man as its head. The new statutory board has received the nucleus of its officers from that originally voluntary board and the man who started the board in Bradford 25 years ago is now the head of the statutory body.

In the old days the administrative costs of the voluntary body totalled about £12,000 a year. Although an accurate comparison cannot be made, administrative costs today are probably 10 times greater. Those costs must be borne by the industry, and it is my duty, as the representative of a constituency in the midst of the textile country, to tell the Government that there is much anxiety in the wool textile trade as a result of the increasing burden of the statutory levy.

The Minister of State asked whether industrial training boards were fair to small firms. The answer from the West Riding of Yorkshire is that the majority of people employed there do not consider that they are fair at the moment to small firms. In this industry the majority of firms are small, particularly compared with huge industries such as engineering.

There is, and has been for a long time in Bradford, a council known as the Textile Employers' Council. It has sought to represent to the board the feelings of those in the industry. It realised that there was growing dissatisfaction with the system of grant and levy. It felt that this was not the best way to achieve the objectives of the 1964 Act. I thought that this Bill was an amending measure and I hoped to find something in it which would tend to rectify some of the unfortunate consequences affecting small firms, but such does not appear to be the case.

The Employers' Council said in its memorandum that it considered the system cumbersome and costly in terms of administration. Firms, especially small ones—-and it is a peculiarity of the textile trade that they are mainly small firms—find the operation of the training board worrying, time-consuming and costly and sometimes they even find it difficult to achieve the maximum grant to which they are entitled. Some firms lose grant because it is not practicable for them to find the staff prepared to attempt to work out the complexities of the system, with all the paper work that is involved. I have with me the guide issued by the board for the completion of claims. I assure the House that it is a most formidable document. This has added a very heavy burden to an already hard-pressed industry. It has prevented many of the staff getting on with far more important jobs than merely filling in forms. The present system uses a great deal of capital for long periods and that adds further burdens to the costs of the industry.

Reference has been made to the effect of the levy system on firms with good labour records. I do not suppose anyone thought of this at the time when the board was set up. It is ironical that firms with good labour records which we want to encourage suffer because they have to subsidise firms with bad records which, of course, have a higher turnover of labour. It is believed that most people in the trade would prefer a scheme in which they would not be compensated for wastage in labour turnover to the situation in which they have participated in a system which has so many negative characteristics. The Employers' Council believes that a supply of trained personnel can be secured in a more simple way.

Its proposal is that the grant system should be abolished and the amount raised by the levy should be considerably reduced, say from 1.25 per cent. to .1 per cent. The 1964 Act does not require the board to operate a grant and levy system, but Section 4 provides for the imposition of a levy and Section 2(4)(b) makes grants permissive. In practice the imposition of a levy of 1.25 per cent. costs small firms a few thousand pounds so that they contrive to have as much as possible repaid by grant involving a tremendous amount of paperwork.

This system, like selective employment tax, is wasteful of labour. Large sums are spent on establishing claims for grants by the firms and probably larger costs are incurred by the board in checking them. It may be that 1 per cent. of the total wage bill is required to pay for this. The Employers' Council is of the opinion that if it could cut out the grant and retain a very small levy which would allow the board to provide all the other useful services, this could be done at a tenth of the present cost to industry. This proposal is not contrary to the spirit of the 1964 Act. Indeed, it is believed that its objectives could be achieved more satisfactorily and on a more acceptable financial basis by this proposal.

The general guide to the Industrial Training Act, 1964, says that the Act has three main objectives. These are: (a) to ensure an adequate supply of properly trained men and women at all levels in industry; (b) to secure an improvement in the quality and efficiency of industrial training; and (c) to share the cost of training more evenly between firms. The wool textile industry prefers to work on a voluntary basis even though sometimes the voluntary basis is supported by some statutory financing.

I give three examples of this. There has long been a scientific research and export promotion board. We have a bureau of statistics. We have a management services centre. This service operates on fees which are sufficient to pay all expenses of the management services centre. The Employers' Council would like to have a body established on similar lines to the M.S.C. to deal with training. It is considered that the needs of the industry would be better served if the board's staff were engaged on actual consultancy training in firms in a similar way to the M.S.C.

One of the omissions from the 1964 Act was provision for recruitment. This ought to be put right now. If the costs of unproductive labour could be cut out there should be sufficient money available to do something about recruitment, which is urgent. The industry—particularly those concerned with the export markets; and the industry has a proud record as sixth in the export league—can no longer bear increasing costs. The Council's proposals point the way to assisting them. I hope that the Minister will consider that the time has come when a change in the method concerning levy and grant would not do any harm to training. This has long been recognised as an integral part of the industry, but the costs are getting out of hand. I urge the Government to give this matter most careful consideration.

5.48 p.m.

Mr. John Robertson (Paisley)

I will not follow the hon. Member for Pudsey (Mr. Hiley) into the mysteries of training in the textile industry. It would not be in the least helpful to make carping criticisms of training boards today. It is far too soon to make final judgments in this matter. Industrial training is a matter on which there is a large degree of agreement on both sides of the House. As the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Mr. Dudley Smith) said, provision for industrial training was introduced by the last Conservative Government and has been continued by the present Government.

I have not met anyone in industry with a had word to say about the idea of training boards. As the hon. Gentleman pointed out, one of the reasons why they were necessary was that training was carried out unevenly in industry. Some employers were asked to carry too great a burden, and a method had to be found to share the cost of training fairly. The fashionable word then was "poaching". We all remarked that many firms employed large numbers of workpeople but trained no one, and in particular did no skill training.

Therefore, we do not want to be too critical of the training boards at this stage. But there are trends which are a little worrying. For instance, it would seem that whenever a training board is set up and raises a levy the first thing it thinks of is to establish its own facilities, without considering those already in existence. In Scotland I have come across training facilities that are grossly underemployed because a training board has believed that it can carry out training only by building its own establishment, putting in its own machinery and providing its own instructors, when the job is essentially being done already in another place.

I am not convinced, therefore, that the Central Training Council is doing the job we thought it should do, which was to co-ordinate the work of the training boards and make sure that the best use was made of their capital equipment and administrative machinery, and carry out a general overseeing of the work of the separate training boards. I believe that the Council feels that it does not have the powers to do more than advise the Minister, and that it cannot intervene in the work of the training boards and thus influence decisions.

Not only are training boards themselves overlapping and duplicating facilities, but they are building training establishments next door to training establishments with all the facilities necessary already provided by education authorities. We have this form of duplication both in group schemes and individual training board schemes. It is a great waste of money. This is a legitimate criticism of some boards.

Education authorities feel that the line of distinction between education and training is rather fine. They argue that the two should be related and the job done in one building; that the job of technical education should be carried out along with the job of manual training.

Let us consider the question of skilled work. In the Engineering Training Board, for instance, the whole emphasis has been on craft training. A great deal of the commercial training, particularly of women—the training of shorthand typists and bookkeepers—is being done by the education authorities. In Scotland they have been asked to invest large sums of money in enlarging training establishments or building new ones, without knowing whether training boards will build similar establishments in the not too distant future, thus leaving the education authorities with a training facility that is grossly under-used. This situation is occurring today. I think that the Shipbuilding Industry Board does some commercial training, but hardly any of the other boards do so. The burden has fallen on the education authorities, but they are not given the grants available to the training boards, and have to bear the cost not only of the training but of buildings, equipment and so on. So it can be seen that co-ordination is lacking.

The Scottish Committee of the Central Training Council has complained very bitterly about this. It says that it is very difficult for it to do much in the matter because of the dreadful lack of information. No information is available to it that would enable it to attempt any work of co-ordination. But the Scottish section of the C.B.I. is complaining that the Scottish Committee of the C.T.C. is making no attempt to co-ordinate the work of industrial training boards. The C.T.C. should be given powers to control the work of training boards, co-ordinate their work and see that there is no duplication.

I agree with some of the criticisms that have been made about the administrative costs of running training boards. I have been very impressed by the amount of money spent by the boards in Scotland, but I wonder how much of it might have been saved had there been better co-ordination and a better look at the whole question rather than simply at the problem in a given industry. It is rather a pity that we could not have had a more general debate on the work of training boards. Even though we might not have been able to make a judgment on all their work, we might have been able to see where they are going and, if they were going wrong, to say something which would have put them on the right path.

There is much criticism of training boards. Strangely enough, it is not so much of the levy and the grant but rather that they are providing only very narrow ranges of training. Their argument is that they must make a start, and that they are starting on the craft side and can then move on to the others. But the Act has been in operation for nearly six years, and the Engineering Training Board, for example, has really only moved on the craft technician side. It is not doing anything in commercial training. I do not want to single out one board, but that is a good instance. It is not doing much in the training of machine operatives and other workmen loosely termed "semi-skilled". As I have often tried to point out, that term describes not the job but the rate paid for it.

Mr. Emery

I am certain that the hon. Gentleman would not wish to mislead the House. I accept that he may rightly be critical of some of the activities of the Engineering Training Board and other training boards, but, because I serve on the Management Training and Development Committee of the Central Training Council, I know that he is not correct in trying to suggest that the training boards are doing nothing, or even very little, on the management or commercial side of training. There is a considerable amount being done which people often do not know about.

Mr. Robertson

I accept what the hon. Gentleman says, but I am really speaking about what is happening in Scotland. Apart from that undertaken by the Shipbuilding Industry Training Board, commercial training by training boards in Scotland amounts to nil. I have looked at the figures, and have been trying desperately to find out whether any work of this kind is being done. That is one of the facts that has emerged.

It may be that in other parts of the country some work is being done, I do not know. For obvious reasons I have had to confine my investigations to Scotland. I would not wish so early after the introduction of the Industrial Training Act to be very critical of any training board. I know that they are trying to do a good job. However, there are indications of an inflexibility that will not do us any good. I am always hearing it said that the training in industry pre-war was bad and that today it is good. I do not believe this. I believe that certain pre-war training was better than anything taking place under any other system since.

I can only speak for myself. I had a full range of training that will not now be given. A person cannot now train as a fitter and go through all the range of skills, on the grinding machine, the work bench, right through into the blacksmith's shop. Now a person has to pick a trade and be a tiny bit of a craftsman. It is far too rigid. There are still places where men with a great range of skills are needed. I am still of the opinion that this is the best kind of training in the long run.

The tendency, even with training boards, is for industry to train for its immediate needs. There is no possibility of manpower forecasting having any immediate effect. Industry will train for what it needs today, not five years from now. Training is geared to the industry, not to the individual and not to the needs of the country in 10 years' time. We will not train for what might happen in five or 10 years from now; we will train today for what is needed today. This is wrong.

We need some kind of manpower forecasting and we need to be able to forecast the shape of industry, the kind of jobs that will arise, the kind of crafts and skills that will be needed and not only the numbers, but the quality of the skill. We should be training people towards that, regardless of whether they are needed in industry now. No training is ever wasted. I remember clearly when I began as an apprentice in the tool room, the foreman—we did not think much of him at the time but I have thought a great deal of him since—used to say, "There is a field marshal's baton in every tool box." He meant that we could get promotion, into the drawing office, even become a planning engineer and who knows, one or more of us could become managers of a factory. It is not so today. If someone decides to be a craftsman, a technician or a draughtsman then that is it. We have the law of the Medes and the Persians and a person cannot cross from one position to another.

Perhaps that is a little exaggerated; it still happens, I know, but it is becoming increasingly difficult. Not very long ago, in my lifetime, it was quite the done thing for a considerable number of apprentices to go on to a fourth year and to take S2 in Scotland or O.N.C. or H.N.C. and even to go on to take a degree, through industry. That was in the Royal Technical College in Glasgow. That Group 2 has now been closed and it is exceedingly difficult for anyone starting as an apprentice to go beyond that, and certainly difficult for them to take a degree.

This is wrong and it is one of the negative sides of industrial training. I hope that at some time we will have a better opportunity—not a little Bill like this—for a real discussion and that we will go into this more fully, discussing the problems, the trends and what should be done. Having said all of that, having made my criticisms, let me say this: surely to goodness we have better training today than we have ever had. Let us correct the faults where we see them, but let us not be too critical of training boards.

6.5 p.m.

Mr. T. L. Iremonger (Ilford, North)

I want simply to protest against the imposition, which is made possible by order under this Bill, of a tax or levy on members' clubs; that is to say, upon many of the large golf, sailing and other social clubs not only in London but throughout the country. The Bill does this by the old legislative device of pretending that something that clearly means one thing really means another. It is known technically as the "cat means dog" device.

The scope of the original Act was to raise a levy for training from those "engaged in the activities of industry or commerce", as the Minister said in moving the Second Reading. Private households and clubs are, clearly, not engaged in industry or commerce. Clubs are really only extensions of private households, organised on a communal, but still essentially private, basis. When this proposition, manifestly enshrined in the original Act, is unheld by the courts right up to the House of Lord, along comes the Minister and introduces a "cat means dog" Bill to say that private members' clubs which are not engaged in industry and commerce are engaged in industry and commerce. I do not think that the House should accept this.

There are many other things in the Bill, and to them I do not take any objection. At this stage I am concerned only to identify this one grievance, which we may be able to remedy in Committee by an Amendment to exclude members' clubs from the operation of the Measure. We should do this for three reasons. First, I do not believe that the inclusion of members' clubs is really worth it. Quite apart from inclusion being semantically indefensible, I do not think it is worth it in terms of cash. Very small sums, acquired at considerable administrative effort, are involved for the training board. But to some of the clubs, and many are in serious difficulties, these sums are very large sums; and they will be larger still, because it will be 3 per cent. of the wages bill before we are very much older.

Secondly, there cannot be a great deal of advantage from the point of view of the hotel and catering industry in bringing these private members' clubs into the Bill because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Mr. Dudley Smith) has pointed out, very few of those who are employed as club servants of one kind or another move into, or are likely to move into, the hotel and catering industry.

Thirdly, there is the consideration that there is a nasty element of bureaucratic spite and vindictiveness in the Bill as it applies to private members' clubs. The explanation is that the court case which precipitated the necessity for the whole of this Bill was brought by a private members' club.

The private members' club won its case, and, naturally enough, when the Minister saw the repercussions of the judgment, which excluded from the Act many other activities which he might much more reasonably have assumed to have been included in the Act, he decided to remedy the exclusion. Then he, or his Department, circularised private members' clubs with a memorandum about his intentions. I should like to draw the attention of the House to this memorandum because it reveals very clearly, as I see it, this element of rather distasteful vindictiveness. The memorandum was sent under cover of a confidential letter from the Department dated 6th November. In paragraph 4 there is a list of the activities which the new Bill would, because of the judgment, feel obliged to bring into the ambit of the old Act.

The memorandum refers to (a) local authorities and so on, (b) river authorities, (c) harbour authorities, and then successively to marketing boards, sea defence commissions, B.B.C., etc., friendly societies, industrial and provident societies, the Corporation of Lloyds, stock and commodity exchanges, schools and other educational institutions, and then, right at the end, item (k), members' clubs, which are absolutely negligible in terms of the percentage of the levy affected and not at all typical in respect of labour or staff employed, but banged in there with the obviously spiteful vindictive suggestion, "Do not think you are getting away with this. You precipitated all this trouble, and now we are going to make you jump."

I do not feel that this is altogether agreeable. The Minister really ought to think again whether, although private member's clubs precipitated the Peed for the Bill, and although we might well accept the other parts of the Bill on the basis on which it has been argued by the Minister, it is really necessary to take it out of members' clubs as he is proposing to do. I do not ask the Minister to give us any drastic or firm undertaking at the moment. I just ask him to keep an open mind on this matter, and to entertain sympathetically Amendments which may be forthcoming on the point when we consider it in Committee.

6.13 p.m.

Mr. Arthur Probert (Aberdare)

Unlike the hon. Member for Ilford, North (Mr. Iremonger), I say with respect that I certainly welcome this Bill for the inclusion of a certain item, not the one to which he has referred.

I speak with many years of experience in local government service as an officer. For many years I experienced the vicissitudes of attempting to train myself in the service through voluntary efforts and with the assistance of other ad hoc bodies set up by various professional institutions—the Institution of Municipal Treasurers and Accountants, the Institution of Municipal Engineers and Surveyors, and so on. Often on a Friday night, very tired, I would have to travel to Cardiff to attend a lecture, a very able one, very educational, provided by these professional institutions. But what it amounted to in the end was that the education of the local government officer was dependent on the initiative of the local government officer himself. There is nothing wrong with that—it is much to be desired—but I feel that we should add to that initiative by the provision in Clause 1 (1) (b) of the Bill, bringing local authorities into this venture.

I would certainly encourage local authorities to come within the ambit of the Bill. Many local authorities are providing excellent facilities, but here again too much is left to the individual local authority. Let us face it; there are certain local authorities which are far too small to provide the education which is needed for their local offices. As was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley (Mr. John Robertson), the provision is so uneven that the paradoxical situation arises that we have in those smaller local authorities professional officers who have received their training through the provision of other local authorities; and smaller local authorities are benefiting although for various reasons they are not contributing anything to the education of their own local government staff.

I believe, therefore, that it is time that local authorities themselves were provided with the statutory powers necessary to provide the training boards. I appreciate what has been said by a spokesman on the benches opposite but I speak with experience as a local government officer. I hope, therefore, that after consideration of this provision in the Bill local authorities will themselves welcome it, because there are going to be very important changes in the local government sphere, however long delayed they may be in coming, and I feel that statutory boards must be provided for the training of local government officers.

6.16 p.m.

Mr. David Mitchell (Basingstoke)

I start by giving a welcome to the Bill and particularly to the proposal to extend industrial training to employers and the self-employed. There is a great need for this, particularly in the field of the small businessman, and for that reason it is to be welcomed. I only hope that it can be done without too much form-filling so that there is still time left for training for the small businessman whose attention is taken up, almost full time, in running his business.

Secondly, I fully agree with the need for industrial training and greatly welcomed the spirit behind the original Bill; but I cannot for the life of me see why it is that Government Departments are excluded. I intervened earlier and the Minister was kind enough to confirm that Government Departments continue to be excluded. He said that this was an enabling Bill. If it is an enabling Bill, why cannot it also enable the Minister to include Government employees where this is appropriate? The hon. Member for Aberdare (Mr. Probert) drew attention to a justified need for including local government employees within the scope of training boards. If that is right, how can we differentiate for national Government employees and say this is wrong?

The whole principle behind the original Act was that we should not have a situation in which certain employers within an industry spent money on training while other employers spent nothing and gained the benefit of the outlay by the employers who did spend. Here we have precisely that situation being recreated in relation to Government employees. The case which was taken up to the House of Lords concerned the hotel and catering industry, which is one of the main reasons for this Bill. Why should not there be the same expenditure on the training of Government employees in Government canteens and places of that kind as in the private restaurants round the corner which are in competition with them?

It seems to me that there is something wrong there, and I would urge the Minister to look carefully at the Bill to see why Government Departments should not be brought into line with other employers. At the same time I have some uncertainty whether non-profit-making bodies should have been brought into the Bill, but I am very relieved to have the assurance that has been given, curiously, from the Conservative Front Bench, that there is a £4,000 wage bill cut-off so that many of the smaller clubs who feared they were to be caught by these proposals will be exempted under the catering training board levy regulations.

My main criticism is that the Government have failed to grasp the opportunity that getting into the legislative queue has given them for clearing up anomalies which have now become apparent in our training board system and for curbing some of the wilder schemes of training for training's sake instead of for industry's benefit, for performance and profit, which should be the real reasons for it.

I do not suggest that we should go so far as to have detailed Ministerial interference, but I wonder whether the Minister has considered the idea of Ministerial circulars to the training boards in the same way as the Minister of Education sends out circulars to the local authorities which administer the education service, giving them guidance on some of the matters to which perhaps they ought to pay more attention and some of the pitfalls of which they should beware.

I doubt very much whether it is worth while providing for a levy system and the application of training boards in the case of highly specialised employment. I give mushroom growers as an example. Mushroom growing is a skilled and specialised field of production which very few people know how to carry out. When the mushroom industry has a training board applied to it, what will the board have to do? It will collect the money from the unfortunate growers and then have to say to itself, "Strewth! We do not know anything at all about growing mushrooms, so we cannot teach the mushroom growers how to do it, and, therefore, we shall have to spend some money on sending somebody to the mushroom growers to be taught how to grow mushrooms so that he can go back and tell the mushroom growers how to grow them." For an example of arrant nonsense, that takes some beating. I believe there is a strong case for exempting the small specialised producer.

Mr. Iremonger

Would my hon. Friend add steeplejacks in considering that question?

Mr. Mitchell

My hon. Friend has drawn attention to another specialised field. There will be others known to hon. Members.

There is also perhaps a case for having a look at the way in which levies are assessed, because the situation has now arisen where the business profits of close company directors are very often included in the field of levies. I declare what interest I have here since I am associated with a company in this field, but if I have an interest it is also that I have some knowledge of what happens.

There is a curious situation that under the close company legislation a company is forced to distribute 60 per cent. of its profits. If it has any income from rents and that income is taken out by way of—as in most small businesses is the case—the salary of the managing director, that goes in for levy. I cannot imagine that that was meant to be the thinking behind the training board system, that small companies should have to pay levy on their compulsory distribution of profits. That is another anomaly which should have been looked at.

Then there is the whole question of the relative value of "on-the-job" and "off-the-job" training and the cost benefit which comes from each of them. I am sure that the Minister will have seen the fascinating study by Thomas Markson and Jones which was reported in the British Journal of Industrial Relations last July. That very clearly indicated the very much greater cost benefit which is obtainable from "on-the-job" training as opposed to "off-the-jobs" training. Again, that is another example of the sort of thing where something could be gained from Ministerial circulars to the boards giving them guid- ance on what will work successfully and what will not work.

I spoke earlier of training running wild and training for training's sake. I give the utmost praise to one training board—the Food, Drink and Tobacco Industry Training Board. Here we have a board which has had the common sense to avoid what so many other boards have done; that is, to send out to businesses in the industry a demand for money, then to keep the money for the best part of 12 months and then pay it back in dribs and drabs at the end, according to various systems and schemes. This training board has done a netting operation so that those involved in the industry only have to pay at the end of the year the net amount for which they have a liability. That is an enormously more sensible approach than that adopted by many of the other boards and something which could well be drawn to the attention of other boards as a way of doing it. This board has done a good deal to make firms do for themselves what some other boards have insisted they should do for them.

I understand that plans are at an advanced stage for a consultancy service by the Manpower Research Unit of the Department of Employment and Productivity for the training boards. I have great reservations about that. The former Minister of Public Building and Works drew attention earlier this afternoon to the great danger of making projections of employment requirements for five or ten years hence on the basis of statistics which may or may not be absolutely accurate when they are fed into the computer. A constituent of mine has sent me one of the inquiries he has received from the manpower unit to which I referred. I will quote from it because I think it is an illustration of the dangers into which one can fall.

The purpose of the inquiry is to compare the numbers currently employed in various occupations within the hotel industry with a realistic estimate—and I repeat "realistic"—of the numbers needed in five years time. Let us look at some of the questions.

On banquetting staff the document asks: If you cater for banquets and conferences, etc., how many casual staff are normally engaged in the following occupations; waiters, wine waiters, wine butlers, banquetting porters, cloakroom attendants and washers up. Of course the answer depends entirely on the size of the conferences. Therefore whatever statistics are obtained from that would be sheer nonsense.

The document goes on to ask about the future level of business and asks: What do you think is the growth or reduction of your activities in the next five years? If somebody would tell the unfortunate hoteliers whether we shall have a Conservative Government or a Labour Government, whether we shall have selective employment tax, whether we shall have 3 per cent. mortgages, as promised on one occasion, and from what degree of inflation the economy will be suffering and whether there will be another devaluation, making it attractive for Americans to come here on holiday, perhaps some reasonable, sensible answer might be given to this sort of inquiry. But, alas, no such guidance is given.

Then the receivers of the document are asked to state, whether they use now, or whether they expect to use in five years' time, such things as the following catering equipment: Dishwashers, pan handlers and stainless steel as well as the following portion controlled foods: Butter, preserves, and pre-portioned meat; frozen or dehydrated vegetables and pie fillings, pudding mixes and sauce mixtures. What nonsense! How can one possibly project anything sensible out of this sort of thing.

I quote further: Please take the personal services provided and state the main occupation of the staff providing the services—early morning tea, newspapers, shoe-cleaning, hot water bottles and personal laundry operating. I could quote on but it would only make the House weep at some of the nonsense which is included in the document.

At the end we come to the prize, the 64,000 dollar question. Gilbert and Sullivan could not have done better. They say: Future staffing estimates. Taking into account all that you have said in answer to the questions above, please consider fully your estimates of the total staff likely to be needed in the various departments in five years time. That would be nonsense from any association.

I ask the House to look at this. I have not even started on it. There are no fewer than 11 foolscap pages, and there is this gem on the front page: Comprehensive and detailed replies to the questions will be welcome. Please answer freely—on separate sheets of paper if you need more space. If there is to be an association between the training boards and this sort of activity, I hope that it will be looked at extremely closely, indeed.

I regret that the Government have not taken the opportunity on this occasion, and with this Bill, to look more closely at the relationship between industrial training boards and Government training centres, because there must be a considerable case for saying that some of the training boards ought to be using the services provided by Government training centres, and perhaps to be paying for some of the services provided by them for training and retraining people to enter into the scope of the industrial training boards industries. I hope that the Government have done some more constructive thinking on this. If they have, I regret that the results have not been included in this legislation.

6.32 p.m.

Mr. Peter Emery (Honiton)

I do not wish to strike a discordant note as I begin to address the House, but I must say that I am critical of the Government for introducing the Bill at this moment. It is a little strange that the Government, following a recommendation from the House, having set up a committee to examine the work of the Central Training Council and the way in which it ties in with industrial training boards, have not waited for that committee's report to be considered by the public before going ahead with this short Measure to take extra powers to deal with the Industrial Training Act.

That criticism is reinforced by what I consider to be a most unusual fact, namely, that in a Bill of only two main Clauses, one of which deals with financial matters, and the other with the Short Title, the Minister has announced that in Committee he will introduce two new Clauses. We therefore start with the proposition that the Bill will be enlarged by 100 per cent. merely by a statement of the Minister's intention to do something in Committee.

Mr. Dell

One new Clause doing at least two new things.

Mr. Emery

I accept the immense difference between one new Clause doing two things, and two new Clauses doing two things, the same things. I accept that instead of a 100 per cent. increase there is to be only a 50 per cent. increase in the number of new Clauses. I am sorry that the Government have not seen fit to wait until the Cousins Committee's report has been discussed and is known to us all.

It is right and proper that it should be known that the structure of industrial training was set up by a Conservative Act and by a Conservative Government. I took exception to the speech of the right hon. Member for East Ham, North (Mr. Prentice), because, in saying that the Conservative Government had been slow in introducing the necessary Measure during the late 'fifties and early 'sixties, he omitted to mention the opposition which came from many trade union leaders to the provisions of the Bill, and indeed their feeling that it was a considerable attack on the control which trade unions had over their own industrial training. I am delighted that that has not proved to be the case, but let us not rewrite history when trying to take credit for something, or to hit the other side.

With that Act, and with the work done by the Government in setting up, I think, 27 industrial training boards, we in this country have the finest structure for industrial training anywhere in the world, including the United States of America. I hope we can ensure that we make the best use of that structure, and that it is made as efficient as is humanly possible.

I am concerned about this measure because I think that I am the only M.P. to be appointed to any of the Central Training Council's committees. This happened during the short sabbatical that I had from this place, when the then Minister of Labour saw fit to use some of my knowledge by appointing me to the Management, Development and Training Committee.

It seems to me that the effects of the 1964 Act, of the action which can be taken under it, and of the action which can be taken by the industrial training boards, have been under-estimated. One has to realise that about £400 million has already been subscribed by way of levy to these Industrial Training boards. That is a devil of a lot of money for any form of education, and particularly so when it is derived by an extra levy on industry to deal with industrial training.

One matter with which I should like the Minister to deal is the variation in the methods of operation of the various boards. The amount of levy raised by each board varies considerably, from 2.5 per cent. to as low as 0.025 per cent. of total emoluments. When it comes to levies related to the numbers employed, the range is £23 10s. to £3 10s. per head. It is therefore obvious that the extent to which grants can be used as an incentive for training will depend to a considerable extent on the amount of money that is available for grant.

The Minister has been very forthcoming about promising to introduce new Clauses, and there is one matter about which I hope he will do something before the Bill leaves Committee. I am thinking of the variation in the powers in operating the different boards. The work of the boards over the last four and a half years has shown them to have an almost completely autonomous status, and this has sometimes not been in the best interests of training, particularly management training, which is of considerable concern to me. One of the difficulties is that the boards have sometimes not been willing to take advice, both educational and professional, or find out what knowledge exists. Too many boards have set out with a view to inventing the wheel all over again. It has been a waste of time, effort and money. This is a criticism which has been made very widely and one which I would have hoped we might have been able to get over by now.

The problem is that because of the entirely independent status which the law allows the I.T.B.s, any directional guidance can be shrugged off and need in no way apply unless the Minister uses the terribly heavy-handed authority of a directive. No Minister of either party wishes particularly to go to that length. Therefore I wonder whether we ought not to consider, before the Bill comes back to the House again, putting into it a certain power for the Central Training Council to undertake co-ordinating action between the industrial training boards.

The fees and allowances paid by different training boards vary considerably. One of the problems and criticisms that arise in industry is that it becomes quite apparent that one course is applicable and accepted in one industry but not in another as regards grant payment. In the same way, it is quite evident that the amount of fees refunded varies from board to board from 50 per cent. to 80 per cent. to 100 per cent. of the actual costs. The refund of subsistence and travel expenses also varies. This is related to salary by some boards; some go up to £6 a day, and some make a full refund. When people are away for a long course, the amount of refund of salary depends on the board; some will get 50 per cent., some 100 per cent. and others only £15 a day.

These anomalies must attract considerable criticism, particularly when in the same industries certain people covered by one industrial training board get a maximum allowance while others in the same part of the organisation qualify only for a lower amount. So, of course, people begin to be critical of the training boards. While it has been quite evident from the work of the Central Training Council that it has tried to reduce these anomalies, they still exist. Therefore, I wonder if the Minister could find some method of giving powers to the Central Training Council to set a pattern which could be accepted by all the boards. Perhaps a minimum standard is required, and boards could go above it if they wished, but I believe that this co-ordinating factor is of the greatest importance.

Members of the Consultative Council of Professional Management Organisations, which I happen to serve as chairman, are particularly concerned that some of the industrial training boards are setting their own standards in management training. An example, which I can document if the Minister wishes, is that a certain industrial training board was setting the level of training necessary for personnel officers within that industry. It had not even bothered to consult the Institute of Personnel Management, and in the view of that institute certain of the standards set were entirely out of date and irrelevant and ought to have been brought up to date and up to modern practice. Because the power of the board is absolute, it need take no notice of the recommendations that may be made by the C.C.P.M.O. or the Institute of Personnel Management.

In the same way, it is terribly important that in setting the educational criteria for training the industrial training boards should consult to a greater extent than, in my judgment, they have done so far. These consultations should cover educational centres, the technical colleges, the universities, where this applies, and the professional bodies, where they exist.

I feel, therefore, that there is great scope for improvement in the Act. That does not mean that I am being immensely critical of the Bill, but it is quite obvious that since the Act has now been operating for six years we want there to be an overall new look to find out the methods by which it can be improved. I am very sorry that the Government are trying to jump the gun on this and go forward with a very piffling little Bill to get over certain legal aspects of problems which could quite easily have waited for 12 months, when one complete bit of legislation could have dealt with the whole matter.

There are three other minor points to which I hope the Minister will give some attention. Will he look at the problem of the industrial training boards in connection with the validation of courses? This varies from board to board. Some take one line of action and others take another. Should there not be some attempt to get a standard procedure?

In the same way, is there not a major need for the Central Training Council at this stage to look at the effectiveness of the different appraisal systems which have been brought into operation by the various industrial training boards? Surely it would be better and make for much better understanding between industry and Government and the I.T.B.s if there could be one system of appraisal instead of a variety of systems.

There is another major problem to which the industrial training boards have not turned their minds, although this does not diminish the problem in any way. It is the problem of the requirements for the training of older managers and more mature executives, or older workmen and more mature craftsmen who are suddenly replaced, whether because of a take-over or because of new methods in technology. These people sometimes have another 10 or 15 years' excellent service to give to industry and the community, and very little thought is given at the moment by the industrial training boards to dealing with upgrading this section of the community. I believe that it would be to the benefit of industry and the economy as a whole to give some thought to this problem so that these people, instead of being brushed aside, may have the proper continual training to keep them up to date and effective within the meaning of the Act.

I come lastly to a specific point. I am delighted to see that the hon. Gentleman the Member for Aberdare (Mr. Probert) has just returned, because he is a considerable expert on the matter of local government officers. I find myself in some difficulty, having listened to what he had to say, because the A.M.C. and the County Councils Association are very much of the view that the powers given under the Bill should not be used to form a local government I.T.B. I do not have to remind the hon. Member that a voluntary local government training board already exists, and the A.M.C. and the County Councils Association feel that it is doing a very adequate job. They hope that the Government will leave it alone and not take some of the classifications which now fall under the local government training board to be covered by other industrial training boards not concerned with local government. This might well happen if the Minister used the powers under this Act to formulate a local government industrial training board.

Mr. Probert

I appreciate what the hon. Gentleman has said, but my point was that there are recalcitrant local authorities which, if this became a statutory provision, would have to play their part. Unfortunately, too many local authorities now are not playing their part in this voluntary effort.

Mr. Emery

I find that point most interesting. My information was that the recalcitrant local authorities were few. Will the Minister give an assurance—whih I believe he said might be forthcoming—that he will not use the powers to set up a local government industrial training board? Will he also help the House by giving the figures, if such exist, of recalcitrant, or perhaps unco-operative, local authorities which have not yet entered the scheme?

Mr. Dell

I think about 75 per cent. of the local authorities provide about 92 per cent. of the total levy.

Mr. Emery

That answers the question immediately. Perhaps the Minister will now turn his mind to the assurance for which I asked.

This was a golden opportunity for the Government to have attempted to take industrial training a full step forward, whereas the Bill is just a little shuffle. The Government should have waited for the report of the Cousins Committee. Has the Minister received the main recommendations of the Cousins Committee? If he has not, will the report be held up because of the illness of the chairman? If so, for how long will it be held up, and is the Minister taking steps to have the extensive work which has already been carried out brought to his attention? Will he ensure that the report is published? It is essential that the House, industry, the C.B.I. and the industrial training boards should have this important report available. With all those questions, I wish the Bill success.

6.53 p.m.

Mr. Ted Leadbitter (The Hartlepools)

My right hon. Friend in his preliminary remarks wisely referred to the record. The Bill represents a small step in the direction of extra training, in the light of the potential and of the record so far. It is estimated that the grant and loan powers under Section 5 of the 1964 Act of £50 million will be increased under the Bill by £20,000. This shows how small is the step, but it is no reason for belittling the Bill. My right hon. Friend must have made an evaluation, and we have already had evidence of this in his remarks about the voluntary local authorities training board. If it is proper to have statutory bodies over a wide range of training boards to enable us to get our teeth into the problem of the essential need for training, why should local authorities be excluded? Local authorities are one of the largest spending powers in the country and have under their wing many people with differing skills, professional and manual.

The voluntary bodies have an excellent and encouraging record, and intervention might be an invitation to criticism, but they would not be unhappy with a statutory requirement carrying with it financial support to enable them to enlarge their area of activity beyond the 92 per cent. and bring within their ambit the few recalcitrant authorities. On that count alone I feel that there should be a statutory requirement upon local authorities.

Although it is my normal practice to sit here throughout a debate, I have unfortunately had to be absent for a short time, but one or two contributions which I have heard were of a highly critical nature. Both parties can take credit for supporting the principle of industrial training boards, but, in spite of the large number of industrial training boards which have been created in the past six years involving so many people and skills, and the great problem of organising for training, it is early days for us to be able to make a proper evaluation. It is a little premature to be over-critical of the people who have worked so hard on the boards to try to bring to acceptable standards the level of training in certain industries. I hope that the industrial training boards will be encouraged that the criticisms are mainly concerned with ensuring that the training boards shall be better than they are now and are an acknowledgement that they have done excellent work during their short existence.

I am concerned about many things which appear not to have been done. I do not profess any expertise here, but in moving around the country and listening to industrialists and trade union organisers I have noticed certain unhappy rumblings about industrial training boards. These may arise out of clashes of personality or out of the stringencies of training programmes impinging upon demands for levies and so on. I speak as a layman, and this may possibly be an exaggeration of what these rumblings mean. Nevertheless, there is concern about this matter. It might not be unreasonable to ask the industrial training board chairmen and the officials responsible for drawing up training programmes to examine certain matters which do not appear to be fully attended to.

Reference has been made to the older people in work. I have many times in this House raised the matter of the over-45s who comprise a forgotten section of the working community. In my part of the world 45 per cent. of the unemployed are over the age of 45 and do not appear to be getting a fair crack of the whip in job opportunities or from the point of view of training in industry. Therefore, I hope that the training boards will look at this very reliable section of the working population to see what can be done. The Government training centres and other training establishments should take the opportunity to examine whether it would be worth while to take on to their books for training men in this age group in order to help them in any way they can and to open up job opportunities.

Sometimes when discussing training matters we tend to forget the problems of the disabled. I do not wish to be accused of introducing an emotional note into this debate which might be misinterpreted, but certainly the more I meet disabled people the more I am astonished to discover their adaptability in so many ways. I would ask the chairmen and officers of industrial training boards and those who are responsible for supervising Government training centres to see that there is a place in industry for disabled people. I believe that the principal employers should take on their books a quota of disabled who could be given training.

There is a further category of people who because of their physical condition are permanently engaged in light work. In the precision engineering industry, where there are automation and semi-automation processes, I am sure that these categories of light work could be reexamined from a training point of view.

In my part of the world there is a great need to keep up the momentum of training, and we are very pleased indeed with the Government's record so far. The economy of the Northern Region cannot be resuscitated unless we pay due regard to this aspect. I am satisfied that during the past five years there has been a real break-through in this matter. Nevertheless, I feel that some levels of training are set far too low. The population of the country is now far more intelligent, and its ability to start training at higher levels is an accepted fact. Could not the training programmes be studied again to see if we are getting the best out of the time and money spent?

I should like my hon. Friend to look at one matter, and if he cannot reply tonight I hope that he will be able to look at this point soon. This involves a matter in my constituency that was brought to my attention recently when I was discussing training problems with the chairman of the construction industrial training board and several members of the education committee. Concern was expressed about the difficulty in getting started on the industrial training wing of the new College of Further Education in Hartlepool. It was suggested that the delay in beginning construction on this scheme arose through difficulty in getting a decision from my hon. Friend's Department or another Department. I hope that this point can be looked at since we in the Hartlepools become very unhappy if such schemes are unnecessarily delayed. I am sure that if there is any delay my hon. Friend will be the first to jump on the problem to see who is responsible for not letting us get on with this substantial wing.

I am sorry to bring in this constituency matter, but we feel that it is very important. If my hon. Friend cannot answer me tonight on this point, I hope that he will take note of it and in due course let me know the answer.

7.8 p.m.

Mr. Nicholas Scott (Paddington, South)

This has been a wide-ranging debate, and I share some of the puzzlement expressed on both sides of the House that we are debating this tiny Bill when the time is surely ripe for a full-scale look at the whole problem of training, at the end of which there could then be a substantial Bill.

I am sure all those who have participated in the debate feel satisfaction with the achievements of industrial training over the last five years. A summary of the view taken by the House today is that although we are pleased with the situation, we are far from complacent. At times during my remarks I shall criticise some aspects of training, but I am only too willing to pay tribute to the Central Training Council and to all the boards which have done so much in such a short time to improve the quantity and quality of training in Britain.

The situation in some of the engineering industries in certain scarce skills is even worse than it was two years ago. It cannot even by said that the present level of the advance, let alone what has been achieved, is sufficient to solve the many manpower problems in industry.

I should like to take up the point about manpower forecasting made by the right hon. Member for East Ham, North (Mr. Prentice). There are immense dangers inherent in forecasting, as my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mr. David Mitchell) made clear, and when forecasts are based on a ludicrously bureaucratic system such as he outlined there are real dangers. When people are faced with an 11-page foolscap form they tend to take it lightheartedly, and when that information is fed into a computer the whole exercise becomes meaningless. I hope that the new Institute of Manpower Studies will do something to draw together the information that is available about manpower forecasting and will try to develop improved techniques for collecting, collating and using information.

It would appear from the form referred to by my hon. Friend that firms are invited to project their present mixes of manpower five years ahead, and those are used as the bases for the forecasts. All too often, that sort of complex and tedious exercise is carried out at a very junior level in the firms concerned, with the result that the ultimate output is virtually valueless. In my view, it would be mistaken to base too many of our training plans on manpower forecasts while they are in their present infancy. We should concentrate on geting as much flexibility and as much ability to meet new situations as possible into industrial training, rather than tying ourselves to any manpower forecasts which come out of the system.

I want to make a few brief general points about industrial training which should have been covered in a Bill at this time and will have to be tackled in the very near future. Mention has been made of the Government's training programme. I doubt very much whether it should remain a completely separate stream of training. In my view, it should be incorporated into the main work of the industrial training boards.

There are several questions which arise on the Government training centres programme. My understanding is that they are still only about 70 per cent. filled at the moment. That is a waste of important and useful resources. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us a little about the criteria used when deciding what courses are to be provided at Government training centres. One hears it suggested sometimes that it is the availability of staff to provide the courses, rather than a real need for the people who are to be turned out by the courses, which is an important determining factor.

Another important question concerns the present success in placing the trainees from Government training centres. The right hon. Member for East Ham, North spoke of the resistance from some of the craft unions to the patterns of training in Government training centres, and we know of trade union resistance to some of the trainees, who are branded as dilutees by certain sections of the trade union movement. We should like to know how much resistance is still met in efforts to place trainees and how relevant they find the skills which they have acquired in Government training centres to the obtaining of jobs once they leave.

I take issue with the hon. Member for Paisley (Mr. John Robertson) on the importance and relevance of apprenticeships. I do not believe that we shall get any sense in our industrial training until we turn our backs on a traditional apprenticeship pattern across a wide range of industry. Outside this House, I earn my living in the printing industry. In that and many other industries, technical advances and changes in the skills which are necessary occur at such a rapid rate that it is nonsense to train a man for five or six years at the beginning of his working life and imagine that that will stand him in good stead until he retires. Instead, training should be done in short, sharp periods at the beginning and at different stages of his working life if he is to be kept up to date. I hope that the Minister will be able to comment on the progress of the boards in overcoming this sort of inertia.

My hon. Friend the Member for Honiton (Mr. Emery) touched on the experience in the United States. We can learn a great deal from the United States in terms of the use to which part-time training facilities are put. In saying that, I mean not only day release, where it has been disappointing to see a very slow growth, but also part-time training at evening classes, possibly leading on to the winning of scholarships or bursaries to enable men to take on full-time courses. I share with the hon. Member for Paisley the passion to link all stages of our industrial training programme as closely as possible with the general educational system, so making the very best use of it, and this is one way in which a closer link might be obtained.

I come now to two wider points. The first is that the Government should be further advanced in their thinking at this stage. I have a great deal of respect for the Minister of State, but his speech took us no further forward than that of his predecessor on 24th June, 1969, when he outlined the way in which training was going, the problems that we were up against, and made it clear that action would soon be necessary. In his speech today, the right hon. Gentleman went over the way in which training is going, pointed to the problems confronting us, and indicated that action will soon be necessary. In my view, the Government should give more attention to this and be ready in the near future with major proposals.

I have already paid tribute to the work of the industrial training boards. However, we in this House and the boards themselves would be making a great mistake if, like the right hon. Member for East Ham, North, we did not take seriously the growing criticism of the boards. The worst that could happen in industrial training would be for criticism to grow and for antagonism between the boards and those whom they are supposed to serve to develop.

There are real resentments in industry at some aspects of industrial training. Some boards seem to suffer from a lack of financial discipline. Firms resent the growth of paper work and bureaucracy and the inflexible attitude of some boards towards certain types of training. My hon. Friend the Member for Honiton spoke about the validation of courses, and it occurs to me to wonder whether the onus of proof should not be shifted so that the board would have to show why it declined to approve a certain form of training, rather than the employer having to show why it should be approved.

Firms also resent the way in which the levy-grant system operates strongly against the firm with a stable labour force. Such a firm is limited in the amount of training that it can carry out. The firm with a rapid turnover of people can always go on with training and continue to make a profit on its training account. The levy-grant system should be studied with a view to seeing whether anything can be done to tackle that problem.

The right hon. Member for East Ham, North made one of the few really party points when he criticised the Conservative Government's attitude towards training. I thought that I carried the House with me when I stressed the importance of the training boards, the unions and industry co-operating with one mind on the development of training. The welcoming attitude which exists now and existed in 1964 did not exist when the Carr Committee was set up in the 1950s. The Conservative Government had to overcome a great deal of resistance on both sides of industry to the new concept of training embodied in the 1964 Act.

Mr. Prentice

My complaint was that for several years they made no attempt to overcome that resistance. If they had given a lead sooner, we could have had an Industrial Training Act earlier and a good deal more training could have been effected.

Mr. Scott

One can go back for ever and a day on that line. But the Carr Committee, which was set up in 1958, began the process of overcoming this resistance which led to the 1964 Act. Without that co-operation it would have been impossible to have the rapid advance in industrial training that we have had over the last five years.

Mr. Prentice

The Carr Committee did not begin to foreshadow a change. Its report was putting a seal of approval upon arrangements within industry that were demonstrably not measuring up to what was needed. It was several years later that the Government produced a White Paper heralding the Industrial Training Act.

Mr. Scott

Any objective assessment of the history of industrial training will show that the Carr Committee made a major start in the train of thought that led to the 1964 Act.

I turn now to points on the Bill. First, the Local Authority Board. I take the points made by the hon. Member for Aberdare (Mr. Probert), on which my hon. Friend the Member for Honiton has already taken issue with him. I should think that in a situation where a voluntary training board is raising 92 per cent. of the levy that a statutory board could raise and is already carrying out first-class work, it should be given a fair chance to see whether it can work as effectively, or even more effectively, than statutory boards before it is superseded. I should not want the Government to rush into a precipitate formation of a statutory board before giving a voluntary board a fair chance to show its paces.

Mr. Probert

I accept the premise that the hon. Gentleman has put forward. If the voluntary board could succeed in reaching 100 per cent. I should be the last to object. But if 8 per cent.—it is not 8 per cent. numerically; this is on the financial side—persists in coming out, then some statutory provision must be put in.

Mr. Scott

That is a fair point. I am merely asking for time to see whether it can improve those figures.

I should like to make one point relevant to the Bill, but which has wider implications. The Government have, once again, exempted Crown employees from its provisions. Yesterday, talking about equal pay, we saw how the Government had exempted the Armed Forces from the provisions of that Bill. I remember in the debates on the Race Relations Bill two years ago how my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for St. Marylebone (Mr. Hogg) had to force the Government, aided by a revolt of hon. Gentlemen opposite, to accept that that Bill should apply to the Government.

There is a real and important psychological point here. If the Government are placing burdens on industry and are asking it to co-operate and work with them in this scheme, they should not opt out by placing burdens on others which they are not prepared to accept themselves.

I welcome the extension of the scheme to employers and to the self-employed. My hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, North (Mr. Iremonger) raised several points on members' clubs. I take his point about the increasing burdens that these clubs have suffered. They are, after all, still reeling from the effects of S.E.T. They are non-profit making organisations. They are, in a real sense, private bodies and they are now, under the Bill, to be considered as engaged in industry or commerce. I find it difficult to see any point of principle upon which we could distinguish between the larger clubs and the hotels and restaurants with which they are in competition, for they are essentially providing the same services—food, drink and beds. I would rather the board raised the minimum payroll level which would exempt all but the largest clubs from the levy-grant system. There might even be a case—I ask the Minister to consider this when we are in Committee—for having a slightly higher limit on payroll exemption for members' clubs. I hope that the Minister will agree that they are, if not of a completely different kind, at least in a slightly different category from organisations which are truly engaged in industry and commerce. It must be pointed out that if the clubs are called upon to pay the levy, then, like everybody else, they will be eligible for grants if they are engaging, as many of them are, in training.

The Bill makes some small advance in industrial training, but it is far from enough. As a nation we must begin to look at our total manpower policy and our approach to the mobility of our labour force which embraces not only training, but also redundancy payments, housing policy and matters of that kind, and try to create a more efficient market in labour in Britain. For what it is worth, I welcome the Bill, but it will not be long before we shall need further action in industrial training.

7.26 p.m.

Mr. Dell

With the permission of the House I will reply to the debate.

We have had an interesting general debate on industrial training. I hope, as a result, that the Bill will get a Second Reading. Much of what has been said has been critical of the industrial training system as it has developed, but there is general agreement that there have been considerable advances since the 1964 Act.

The object of the introductory passages in my opening speech was to indicate that I accept that there are problems about which it is necessary for us to think very seriously. This, after all, was the reason for asking the Central Training Council to undertake its review. Nevertheless, I am glad that the House in general has accepted that considerable advances have been made both in the quantity and quality of training in this country.

I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for The Hartlepools (Mr. Leadbitter) will accept that it is not an adequate measure of the Bill's importance that it may lead to £20,000-worth of additional expenditure out of the £50 million which is permitted under the 1964 Act. The Bill extends the coverage of the industrial training system by over 10 per cent. and introduces the possibility of including the employed and self-employed within the remit of the industrial training boards.

The hon. Member for Paddington, South (Mr. Scott) emphasised the urgency of undertaking any necessary reforms of the system. The hon. Member for Honiton (Mr. Emery) suggested that we should have waited for the C.T.C. review report before legislating. However, there were certain points on which we knew we had to legislate and, if possible, legislate urgently. One was self-employment, because this is connected with the change in the system of financing the Agricultural Training Board. Another was to bring back within the scope of the Hotel and Catering Industry Training Board those who had been removed from its scope by the judgment of the House of Lords. If we had not done this now it would have meant waiting for any further legislation that might arise from the C.T.C. review report. Therefore, it seemed sensible to introduce this Bill, which in no way prejudices anything which may be necessary as a result of that report.

I should have thought that it should also be remembered that much which will arise out of that report could be done by administrative measures. We were under some pressure from the Opposition Front Bench to go ahead with this legislation. When, at Question Time recently, I could not give a categorical assurance to the right hon. Member for Mitcham (Mr. R. Carr) that this Bill would be introduced this Session, he seemed to deplore that. We have now introduced it, and it is worth while, although we are not legislating more widely, nor as I have said does it prejudice anything further which may be necessary.

The hon. Member for Honiton introduced an idea which is worth considering, and which I am sure will be considered by the Central Training Council Review Committee: that is, how far one should take central control of the activities of the training boards. He will also agree, I think, that introducing central control would be a very controversial proposition which should be discussed thoroughly with everyone affected. It would depart in a major respect from the philosophy of the Industrial Training Act, 1964. It is not wrong for that reason, but it is a highly controversial proposal. It does not seem necessary to delay this Bill until we have fully considered whatever the Central Training Council proposes. Does the hon. Member for Honiton wish to intervene?

Mr. Emery

Since the right hon. Member invites me to do so, I would only say that of course it will be controversial. Most of the arguments are already known. These are not facts which have not been discussed. The views of the C.B.I. and of the unions are well known. It does not mean that it has to be overall control: it needs only to be powers to co-ordinate in certain aspects. That is certainly within the considerable powers, if not of the Minister of State, certainly of the Minister.

Mr. Dell

I am always too ready to give way, and apparently I am beginning to give way even when hon. Members do not wish to intervene.

The sort of control which the hon. Gentleman now seems to be proposing could be done by administration and therefore is not a good reason for delaying action on the Bill. However, we shall see what the Central Training Council proposes and whether legislation is necessary as a result.

The hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Mr. Dudley Smith) also criticised the inadequacy of the Bill in deal- ing with certain major problems which he sees in the training board system, but he was not constructive in saying what should be done about it. At least the hon. Member for Honiton gave us a programme for greater central control, but the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington gave us no guidance as to whether he wants the Government, Parliament or the C.T.C. to exercise greater control. To that extent, his contribution to that part of the debate was less helpful. I certainly agree that we should find ways of keeping industries better informed of the activities of their boards. I also agree that we should ensure better co-ordination of the work of the boards, although a great deal is being done here which should not be ignored. But much of this can be done administratively; we will, I hope, be advancing along that line as a result of the report of the C.T.C.

But I must emphasise—this was the central point of the philosophy of the Industrial Training Act, introduced by hon. Members opposite—that responsibility is placed on the boards. Hon. Gentlemen opposite may criticise the bureaucracy of the boards and their financial administration, but that Act, under which we are operating, which was passed by hon. Gentlemen opposite, place responsibility fairly and squarely on the boards.

If they are now saying that that was wrong and that responsibility should be taken from the boards, that to that extent the links between the boards and industry should be broken in favour of more detailed central control by Government, as a means of avoiding the bureaucracy and the failure of financial administration which they detect and dislike, they should say so clearly.

The Government can give guidance, as can the C.T.C. The hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mr. David Mitchell) asked whether we issued circulars. We are in regular communication with the boards through the assessors appointed by the Department of Employment and Productivity, through regular conferences with chief officers, during which such matters as we have debated today are discussed, and we issue guidance as necessary, often in the form of C.T.C. memoranda.

The lack of financial discipline which is complained of is properly debatable in the House when levy orders are presented and the House can pray against them. No doubt if, in some cases, hon. Members think that there is a lack of financial discipline, they will pray against the relevant orders. It is a little unfortunate that this sort of accusation is made generally, when I suspect that hon. Members probably have in mind some limited examples which we cannot really debate today.

If there is a Prayer against an Order the other side of the case can be put. These boards are constituted according to the provisions of the Industrial Training Act, by employers, and by trade unions. We take the guidance of the relevant trade associations and unions in appointing people to the boards. It is a pity if it is to be said generally of such people, as appears to have been said by a number of hon. Members opposite, that they cannot exercise financial discipline or administer boards without unnecessary bureaucracy. The hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington had a graphic phrase about industrialists on these boards "engaging in unnecessary and wasteful bureaucracy". At any rate, he will not recommend a Government of industrialists as a way of avoiding bureaucracy if he thinks that this is a fair description of what these boards have been doing.

Mr. Dudley Smith

Those are not really my words but those of a large number of industrialists about some boards. The right hon. Gentleman must have had a large amount of correspondence from a wide variety of people making just this sort of allegation.

Mr. Dell

I know that this sort of allegation is made; what I am saying is that it is a pity if this sort of allegation is made generally about boards. What hon. Members possibly may have in mind is particular boards about which they can speak on particular occasions laid down each year for the benefit of the House, under which the House may consider the operations of particular boards.

What I dislike is general remarks of this kind which may be taken in the country as referring to the administration of boards generally, when even the hon. Members making these accusations do not regard them as true of boards generally. I suggest that it would have been better if that sort of remark had been made, if it was thought to be justified, of specific boards rather than of boards generally.

On this question of administrative costs and unnecessary and wasteful bureaucracy, I was interested to hear from a number of hon. Members that they thought that the voluntary local government board had lower administrative costs than others. I in no way hold it against the voluntary local government board, to whose work I paid tribute in my opening remarks, but I am informed that the situation is to the contrary.

For the year ending March, 1969, the administrative expenses of the Local Government Training Board were about £100,000 on a levy income of just over £2 million; in other words, less than 5 per cent., which is a little above the average of the statutory boards. On administration, as opposed to training, the expenses of boards as a whole were about f4 million on a total levy income of about £130 million for the year ending March, 1969. In other words, the Local Government Training Board has, on this account, no special claim to virtue.

I do not place any particular weight on this fact, taken on its own. I do not say that the Local Government Training Board is to be criticised for its high administrative costs, because the question is what administration it needs to administer the training that is provided. The percentage of levy does not seem to be an accurate guide to whether or not it is engaging in "unnecessary and wasteful bureaucracy". It depends, for example, on the way in which it operates its levy system. However, if hon. Members are to take this as a measurement, then the Local Government Training Board does not show up the statutory boards as being guilty in this respect.

The hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington asked when the Cousins Committee's report would be available. I expect that report to be in our hands shortly. I hope that it will not be delayed as a result of the regrettable illness of Mr. Cousins. Whether the report will be published is a matter which will have to be decided when we have it, but my predisposition is always in favour of publication whenever possible.

Mr. Scott

When the right hon. Gentleman uses the word "shortly" in this context does he mean weeks rather than months?

Mr. Dell

I hope to have it in about two months.

The hon. Member for Basingstoke argued the necessity for closer liaison between Government training centres and industrial training boards and said that the boards should use the G.T.C. facilities. He made a reasonable point, and we are considering it in relation to specific training boards. Again, however, I know of no difficulty in doing that at present; and this is another example of something that could be done without legislation.

Three points received a great deal of attention in many speeches. The first, which was raised in particular by the hon. Member for Ilford, North (Mr. Iremonger), was members' clubs. I cannot imagine why the hon. Gentleman thought it vindictive to list members' clubs, and he read the list to the House. I would have thought that one might be accused of being dishonourable or of concealing something if one did not list them.

We have listed them and have said that this is something that we intend to do. The hon. Gentleman's accusation of vindictiveness might appropriately be made against his hon. Friends on the Front Bench opposite, for it was the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington who said that the argument was finely balanced—so he obviously acquits us of vindictiveness—while the hon. Member for Paddington, South saw strong arguments, on grounds of principle, for including them, and said that it would be difficult to draw a line for excluding them. Thus, the charge of vindictiveness by the hon. Member for Ilford, North was rather unfortunate.

The Bill includes members' clubs, though we can go into this matter in detail in Committee. However, I see no reason, in principle, for excluding them, when they are using the same sort of staff as institutions like hotels, large restaurants and proprietary clubs which are clearly within the scope of the Measure; and, of course, the number of employers, possibly 14,000, is not negligible.

In any event, what we are debating here is whether they should be within the scope of the Industrial Training Act. If there is adequate reason for excluding them from the scope of a particular board, then that will be a matter which the House can consider when we present, if we do, an order including them, and that would be done only after consultation.

I remind hon. Members, as they will see from the order which the House approved in 1966, which included members' clubs within the scope of the Hotel and Catering Industry Training Board, that at that time we excluded members' clubs not providing main meals or board or lodging for reward. That effectively cut out workmen's clubs and the general run of small clubs. It would be possible in an order to specify exactly what clubs we had in mind. We could at that time take note of the suggestion made by the hon. Member for Paddington, South, but I have reservations about the sorts of exclusion to which he referred, where there might be a payroll of below a certain level.

Mr. Iremonger

The right hon. Gentleman said that if he decided to introduce an order bringing members' clubs within the scope of a particular board, that would be done only after consultation. Would he say with whom the consultations would take place?

Mr. Dell

We would have what we considered to be the necessary consultations. If the hon. Gentleman pointed out, in the course of that consultation, that I had omitted somebody, then I could certainly include that person or persons in the consultations. We try to be as fair as we can and we would have no motive for excluding from consultation anybody who could appropriately be involved.

This brings me to the point made widely in the debate; namely, the question of local authorities and whether they should be included. I gave the House an assurance that if the intention were to introduce an order to set up a statutory local government training board, there would be the fullest previous consultation. According to my information, it is wrong to think that all local authorities are opposed to this. It is true that the County Councils Association and the Association of Municipal Corporations are not happy about it and have indicated that view to me. However, it is equally true that other local authorities are not against the proposal. Trade unions have indicated that they are in favour of it. It has, therefore, been thought right—although we are not questioning the fact that in its first two years the existing voluntary board has done very well—to take this enabling power which, as I say, we would not use without previous consultation.

The hon. Member for Honiton was worried about the fragmentation of the training of local authority employees as a result of being brought within the scope of the Measure. He might bear in mind that by bringing these employees within its scope, we are undertaking, to a considerable degree, responsibility for the training of those people. It is perhaps easier for us to decide, if we thought it right, not to fragment—I am making no commitment here—if we knew that we had the ultimate power to establish a statutory board, should that be thought necessary.

Reference was made to Crown employment and it was regretted by a number of hon. Members that such employment is excluded. This is a debatable point, and there are many in favour of including Crown employment. Nevertheless, it has so far been thought an unnecessary complication to place on Government Departments the obligations of the levy and grants system if the objectives could be achieved more simply in other ways.

The then Minister of Labour, the right hon. Member for Grantham (Mr. Godber), gave an undertaking on 20th November, 1963, that Government Departments would, in respect of their own employees, at least equal the standards set by the training boards for industrial training and associated further training. He gave an assurance that: my colleagues will see that their Departments make a fair and reasonable contribution to training in the appropriate industries."— [OFFICIAL REPORT, 20th November, 1963; Vol. 684, c. 1013–14.] Those who took over from the right hon. Member for Grantham and other Ministers of that time have lived up to the undertaking which the right hon. Gentleman then gave. I think many examples could be quoted of training which actually exists and of the fact that this training is comparable with that which goes on under the aegis of industrial training boards. For example, according to the latest report from the engineering training board the estimated number of trainees in the industry is 17.4 per cent. and the percentage of engineering apprentices to craftsmen in Government employment is now 22.3 per cent. In addition there are external courses to prepare them for promotion which widen their career prospects.

Mr. David Mitchell

Can the right hon. Gentleman reassure me that it would be possible for him to accept an Amendment, should he so decide, during Committee stage to insert this in the Bill? There is nothing in the Long Title which would prevent this being done?

Mr. Dell

I do not think I should too readily say that to the hon. Member because I am not so very expert about the procedures of this House, but I think he is right. The Long Title is, as a matter of fact, rather short: A Bill to amend the Industrial Training Act 1964". I interpret that to mean that the suggested Amendment would probably be in order.

Mr. Dudley Smith

Will the right hon. Gentleman have another look at this, because the good will aspect is involved? I am sure we have gone a stage further than when my right hon. Friend the Member for Grantham (Mr. Godber) made the point. Surely because of the resentment felt by some industrialists it would be very advantageous if this could be done.

Mr. Dell

I have had some indication this evening that an Amendment will be put down in Committee, and I shall therefore have to consider it seriously.

Criticisms have been made of the levy and grant system. I do not want to go into this in detail because that would take too long, but I make one point about it. Tribute has been paid to the advance which industrial training has made as a result of the training board system. I do not believe this would have taken place without the incentive of the grant system, and all criticisms of it should be considered against that background. Of course there is room for flexibility and for amendment of the levy and grant system as the overall training provided by individual firms improves. In the criticisms of the levy and grant system let us not forget that it has made a very considerable contribution to improving the standard of training in this country.

My right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham, North (Mr. Prentice), who put a number of questions to me, is no longer in his place. He told me that he had to leave before I replied to the debate. I shall take advantage of that fact and will write to him giving answers to the questions he asked. The hon. Member for Paddington,South asked about occupancy of Government training centres and about their part in the total industrial training picture. The occupancy at 12th January, 1970, was 78 per cent., not 70 per cent. He should remember that new Government training centres are now quite rapidly coming into existence and it takes time to fill them up. This has an impact on the percentage of occupancy.

One reason for the fact that the percentage is at that level rather than nearer to 100 per cent. is the difficulty of attracting suitable trainees in certain parts of the country. We are now using the new sponsored training scheme to help to fill places, and 90 per cent. of trainees are placed in trades at the end of their three months' course. That should give an indication that the main criterion in filling these places is the possibility of placing the trainees in useful occupations once they are trained.

The hon. Member asked about resistance by unions to placing of trainees and resistance to dilutees. Of course there are difficulties with unions in various parts of the country although generally we are receiving co-operation from the unions. But for that co-operation we could not have had the advance we have had in industrial training. In this whole matter an important educational battle is necessary to ensure that the lesson of industrial training is thoroughly understood throughout the country. The hon. Member should not fasten his attention on trade unions alone. No trade union has come to me saying that the levy in any particular industry was too high. I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham, North that industrial training boards have to give a lead. If they do give a lead they will sometimes receive criticism from employers in their industries who have to pay the levy as a result, but that lead is essential and without it we would not have made the advance which we have made.

We have made an advance of great proportions and it is very important to the economy of the country. This Bill is an important addition to the legislation under which we are operating and it will enable us to extend the scope of the industrial training boards in certain important respects. I look forward to the Committee stage during which, obviously, interesting Amendments will be moved, but I do not think any criticism made in this debate should be allowed to detract, either in the mind of the House or more generally, from the great success we have had in industrial training. It is not yet sufficient and it is still subject to a number of criticisms, but nevertheless it is laying the basis for the further development in which we are all interested.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time.

Bill committed to a Standing Committee pursuant to Standing Order No. 40 (Committal of Bills).