YTS (Hansard, 14 February 1989)

§ 5. Mr. Battle
To ask the Secretary of State for Employment whether he has any plans to increase the non-work content in YTS; and if he will make a statement.

§ Mr. Cope
We have no plans to increase the non-work content in YTS. The emphasis is increasingly moving towards achieving approved vocational qualifications by the most appropriate route rather than specifying particular routes.

§ Mr. Battle
Is not the reality that the non-work content is being decreased and the Government are watering down the original YTS requirements as set out in the new training initiative in 1981 by reneging on the 20-week on-the-job off-the-job training promise? Are not the Government using the scheme not for real and useful long-term training, as the Minister suggested earlier. but as a means of making out to us that the unemployment figures are falling?

§ Mr. Cope
On the contrary, we are introducing increased flexibility into the youth training scheme in cases where it can lead to approved national vocational qualifications. We have introduced the changes to increase the number of people who achieve qualifications on the scheme. That is why we are varying the mix.

§ Mr. Paice
Does my right hon. Friend agree that increasing the role of vocational qualifications in the youth training scheme is warmly welcomed by employers and would-be employers who recognise qualifications as an important achievement? Does he also recognise that the training standards advisory service within the Training Agency ensures that all managing agents are constantly improving the quality of their training, which matters more than simple duration?

§ Mr. Cope
Yes, we have for some time been emphasising the importance of the quality of training, through the work done by the training standards advisory service, among others, but quality and qualifications are also important to the young people.

§ Mr. Nellist
Would not a guarantee of stability, or better still an increase in the proportion of non-work training, for people on the youth training scheme also serve to reduce accidents which have grown from 69 fatal or major accidents per 100,000 trainees in 1984 to 143 in March 1988? Should not parents who send their sons and daughters on a youth training scheme in the morning be able to have confidence that they will return home at night with the same number of limbs as they had when they left?

§ Mr. Cope
The hon. Gentleman should not try to frighten people in that way. In the first place, he is two questions late. Secondly, he will have heard my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State, the Member for Teignbridge (Mr. Nicholls), say that the reporting of accidents changed in 1986, as the hon. Gentleman should well know.