Can somebody put the comment made, as noted below, from skills Minister John Hayes; into English please? Speaking to the Commons, he stated "We will remove all health and safety requirements beyond what health and safety legislation requires""

In English this means "I am highly skilled in promising to do nothing while appearing to support whatever bandwagon is big among the party supporters at the moment"

It is pure gobbledegook. All that is/has happened is that a couple of bodies such as the Skills funding Agency and the Learning Skills Council have been either totally removed or taken out of the equation. This saves money. These bodies, with their approved training providers and bodies such as Education Business Partnerships were responsible for setting procurement standards for providers of work related training for 14-19 year olds. I should say that they all did other stuff but this bit is directly relevant to this topic. A large part of that work was to visit employers who had agreed in principle to support and provide training or work experience in their businesses. You might imagine that finding employers who FULLY meet their legal obligations is not as easy as it should be. Thus such employers were often asked to improve their H&S standards. The logic being that if we are dealing with young people then surely they must only be placed in organisations that do fully meet their legal obligations? Not my own opinion but the one that is enshrined in the system as a result of safeguarding of vulnerable groups. Now, in my experience SME would be the least likely to be FULLY compliant and would often resent the findings of the assessment and the potential costs. They therefore regularly sought either some financial subsidy to taking learners or simply decided not to take youngsters. Thus a burden from which they were not releived. So, what we will now have, in my opinion, is simply a change to the systems that will accept that being less than perfect is not a default barrier to taking young people on apprenticeships. How colleges, schools, training providers will manage their duty of care to their students in such a system is not clear to me and it would seem is not understood by HMG. It is actually a bit like telling all you Construction bods that your standards of contractor assessment are OTT and you must not impose anything on them more than the law requires. How many times do we see discussion on here about OTT principal contractors etc. What would change in that scenario if you were told that you are a burden on contractors because you are imposing standards higher than the law requires? Please don't answer that; I think we know the answer. And we should remember that this system of control was put into place as a direct result of the tragic deaths of apprentices. Of course it needed an overhaul. It has become confused with many agencies involved and often multiple visits to the same employer by different agencies. I sincerely hope it is that overhaul that will be outcome of this current political spin. p48