The audit arrangements will continue, and TECs will continue to have to operate in accordance with the contracts that they signed with me. A considerable range of monitoring arrangements exist to ensure that they continue to provide the high-quality training that we intend them to provide.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Teignbridge said in his intervention, each and every initiative which has led to the improvements in training in this country in recent years has been opposed by the Opposition. They opposed the technical and vocational education initiative when it was launched. They opposed employment training at their 1988 party conference, and called on their local authorities to boycott it, which 13 Labour-controlled local authorities did. Now the Opposition admit that they were wrong and they seek to pose as the defenders of employment training.

The Opposition opposed training and enterprise councils when they were announced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler), who is in the Chamber today. Now they admit that they were wrong and they support them—at least, the hon. Member for Sedgefield says they support them. In a moment, we shall consider the extent to which the Opposition speak with one voice on training and enterprise councils.

Time and time again, the Opposition have simply copied our policies, after a respectable period of time has elapsed, and ditched their own. This week the hon. Member for Sedgefield placed our "investors in people" initiative at the centre of his latest proposals.

The hon. Member spoke at length about the alterations in training funding that we should be making from next April. Not surprisingly for him, he did not refer once to the significant increase that we shall be making in planned spending on youth training. He did not refer to the transfer of responsibility and money for work-related further education to the training and enterprise councils, and he left out altogether any reference to the important additional flexibilities that will be given to TECs to increase the value for the taxpayer of the investment that we are making in training.

Perhaps that is because the hon. Gentleman agrees with his five Front-Bench colleagues, who signed an early-day motion a few weeks ago, describing as "disasters" those flexibilities requested by training and enterprise councils —and warmly welcomed by TECs.