Governance in English VET: On the functioning of a fractured ‘system’

Abstract

This article explores the governance structures that cover vocational education and training (VET) in England. The English VET system is highly fragmented, complex and unstable, and has tended to oscillate between centralised command and control, and attempts at marketisation. Its governance arrangements reflect this situation. The various providers of VET are reviewed, and the critical role that national government plays in dictating governance systems in the absence of wider social partnership arrangements or fully functioning employer representation systems is explored. The distinctive form and role of the funding agencies, the national learning inspectorate and the qualifications regulator are noted, and the design principles that underlie systems governance are discussed. Three trends that are disrupting the current settlement are analysed – fiscal retrenchment, moves towards ‘employer ownership’ of provision and the growing drive towards localisation. The article concludes by arguing that the current governance model is liable to come under serious pressure.

Introduction

Describing and analysing the governance systems, if such they can be termed, that cover English vocational education and training (VET) is extremely difficult, for three reasons. Firstly, there is no overall education and training ‘system’ within which governance takes place (Lawn, 2013), but rather a set of related but fragmented and in some instances partially over-lapping sub-systems or streams of activity – schools (varied by institutional status), further education (FE), apprenticeship, higher education (HE), lifelong/adult learning. Moreover, VET is a relatively low status area, highly fragmented via different levels of provision and age- and employment status-related funding systems (Coffield et al., 2008; Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2015), and is often seen as a residual catch-all category for those activities not assigned to schools or universities. As a result, the organisations that deliver it are sometimes treated by policy makers as simply atomised actors in a marketplace rather than as parts of anything resembling a coherent system, and as a result national VET governance design generally seeks to regulate a market or quasi-market rather than individual institutions (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2015).

Moreover, observers (Evans, 2014; Skills Commission, 2014) have noted that the English VET system’s organisational structures, programmes of study, qualifications and funding and student support mechanisms are extremely complex, not least for parents, potential students and employers. The following brief exploration of VET and its governance is perforce but a much-simplified depiction of an intricate, multi-faceted reality. Where possible, references to more detailed coverage of the issues being discussed are provided.

The second problem is that, besides being complex, policy and the institutional arrangements that are meant to deliver it are highly unstable and have been subject to successive random, often ill-managed rounds of ‘reform’ (City and Guilds, 2014; Evans, 2014; Perry et al., 2010). It is no exaggeration to claim that English VET is delivered and governed through what is almost certainly the fastest changing set of institutional arrangements in the developed world. This has been the case for 30 years or more (see City and Guilds, 2014; Coffield, 2008; Keep, 2002, 2006). Thirdly, while it is widely accepted that the current system of funding and governance, particularly for post-19 activity, is dying due to a massive and potentially prolonged squeeze on public funding, it is profoundly unclear what shape the model that replaces it will take. Indeed, as will be explained below, it may well be that there is no single model, but rather a policy race or contest between competing models or avenues for development, the outcome of which will take some time to emerge.

The current ‘system’

The current system has been shaped by successive waves of structural, institutional and programmatic reform, and these cannot be dealt with in detail here. (Those seeking further detail are directed to Coffield et al., 2008; Hodgson 2015; Hodgson et al., 2011.) In brief, under the New Labour governments the stress was on national, regional and local skills planning, increasingly overlaid and over-ridden by national targets derived from international skills benchmarking exercises (see Coffield et al., 2008; Keep 2002, 2006, 2011), alongside paradoxical (given the stress on planning) attempts to marketise provision and foster competition. Policy was extremely centralised, a tendency that increased as the government reduced the strategic capacity and freedoms of subordinate agencies, with the result that there developed a unified, one-size-fits-all model, underpinned by monolithic national learning entitlements and schemes. This model reached its apogee in 2007/2008 in the aftermath of the Leitch Review of Skills (2006), which set the VET system a set of ‘world class’ targets for the achievement of qualifications by the year 2020.

Under the Coalition government central control was somewhat loosened, and colleges and other providers given greater freedoms, although this freedom came in the context of large-scale reductions in funding, which meant that often the freedom was one of choosing which forms of provision to cut (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2015; Keep, 2014). There has been a reversion to a belief in markets rather than planning or targets – although international benchmarking measures such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) Adult Skills Survey remain very important to policy makers at a national level. It appears likely that the Conservative government elected in May 2015 will pursue an agenda that links spending cuts with the creation of localised markets for VET.

The providers

VET is delivered by two broad groupings of provider. The first are public institutions, including schools and sixth-form colleges (who deliver some general rather than occupationally specific vocational courses), and FE colleges, all of which have management teams whose work is supervised by some form of governing body (the equivalent of non-executive directors in a firm). Traditionally, schools delivered academic learning and the bulk of FE was conceived of as vocational in some sense or other. In recent times this distinction has collapsed. Many students now pursue academic qualifications (e.g. A levels) within FE, while recent schooling reforms have created a marketplace wherein new types of school (for example, University Technical Colleges [UTCs], studio schools, academies, free schools and career colleges) can be established with direct government funding within a locality and compete with one another and with pre-existing schools and FE colleges for students. UTCs, career colleges and studio schools all have a strong vocational slant to their subject offering and curricula. At the same time, some FE colleges have seen an opportunity to extend their provision through establishing new free schools or by taking over existing but failing schools, including academies. It is also the case that some HE, at degree and sub-degree level, takes place within FE institutions (see, e.g., Parry in this issue).

The second group are private training providers (PTPs), including one new privately owned FE college. Some PTPs are for-profit organisations, others are not-for-profit and these may be run by faith groups and charities. In size, the PTPs vary from large general service providers (contract management, office management, human resources (HR) and training) to self-employed consultants. PTPs are mainly involved in delivering adult basic skills (literacy and numeracy), apprenticeships and a wide range of employer-funded training activities (for example, management training, customer care skills and health and safety).

Critical to an understanding of how the English VET system functions is the fact that non-publicly funded employer training and development is outside the national VET ‘system’ as it is normally conceived of by policy makers. Employer-provided training is largely voluntarist in nature, and only a limited amount is legally mandated (for example, health and safety training). In the context of this settlement it has long been unclear what employers’ rights, roles and responsibilities within the VET system are, and the government and other actors generally lack any means to exert serious influence over either the level or pattern of employer investment in skills (Keep, 2012, 2015). Achieving greater government leverage over the large flows of employer investment in skills has been a long-standing policy goal, and the latest attempt, through an initiative called ‘Employer Ownership’, aims to create a ‘single market’ whereby state and employer investment are combined (see Keep, 2015, for an overview).

Moreover, in England apprenticeship provision is largely driven and delivered by external PTPs, rather than by employers and their company’s internal training capacity. Apprenticeship is a government scheme delivered by private contractors (Fuller and Unwin, 2003), with employers often fairly passive recipients of this service (see Dolphin and Lanning, 2011). Current government reforms are meant to be changing this, and are ostensibly moving towards employer-led apprenticeships (Keep, 2015), but for the present governance of apprenticeship is largely governance of PTPs, rather than oversight of employer activity and decision-making.

The lines between these FE and PTPs are blurred. For example, many FE colleges sub-contract elements of their activities to PTPs. Thus, in 2014 one FE institution (Calderdale College) had subcontracts with 128 providers (FE Week, 26 January, p. 3).

Both sets of providers are represented by a range of lobbying groups. For PTPs, the main one is the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP). For FE, there is the Association of Colleges (AoC), but there are also other college groupings, such as the 157 Group. In addition, a range of other stakeholders, including qualification awarding bodies (of which there are more than 170), employers, trade unions, think tanks and charities also seek to influence how VET policy develops and provider priorities.

In terms of scale, there 4.2 million learners within the publicly funded English FE and skills system at any one time. There are around 220 general FE colleges (the numbers change due to mergers), which cater to about three quarters of the students, while there are approximately 700 commercial or charitable bodies that cater for the rest. Between them, these organisations receive about £7 billion each year from the government and its agencies and from the European Social Fund (EFA), but with increasing sums coming via the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) – see below.

National government

VET is split into different streams, depending on mode of provision, employment status of the learner and the age of the students involved (14–16, 16–18/19, 19–24 and those aged 24+) and these have their own funding systems and tariffs, which generates significant complexity (National Audit Office, 2014). This in turn reflects the fact that a number of central government departments have direct control over policy and governance.

The Department for Education (DfE), besides responsibilities for schools, pre-school provision and child protection issues, is also in charge of vocational learning in schools and colleges until age 19. It funds school and FE activity for this age band via the Education Funding Agency (EFA). The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS) is responsible for HE, science and innovation, industrial policy, post-19 learning, apprenticeship provision and its funding, and the overall strategic supervision of the FE sector and of PTPs delivering apprenticeship, and is the primary point of contact for government liaison on VET with both employers, and to a much smaller extent, with trade unions. Within DBIS the Vocational Skills Branch deals with all VET that is not delivered via some form of HE.

DBIS largely funds these activities via the Skills Funding Agency (SFA). The funding systems for different streams of activity are extremely complex, very unstable and, in recent years, have been subject to successive cuts as the government has imposed spending reductions as part of its wider efforts to reduce the public deficit (see below).

In addition to the DfE and DBIS, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) designs, funds and controls learning provision for the unemployed and the disabled. Unfortunately, there exist no proper mechanisms for coordinating, concerting or aligning the VET-related activities of these three government departments, and there are (and have long-existed) significant policy tensions between them. For example, as the Skills Commission noted: ‘The fact that the DBIS is not mentioned once in Fuller Working Lives, the DWP’s framework for action encouraging extended working lives is indicative of the lack of join up on this fundamental issue’ (Skills Commission, 2014: 55).

EFA and SFA – distinctive institutional forms

The main government agencies that superintend funding and governance in publicly supported VET (the EFA and SFA) are very different in character from that which deals with HE (the Higher Education Funding Council – HEFCE). Their autonomy is extremely limited. Strategy is established by government and they then enact it. Their primary role is to deliver national priorities through formula funding mechanisms and conventions, gather statistics and monitor the performance and financial health of publicly supported VET providers. Unlike the HEFCE, the EFA and SFA have very little advocacy role for the activities they oversee; they are more or less purely administrative entities. Moreover, successive institutional reforms imposed by government have meant that both the EFA and SFA are significantly less capable institutions than the bodies that preceded them. Thus, their capacity to undertake research and development (R&D) activities, commission research or engage in institution building or sectoral development has been attenuated to the point of non-existence. For example, they have no ability to address curriculum or teaching issues, and as a result of the earlier abolition of the national body responsible for curriculum development, DBIS now has to directly superintend the development of policy and practice on how mathematics and English should be taught to post-19 students, with a civil servant holding the post of Head of Maths and English Policy.

By contrast the HEFCE offers policy analysis and advice, acts as a developer and interpreter of government thinking, mediates between higher education institutions (HEIs) and various parts of government (including the Treasury – the UK’s finance ministry), and commissions research to help underpin the case for public investment in HE. The HEFCE also maintains a council and various strategic committees that allow it to engage with and mediate a range of interests, not least that of employers and the business community. The HEFCE is a strategic body in a way that the EFA and SFA are not.

Ofsted and Ofqual

Two other government agencies need to be mentioned here. The first is the national inspectorate – Ofsted – which is meant to secure the quality of learning provision through a high-stakes inspection system for all publicly funded learning providers, academic and vocational, except universities (who have their own quality assurance mechanisms). Inadequate grades at inspection lead to swift and harsh penalties for providers – in the case of a FE college the possible sacking of the college principal and in some cases the rest of the senior management team, and the replacement of the board of governors who are responsible for the direct oversight of the college management team’s plans and actions. Recently, a new supplementary role has been created – the FE Commissioner (the FEC), who can be called in to recommend changes in the management, strategy and structure of colleges that are deemed, either by Ofsted or the EFA or SFA, to be in trouble in terms of learning quality or institutional finances (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2015). The FEC’s workload has been rising sharply over the last year, mainly due to the growing number of colleges unable to manage cuts in state funding.

The other body of note is the regulator for qualifications – Ofqual. The government has deemed qualifications – academic and vocational – to be products that are being sold in a marketplace. Ofqual is there to act as the market regulator for all non-HE qualifications, in much the same way as the parallel body Ofwat regulates the private sector monopolies that now supply water to households and businesses. Ofqual is responsible solely to government. It oversees the work of the awarding bodies, who in turn oversee the way their qualifications are delivered and assessed by VET providers. This is an unusual approach to managing a national qualification system, but space forbids a more detailed examination of this topic.

Issues raised by this governance model

The first issue is that, in marked contrast to many other European VET systems, England affords only the most limited of roles to any form of social partnership arrangement, which in turn mirrors the fact that there is little collective bargaining between unions and employers over skills issues (Clough, 2012; Keep et al., 2010). The sole exception is the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES), which exists to offer policy advice on VET, employment and their linkages to economic performance to all four UK national governments; supervises the employer-led sectoral training bodies (Sector Skills Councils – SSCs); and has more latterly become responsible for the design and funding of various pilot schemes aimed at enhancing employer ‘ownership’ (see Laczik and Mayhew in this issue) of the VET system. The Commission is made up of business and trade union leaders, plus representatives of the voluntary sector and of FE and HE.

The lack of general social partnership arrangements to oversee VET means that government has considerable discretion over how institutions and provision are designed, configured, managed and measured. It also means that government and its agencies are in sole charge of governance systems design (National Audit Office, 2014), and reforms proposed by national government do not require the consent of any other party before change can occur (Keep, 2006). Indeed, in many instances they do not require primary legislation in parliament, and can instead be made by the relevant Secretary of State through what Ryan and Unwin (2001) termed, ‘leaflet law’ (ministerial announcements and associated minor technical adjustments to statutory instruments). The norm for many years has been that government will enact changes in VET without any serious attempt to involve the institutions that deliver VET or those who work within them (Coffield, 2008, 2015). The ease of change and the lack of any constraints on how it is managed help explain why it has been so frequent.

Employers and employer bodies

Although social partnership is an insignificant force, government has long desired to increase employer influence over and involvement in VET (see Keep, 2012, for an overview of this area). The objective has been to enable employers to, for instance, directly influence patterns of provision and the design of vocational qualifications. Hitherto, the main expression of this has been a succession of government-sponsored and funded sectoral training bodies, with five different sets of institutions tried and then scrapped since 1980. The current model of SSCs is in a state of transition, with some SSCs collapsing due to the withdrawal of core government funding, and the gradual emergence of a new set of smaller, more ad hoc employer groupings, some temporary in nature, to deliver reform of apprenticeships, and vocational qualifications (VQs).

Underlying this picture is the fact that employer representation is weak and patchy in large measure because, unlike much of Europe, sectoral collective bargaining within the industrial relations system has collapsed, and strong sectoral employer bodies no longer exist. This means that when either policy makers or providers within VET want to hear a representative voice from employers, they often listen in vain. Individual employers have very varied takes on what should happen and a consensus does not always emerge (see Keep, 2012, 2015; see also Clarke and Winch in this issue).

Design principles and the established philosophy of governance systems

Current governance arrangements are driven by a set of design principles (Coffield, 2008; Coffield et al., 2008; Hodgson, 2015; Keep, 2006, 2011). Of these the most important are a belief in top-down decision making, whereby those at the centre know best, and which offers limited or no feedback loops that might allow providers to communicate their views and insights into policy formation. As a result, national policy makers have very little knowledge or understanding of frontline practice or how their policies play out in the real world (National School of Government, 2009).

At the same time, governance is extremely low trust, and is driven by New Public Management (NPM) models that rely on competition, marketisation and high-stakes performance management and inspection regimes that deliver punitive outcomes for failure (as defined by national government) (Hodgson, 2015), or as one academic proponent of the model termed it, ‘targets and terror’ (Propper, 2010: 34). Underlying this lack of trust is a dominant official belief in economic theory on rational choice that stresses principal-agent problems, whereby without proper incentive structures, agents (in this case VET providers) may not deliver the quality or quantity of training to the right target groups as desired by the principal (the government) (see Gailmard, 2012, for an overview).

The final point is that the current governance configuration exists without any, ‘comprehensive framework setting out the roles, responsibilities and accountabilities of the funding and oversight bodies’ (National Audit Office, 2014: 9). It is the result of largely isolated, ad hoc changes rather than the product of any form of systemic design.

Disruptive trends

The governance settlement outlined above is coming under sustained pressure due to a number of factors. Three of the most important are highlighted here.

Fiscal retrenchment and the decline of publicly funded post-19 VET

Between 2010 and 2014, central government-funded post-19 FE sustained a cumulative reduction of around 35 per cent, and recently a further funding cut of 24 per cent has been announced. If these trends continue, and there is little reason to think that they will not, the volume of publicly funded post-19 VET provision is liable to become nugatory within a few years (Association of Colleges, 2015). This raises a number of fundamental issues about what the role of national government should be in a future where its ability to fund activity is severely diminished. For instance, cuts in government support are liable to lead to a diminution in its ability to control the policy agenda and direct the VET system (Keep, 2014).

In thinking about future models of funding, the government has suggested that:

In simple terms, the government should only fund where it can add value, maximising the impact of that spend. Increasingly, its role should be to support employers and individuals as purchasers of skill, rather than as a direct funder itself. (Department for Education/Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2013: 32)

If such a change takes place, it implies moves towards a very different model of governance, one where the national state and its agencies act as market makers or regulators rather than as architects and controllers of a publicly led and funded supply system.

Employer ownership

As noted above, the UKCES is piloting a number of approaches to trying to secure greater employer investment in and ownership of the VET system, and to link public investment with firms’ own training expenditure. At the core of this series of experiments has been the re-routing of public funding from FE and PTPs to employers. This is based on the belief that giving employers direct purchasing power will both increase their influence on the VET system, and that in return employers will help improve the design of VET courses and qualifications and invest more of their own money in upskilling (Keep, 2015).

It is profoundly uncertain how this model will develop. It is very hard to move from pilot schemes that route funding on a competitive basis to firms or groups of firms to deliver specified training outcomes, to making this a universal funding model, especially at a time when public spending is falling fast (see Keep, 2015). If it does become more generalised, then one element of the new governance system will be an increased focus on contractual relationships between employers and VET providers within a marketplace (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2015).

Localism, devolution, the missing middle and crises of accountability

Three forces have driven the rise of a debate about localism. Firstly, the removal of elected local government as a significant tier of accountability/governance in VET (until 1992 both FE colleges and polytechnic HE institutions were controlled by local authorities) and more recently in mainstream schools (primary and secondary) has opened up an increasingly visible gap (Hodgson, 2015; for the current relation of FE and HE see, e.g., Parry in this issue). Perhaps the main focus for concern has been on schools where the lack of any middle tier to deliver accountability has led to an atomised model, where the only accountability for certain types of school is to the Secretary of State at national level, but there has also been a growing debate about how FE colleges interact with their local communities, and also how local patterns of provision for both 14–19 year olds and for adult learners can be planned and delivered without greater local coordination (see Hodgson and Spours, 2009, 2015).

Secondly, national political devolution within the UK, and the rise of increasingly divergent models of education within and between the four UK nations (England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland), not least in terms of VET policy and governance, has sparked debate (Hodgson et al., 2011). Thirdly, in recent years calls for ‘devolution’ of skills funding and governance from national level have become part of wider debates about regional devolution and its links to economic regeneration. This, in turn, has been driven by the rising importance of economic theories about city regions as the key to economic growth (Gravatt, 2014; Hildreth and Bailey, 2013; Royal Society of Arts, 2014).

The main expression of this movement has been the creation of 39 LEPs and 28 City Deals. When established, the LEPs were given small budgets and had extremely limited powers. Gradually, there has been a limited move to transfer elements of skills funding to them, including the FE sector’s capital budget, a development given some added momentum by Lord Heseltine’s (2012) No Stone Unturned review of growth policies. More recently still, the emergence of City Deals has seen moves by the government to gradually transfer parts of the post-compulsory education and training budget to individual cities – the most far-reaching of which to date is the Manchester City Deal (see Clayton and McGough, 2015; for the role of City Deals regarding the NEET target group see Maguire in this issue). The latest development is an announcement from the SFA that in future colleges and PTPs who failed to demonstrate that they had a working relationship with their LEP and that they were shaping their provision in line with the LEP’s strategic skills priorities would be penalised (Skills Funding Agency, 2015).

This approach will only work, however, if the LEPs’ and City Deals’ skills priorities actually reflect real employer demand, which in turn requires them to be effective representatives of business and to have robust intelligence on current and future skill needs. Early research on the functioning of the LEPs suggests that in some localities neither requirement is being fully met (Ofsted, 2014; Pike et al., 2013; Ward and Hardy, 2013). More broadly, it is as yet profoundly unclear how local and city regions’ systems of planning and funding for VET can mesh with national policy priorities and systems of inspection, or how well they will be able to gather and articulate employers’ views (see Gravatt, 2014, for a very useful overview of the issues, and Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2015, for the government’s expectations).

New horizons?

Given these pressures, the system appears to be in a state of transition. Conditions are currently highly unstable and as Ofsted (2014) has noted, change is taking place in the absence of any coherent overall government strategy.

However, as a result of the developments outlined above, in the broader policy arena several potential directions for the future evolution of governance models, some probably in tension with one another, are now in play.

1. Market/quasi-markets, with employers and/or students as the customers (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2015). It is unclear if policy makers understand that the needs of these two groups do not always coincide (Keep, 2012). This model has major implications for governance, because a smaller state means either a greater role for investment by individuals and employers, or sharp reductions in levels of VET provision. If individuals or firms become the funder, then their interests (however represented) become the prime concern of governance and accountability mechanisms, rather than what central government might want.

2. Localism, local control and localised planning and targets (tied to LEPs and City Deals). This stress on localised planning and matching of VET supply to demand may not sit easily with national government’s enthusiasm for markets, or with the wider needs generated by national and occupational labour markets.

3. Central/national policies, priorities and reforms and new mechanisms to pursue these with diminished resources and with greater control being devolved to localities. The legacy of a highly centralised system means that there are no extant structures to allow the centre to share governance or policy making with other levels or actors, and there are likely to be contests between new local bodies and the national level over funding and priorities.

Overlaying these are also long-standing rivalries and disagreements between the DfE/BIS/DWP/SFA/Ofsted, which have yet to be resolved.

Hodgson et al. (2011) argued that UK VET and lifelong learning was heading into uncharted waters and that the future direction of policy development and governance structures, particularly in England, appeared uncertain. This article has suggested that this uncertainty remains. The trends outlined above are in their early stages. Moreover, their relationship with national governance and policy structures has yet to be worked through between the actors involved, and the degree of accountability that they will deliver, and to whom that accountability will be directed, are extremely unclear as rival models jostle for attention (Hodgson and Spours, 2015). Where employer ownership goes next is also a moot point.

Behind this picture lie four deeper tensions. Firstly, form is supposed, at least in part, to follow function, but as the author has noted, the traditional purposes of VET policies in England are collapsing as the public funds that fuelled them dwindle (Keep, 2014). The over-riding goals have hitherto been to improve our standing in OECD VET league tables, and to bring about a ‘step change’ in skill levels via public spending. Given the fiscal backdrop, both look less achievable than ever. Unless and until the fundamental goals of policy adjusts to new realities, and we become clearer what VET is there to deliver, sorting out governance and accountability is hard.

A second and related concern is that FE colleges (and to some extent the apprenticeship system too) remain trapped in a situation where policy and stakeholder priorities pull them in two opposite directions (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2015). The first is the view that colleges need to, ‘acknowledge publicly that their primary purpose is their contribution to the economy. This may require, for some, a re-examination of who we are accountable to […]’ (Sedgemore, 2014: 13). The second is a continuing belief that colleges and apprenticeships must act as a social inclusion route for the disadvantaged, and that colleges remain the provider of last resort for those whom other forms of learning have failed. Plainly the balance between these two viewpoints has significant implications for governance and accountability, and policy makers continue to grapple with this (see Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2015).

Thirdly, the government simultaneously tries to treat VET as both a system and as a market (see Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2015). At present, the market stance seems to be winning, with the DBIS arguing that, ‘we believe that quality and choice thrive in an open and competitive market’ (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2015: 67), although government also believes it is a market in which they can endlessly intervene and unilaterally impose new priorities and goals. Finally, there is a massive gap between policy aspirations and the public funds available to deliver them (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2015).

History suggests that resolutions to these issues will not prove easy to come by. A lengthy period of experimentation and contestation seems the most likely outcome.