They grow up so fast! The Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill has now completed House of Commons scrutiny without a single change – an outcome we have become increasingly familiar with over the course of this parliament. As usual, the government will first have to grapple meaningfully with the issues the Bill has in the Lords – at arms length, and often at odds with the expertise in post-compulsory education that the Conservatives’ nominally boast on the red benches.

At Third Reading Matt Western spoke of the awkward predicament that such a policy-light bill faces at a parliamentary stage that should focus on the policy on the face of the bill. The amendments presented by the Shadow team and the Liberal Democrats’ Munira Wilson sought to ensure that the policy will receive appropriate scrutiny and explanation when it does arrive.

Only New Clause 1 – which sought to see an annual report on the way the LLE is working – was pressed to a vote, with the government winning comfortably with 253 votes against 89.

In the government’s defence, many (though not all) of the powers the bill gives to the minister are subject to an affirmative resolution in parliament – meaning that both houses must vote on their use before regulations can be made. This covers the choice of the method for determining the fee limit, and the working of the credit based method for determining the fee limit – though it is not clear whether any change to the definition of a “credit” would require an affirmative resolution.

Unless the Lords is successful in teasing out more on the way this Bill will work in practice, our initial explanation still stands. We can expect more detail to emerge in “mid-to-late 2024” according to Halfon – which would give providers around a year to develop and launch courses for a 2025 start.

There’s a disquieting sense that the government (or the government before last if we want to be strictly accurate) has decided the shape of future skills provision and will not be deviate from this path by mere scrutiny. This bill follows the Skills and Post-16 Education Act as a compendium of technical underpinnings – the LLE policy itself has never been properly set out for parliament to debate, any more than the demand (for the specific funding mechanism that is the LLE, not the motherhood-and-apple-pie concept of lifelong learning) has been tested among the people it is intended to benefit.