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Learning accounts a 13-month disaster, say Tories

Ben Russell Political Correspondent
Wednesday 07 November 2001 01:00 GMT
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The Government was accused yesterday of "wilfully ignoring" warnings that its flagship individual learning accounts (ILAs) were open to fraud a year before the scheme was suspended. Damian Green, the Tory education spokesman, said ILAs were a "13-month disaster".

He published letters from James O'Brien, the director of the Pitman Training Group to David Blunkett, then Secretary of State for Education, in September last year, warning that the scheme was "open to abuse". Ministers suspended the programme last month amid allegations of fraud and mis-selling.

Mr Green told MPs: "It's not just a shambles. It's a scandal and someone should take responsibility for it. Throughout the life of the ILAs, the Government should have been aware of the potential fraud. The problem the Government failed to address is that no real checks were done on anyone posing as a training provider."

But Estelle Morris, the present Secretary of State for Education and Skills, said the programme was "probably the biggest, and despite all that, the greatest success there has been in getting adults back to learning." Only 8,448 complaints were received out of 2.5 million accounts, she said. Police were investigating possible fraud in just four cases, involving 30 people, she said.

Ms Morris said ministers took action when they noticed a small rise in complaints in the summer and a sharp increase in the number of accounts being opened. She added: "I can give a cast-iron guarantee that what we will do over the next two months is to build on the success that ILAs were."

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