4. Will the Counsel General please provide an update on the tendering process for the level 7 legal apprenticeship programme? OQ59170

Thank you for your question. In December, we issued a tender to assess the need for solicitor apprenticeships in Wales. No bids were received when the tender closed in January, and we are now considering next steps.

Diolch yn fawr, Cwnsler Cyffredinol. Could you please outline, perhaps, the process you used in the first tendering process and how this can be changed to ensure a wider audience for the re-tender? Diolch yn fawr. 

Thank you for that. I think it was disappointing that the tender didn't receive any bids. We're evaluating how it was carried out and, basically, how it can be broadened out. I think that the substance of what you're suggesting, really, is that we need to look at a far wider group in terms of the invitation-to-tender process. That is being looked at.

The solicitor apprenticeship issue, I think, is an important one. We've done a lot of work already in terms of the apprenticeships for level 3 and level 5, for the paralegal level, and, of course, the first cohort of students started in September 2022 at Coleg Sir Gâr in Carmarthen. So, this is really the next stage, but it's one that's more complicated, because if we're putting public money into supporting apprenticeships, we want it to go to filling in those gaps, the desert areas that exist within legal services, and also look at how we might actually improve something that I think is quite important, and that is the law centres—effectively the two law centres we now have—and how we could look at extending that and how this might actually be something that could look at servicing that, an area that I think is well worth developing. I will, of course, update the Senedd in due course when we've re-evaluated how to continue or how to promote the tendering process and any further developments on the solicitor apprenticeship objectives that we have.