asked the Secretary of State for Employment what has been the engineering apprentice intake for each year since 1975–76; and how many engineering apprentices have been made redundant in the past 12 months.

The numbers of apprentices recruited by firms in scope to the engineering industry training Board are as follows:

Year
1975–76	25,243
1976–77	24,249
1977–78	24,643
1978–79	24,532
1979–80	22,822
1980–81	20,541
1981–82	14,639

The final figure for 1982–83 is not yet available. The board has had reports of 1,361 redundancies among apprentices in the period 9 October 1981 to 8 October 1982.