A decade after the National Advisory Group for Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning (NAGCELL) report, "The Learning Age", born in the first flush of the New Labour Government, the task of providing and securing an overall strategic framework for lifelong learning remains as large as ever. NIACE is the Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning sponsor--and it is an enormous tribute to the organisation and to Alan Tuckett that it is in a position to play this role. The Inquiry will, though, be independent. It will not aim to supply forensic material for current providers to lobby with (a task NIACE itself already accomplishes to good effect), but will grapple with the kinds of difficult choices to be made in the 2009 Comprehensive Spending Review. In this article, the author, newly appointed Director of the Inquiry, adds a couple of his observations to this work, mixing the sombre with the more encouraging, from an international perspective.