Apprenticeships Funding

Chris Green Excerpts

Tuesday 1st November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Streeter. I also congratulate the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) on securing this important debate.

Apprenticeships provide a fantastic opportunity for young people to get on in life, while at the same time raising the productivity of the businesses that they join. On visits to schools around Bolton West, I hear concerns raised about getting that first job and having the required experience. That is obviously a great concern upon leaving school or university, but it is less so if someone chooses an apprenticeship because practical experience is built into the course. Businesses often raise the same concerns about people’s preparation for the world of work. Apprenticeships are key to solving that problem, because the potential employee not only will have the practical skills but will have been trained with a specific job role in mind, and will therefore be job or industry-ready.

It is really important that apprentices go into an improving and increasingly successful economy. The continuing economic recovery in Britain over the past six years is a fantastic achievement by the coalition Government and the present Government, and means that anyone doing an apprenticeship or any other course will have a job to go into afterwards.

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)]

Is it not also true that there is a significant return for the taxpayer—especially when compared with universities, where the return is much less—of £26 to £28 for every £1 that the Government put into apprenticeships? Promoting apprenticeships is a good thing for the taxpayer.

[Chris Green]

I agree entirely. Apprenticeships are a fantastic investment in the economy but also a great investment in the individual.

There is still a problem with the perception of apprenticeships; I sympathise with the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) in that regard. We need quality apprenticeships. It seems that companies often find resistance within the school system when trying to recruit people for apprenticeships. That could be to some extent due to the recognition of apprenticeships—their reputation has become tarnished over a period of time—or to the fact that schools need to achieve academic targets to be recognised as successful, rather than targets on the number of people going into an apprenticeship.

Training providers and employers in my constituency, such as Alliance Learning in in Horwich and MBDA in Lostock, are working to change those negative perceptions with the delivery of superb apprenticeship programmes. MBDA delivers fantastic apprenticeships, but people are often unaware of the level to which they can be taken. For example, someone can be paid to study and gain a full bachelor’s or master’s degree in subjects such as advanced systems engineering.

I am delighted that the Government are continuing to support young people in moving into work by allocating £1 billion to the youth contract and ensuring that apprenticeships for under-25s incur no national insurance costs for employers.

[Karin Smyth (Bristol South) (Lab)]

I agree with much of what the hon. Gentleman has said. Does he agree with my suggestion in the Public Accounts Committee that a UCAS-style system for young people would help them to navigate their way through the system? It could also help employers to receive young people, rather than young people having to send hundreds of applications themselves.

[Chris Green]

I am sympathetic to that idea. If someone goes down the academic route, they have the path laid out and guidance. Apprenticeships do not have that, and perhaps it would help if we had that system in place, but there is a huge range of different kinds of companies and organisations providing apprenticeships, so I can see there being significant problems with that that are perhaps not there with the more academic route.

Since 2010, my constituency of Bolton West has seen an increase of more than 4,000 apprenticeships. Hon. Members will be pleased to know that I have an apprentice in my office in Westhoughton. However, employers have raised concerns with me about the introduction of the apprenticeship levy in 2017. The additional tax is being levied for the best of reasons, but it may disrupt existing training programmes as employers that currently provide excellent training will have to reconfigure what they do in order to recoup some or all of the levy.

We must also be cautious not to force companies to rebadge existing training programmes to hit the Government’s target of 3 million apprenticeships in this Parliament. What assurances will the Minister give to companies with existing training programmes that are anxious about the introduction of the levy, and that feel as though they have to contrive their courses in such a way as to recoup some of the money they will be losing?

I want apprenticeships to become an increasingly normal route for ambitious young people, as well as for employers that are dedicated to growing their own talent and increasing the skills base of the nation.