Apprentices: Financial Support

Debate between Karin Smyth and Gordon Marsden

Wednesday 8th March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Gordon Marsden]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. It is about the process involved, and I will talk later about the barriers to doing that sort of thing that young people experience in schools, for instance. It is important that various sectors act.

I have talked about the importance of the motor industry, but there is also the service industry. That raises questions not only about support but about the many opportunities available. I mentioned Apprenticeships 4 England and Lindsay McCurdy. Last year she brought a great bunch of apprentices, including a talented group of young apprentice hairdressers from Michaeljohn Training in Manchester, to a meeting that I sponsored in one of the Select Committee rooms. As an apprenticeship week present, they presented me with a very lifelike model head—I still have it on my office shelf—to demonstrate their skills in colouring and styling. One of these days, if I am feeling mischievous, I suppose I might ginger up the occasional official or other policy maker who seems to think that the route to successful jobs and apprenticeships is simply through higher-level manufacturing, digital or technical areas. The truth is that if we are to achieve the 3 million target, which the Minister and his colleagues are so keen to hit, and really expand the opportunities for young people, we will need the service sectors just as much as we need manufacturing and other sectors.

Oppositions do not get much opportunity to blow their own trumpet about success stories, so I shall. I am very proud of the fact that the last Labour Government introduced the National Apprenticeship Service and, indeed, National Apprenticeship Week in 2008. They also revived apprenticeships, taking them from 65,000 starts in 1996-97 to 279,700 by 2009-10. Those increases have continued under successive Governments.

The last Labour Government also linked the creation of apprenticeship placements to public sector contracts across a range of Departments and projects, including Crossrail. Such infrastructure projects will remain a crucial conduit for apprenticeship expansion, as I have said. As well as financial support, informal encouragement is extremely important for widening the diversity of the apprentices who take part in those great projects. I was fortunate enough to see that two years ago when I went down the construction tunnel at Farringdon and saw some of the people working on it. They were young Londoners, including a couple of young women and a young man from a BME community who had started off selling ad space and was now proud of his tunnelling qualifications. It is worth remembering that 60% of the construction work on Crossrail is outside London, so there is a lot of scope in the supply chain for many more opportunities for young people. Projects such as Crossrail and its commitment need to become a vital part of our regeneration and productivity across the UK.

[Karin Smyth (Bristol South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Closer to home, I was able to visit the cellars of this very place to see the amount of work that is needed on the restoration and renewal project for Parliament. A great range of people across the country contributed to building this great building. There are immense opportunities for apprentices to be involved in the restoration project across the country and learn new skills that we have lost. That needs to be a key part of the project.

[Gordon Marsden]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent and highly relevant comment. I remember having the same experience many years ago when I served on the Advisory Committee on Works of Art, looking into the repair of stuff in this place. The project is important because a lot of bespoke skills will be needed, not least those relating to architecture. There are some very challenging issues—logistics, wiring and God knows what else—that will potentially engage a whole gamut of people.

That is what it is all about; it is about economic impact, but it is also about improving the careers and life chances of hundreds of thousands of young people—and, indeed, older people. We talk a lot about apprenticeships, but we have not always talked enough about apprentices and their individual issues and challenges. The need to increase the focus on improving access and social mobility, which I know the Minister feels strongly about, as I do, is a crucial part of the equation.

My hon. Friend the Member for Luton North has already referred to the Government’s continuing failure to address or understand apprenticeships. The fact that the Department for Work and Pensions does not class apprenticeships as approved education or training is leaving many individuals and families thousands of pounds worse off. I pay tribute to a survey that appeared in The Times Educational Supplement on 10 February under the headline “Apprentices ‘treated like second-class citizens’”. It was carried out by the National Union of Students, via the National Society of Apprenticeships, which it sponsors.

My hon. Friend read an important but slightly dispiriting list of the ways in which apprentices are financially disadvantaged in comparison with students. If the Government hope to reduce the growing skills gap in this country with a push to create 3 million apprenticeships, why are apprentices and apprenticeships not included as approved education or training? There has been spirited discussion about that in the House of Lords recently, which I will come on to shortly. The Government need to make progress on this.

The Times Educational Supplement article states:

“Research by the NUS and TES has revealed that…some apprentices earn as little as £3.40 an hour”.

That figure will rise to £3.50 in April. There is a separate issue, which we probably do not have time to discuss in detail today, about how many more employers could go the extra mile, over and above the existing rate. That rate can sometimes be particularly difficult for younger apprentices to exist on, given their personal family circumstances.