Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what plans his Department has to ensure that any Apprenticeship Levy underspend can be retained for the sectors from which that Levy was raised and directed to address specific skills gaps in those sectors.

The apprenticeships programme is demand led, and employers will recruit apprentices and spend their funds on the apprenticeship training that they judge best meets their skills needs. The programme makes sure that funds move to where there is a need; to retain levy funds for specific sectors could restrict the use of funding.

Using our apprenticeship budget to fund wider skills training would have a significant impact on our ability to meet our target of three million apprenticeship starts by 2020 as less of the funding would be focussed on apprenticeship training. We want to retain and meet this target to give more people the opportunity to get the skills they need to get on in life.