Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many and what proportion of businesses in (a) Ashfield constituency, (b) Nottinghamshire, and (c) England do not pay the apprenticeship levy; and how many of those businesses have apprentices.

Disaggregated information on the apprenticeship levy that is collected in each constituency, local authority or region of the UK by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is not available. Many larger levy-paying employers are headquartered in one region but they employ staff across the country. Therefore, levy data is reported to HMRC by PAYE scheme rather than by organisation, which means that we cannot attribute the levy collected and spent to individual locations. Individual employers can control where apprenticeship funds are spent in order to meet their current and future skills needs.

Since May 2015, there have been 4,690 apprenticeship starts in the Ashfield constituency, 39,650 starts in Nottinghamshire (including in the city of Nottingham) and over 1.7 million starts in England as a whole, reported to date. 49.4% of apprenticeship starts in England were supported by the levy in the first half of 2018/19, which is the most recent period for which data are available.

Income from the levy in England is used to fund apprenticeships for all employers, including apprenticeships started before the introduction of the levy as well as apprenticeships started since the introduction of the levy. We recently announced our intention to move non levy-paying employers onto the apprenticeship service, beginning later this year, giving small to medium-sized businesses a greater choice of quality training providers and the opportunity to be more engaged in apprenticeship training decisions for their business.