Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she has made an assessment of the potential impact of increasing the flexibility of the apprenticeship levy on the level of (a) staff and (b) skill shortages in the hospitality sector.

The apprenticeship levy supports employers in all sectors, including those in hospitality, to invest in high-quality apprenticeship training. Employers in the catering and hospitality sector have developed 10 apprenticeship standards to help them to develop their workforces, including Level 2 Hospitality Team Member, Level 3 Chef De Partie and Level 4 Senior Culinary Chef. In the 2020/21 academic year, there were 8,870 starts in the hospitality sector.

The department is committed to enhancing the quality of apprenticeships and improving the system, so that apprenticeships continue to meet the needs of employers in all sectors.

The department is also supporting employers to make greater use of their levy funds by helping them choose more flexible training models, such as portable, flexi-job and accelerated apprenticeships. Improvements have been made to the levy transfer system, to enable larger employers to more easily support apprenticeship starts in other employers in their own or different sectors. In addition, employers can also access a range of other government-funded skills programmes, including T-levels, Skills Bootcamps, and our free Level 3 courses for jobs, which can help people gain the skills that employers value.

There are no current plans to reform the apprenticeship levy, and as such, no assessment has been made of changes to the levy and the impact on the level of staff or skill shortages in the hospitality sector.