Lord Aberdare
Main Page: Lord Aberdare (Crossbench - Excepted Hereditary)
Lord Aberdare
My Lords, I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak in this debate, and I declare an interest as a director of two small social enterprises, both of which are engaged in helping unemployed people in London to find and keep employment. Having said that, very few of these jobs have so far taken the form of apprenticeships—certainly fewer than I might originally have anticipated. I also apologise for covering a certain amount of ground where points have already been made very much more elegantly by noble Lords speaking earlier in the debate.
I strongly support the Government’s commitment to apprenticeships, which are filling a vital need to provide jobs and training for young people seeking to enter the labour market, and essential skills for the UK economy. I recently attended the launch of the Southwark apprenticeships challenge “100 in 100” campaign, which aims to create 100 apprenticeship opportunities in that borough within 100 days. I was struck by the range of different apprenticeship frameworks now available. There are no fewer than 190 separate frameworks in 80 different industry sectors. I was struck, too, by the enthusiasm and commitment of those existing apprentices, and their employers, who spoke at the event.
However, it is clear that apprenticeships are currently providing only a small part of the answer to the challenges of youth unemployment. If their impact is to be maintained and increased, their attractiveness to young people—and even more to the employers, without whom there would be no apprenticeship opportunities—needs to be enhanced. There are a number of jobs or sectors which may have good opportunities for young people, but which are not currently well suited to apprenticeships. Apprenticeships work very well for jobs which call for specific skills or qualifications, not just in traditional areas like construction, plumbing and hairdressing, but also in business services such as IT, accounting, design, or marketing and communications. However, they are less appropriate in sectors like hospitality, where the key requirements for staff are sometimes more to do with attitudes and behaviours than specific skills, and where a high degree of flexibility is required in working patterns, which may not fit easily with the need for apprentices to spend one day a week in training. There are several successful apprenticeship schemes for chefs, but fewer for roles such as hotel receptionists, waiters or back-office staff.
Apprenticeships are also scarce in the creative and media sector, where a good many jobs tend to be freelance or self-employed, and may not lend themselves easily to the apprenticeship model. For example, an apprentice has to be employed by someone, which is not always straightforward in a sector where most people are self-employed. Many production companies, magazine publishers and other businesses in the sector are quite small, and SMEs find it harder than larger enterprises to set up apprenticeships: finding out what is involved, identifying suitable frameworks and learning institutions or training partners to deliver them, and accessing available funding. Well targeted information and signposting are needed to make it as easy as possible for different types of employers—small or large, public or private—to implement apprenticeships.
It is therefore important to ensure that apprenticeships—and, indeed, other employment programmes such as the planned new Work Programme—are sufficiently appealing to employers. Many of the employers we have worked with are keen to take on young people and set them on the first step of their careers. At the same time, however, they are all too conscious of the business pressures they currently face which make it hard for them to find or spare resources to train young people, to pay their wages and to provide the support some of them need to stay in, and do well at, their jobs—support such as the mentoring support mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Sugar.
Again, this is especially true of SMEs. One of the great merits of the previous Government's future jobs fund, regrettably terminated by the coalition, was that it provided a real incentive for employers to offer—indeed, to create—jobs for young people by actually paying their wage costs, at least at minimum wage levels, for the first six months of employment. Apprenticeships do allow employers to pay less than the standard minimum wage, but this may not be entirely a good thing. We have even heard of young people dropping out of apprenticeships for the simple reason that they cannot afford the bus fare to work. It does not help many public sector employers who are bound by collective bargaining agreements to pay higher rates.
Earlier this year, the National Apprenticeship Service offered grants of £2,500 to employers, especially SMEs, to take on 16 and 17 year-old apprentices. This was instrumental in persuading a group of museums to set up a programme for 50 apprentices, which they said they might not have done without the subsidy.
Pump-priming incentives like this may be needed to encourage employers to go the extra mile in creating jobs for young people in these difficult times, and to overcome their initial doubts about the benefits of taking on untrained young people, with all the perceived constraints and paperwork of a government-sponsored scheme.
I have focused on a couple of ways to increase the impact of apprenticeships: extending their scope to cover additional sectors and jobs, and enhancing their attractiveness to employers. There are many others, such as: developing higher-level apprenticeships to provide an access route into higher education; supporting colleges in the provision of pre-apprenticeship training; extending the scheme to cover well regarded training programmes not currently recognised as apprenticeships, such as those run by several guilds or livery companies; or finding ways to enable public sector bodies to take on apprentices at a time when many of them are subject to hiring freezes.
I wondered about the possibility of offering apprenticeships in your Lordships' House, as was done in another place under the aegis of my noble friend Lord Martin of Springburn. I understand that there are programmes for commis chefs and library staff to receive training to gain higher qualifications, although these are not formally classed as apprenticeships. Beyond that, the House, like so many other employers, currently lacks suitable roles or resources for an apprenticeship scheme.
Apprenticeships can play an important part in ensuring that young people have opportunities to work and to acquire skills, even in a period of economic constraint, so that we avoid the catastrophe of a generation of young people missing out on the experience of work when they leave education. I urge the Government to ensure that apprenticeships, along with other youth employment and skills programmes, continue to receive the support, emphasis and resources required to achieve that goal.