Apprenticeships

Lord Layard Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Layard (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise for having missed the deadline, but I would like to ask one simple question. In 2009, the previous Government’s apprenticeship Act guaranteed that, by 2015, there would be an apprenticeship for almost every 16 to 18 year-old who wanted one. That was a clear statement of priorities and a marching order to the National Apprenticeship Service. Unfortunately, the present Government repealed the guarantee and focused the biggest development in apprenticeships, as many noble Lords have said, on the older age group. Was that not a massive error and will the Government now revert to the priority for 16 to 18 year-olds that was embodied in the previous strategy?

There are many Cassandras, probably on both sides, who say that we will not get employers to be interested in young people under 19. Suppose we accepted that argument: what would follow? It would be catastrophic because there would be permanently high youth unemployment and millions of people who would probably never get a real skill. The top priority has to be getting people off to a good start at the very beginning of their working lives. The best evidence for that was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp: a number of OECD studies show that the countries with the lowest youth unemployment and the best level of skills in the lower-skilled parts of the workforce are those countries with the largest number of apprenticeships for school leavers.

What is the problem? In spite of some things that have been said this evening, the problem is not mainly with the aspirations of young people; it is with our employers and the way in which they are approached by the apprenticeship service. More than half of all large employers still have no apprentices. By contrast, in 2012-13, 800,000 young people aged between 16 and 18 registered as applicants for apprenticeships. How many got an apprenticeship? It was one in seven. That is the problem—the supply of apprenticeships is not there and that is a terrible reflection on the record of the National Apprenticeship Service as a generator of apprenticeships. It has simply failed, I suspect partly because it has not been told that that is what the service is meant to be doing for that age group.

What is the Government’s priority? Is it 16 to 18 years-olds or not? If it is, will the Government tell the National Apprenticeship Service very clearly that that is the top priority?