Carillion

Catherine West Excerpts

Monday 15th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lidington]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I can well understand why apprentices would be worried at the moment. Carillion has 11 training centres across England, with about 1,200 apprentices who are also Carillion employees and who are mostly 16 to 18-year-olds. The Construction Industry Training Board has now agreed to become the training provider for those apprentices, and it will assist apprentices accordingly in finding new employment as rapidly as possible.

[Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)]

There are 1,200 16 to 18-year-old apprentices. May I suggest that the statement that the CITB is going to call together a taskforce does not match the urgency with which Members across the House have raised the issue of these young people, and the crucial question of their future in construction, which we desperately need to fix in advance of the Brexit debate?

[Mr Lidington]

The 1,200 apprentices obviously needed to be found both a training provider and an employer, and Carillion had been performing both those roles. The CITB has now stepped in and taken up the role of the training provider for all those young men and women. I assure the hon. Lady that the CITB is going to be extremely active—and will be pressed by Ministers to be very active—in ensuring that it reaches out to employers and finds spaces for those young men and women as rapidly as possible.