Aviation: Recruitment

(asked on 8th September 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what recent assessment he has made of trends in the retention and recruitment of commercial pilots in the UK.


Answered by
Robert Courts Portrait
Robert Courts
Solicitor General (Attorney General's Office)
This question was answered on 15th September 2021

The most recent data from the Annual Population Survey – Employment, provided by the Office of National Statistics, shows that the number of aircraft pilots and flight engineers employed reduced from 26,100 in 2019 to 24,000 in 2020. This latter figure includes pilots who may have been furloughed by their employers and experienced support under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS).

Skills retention and skills fade for highly trained jobs needs to be a key element of the sector’s recovery plan. To support this, we introduced the Aviation Skills Retention Platform (ASRP) in February 2021 to support the retention of skills within the sector, including for pilots, by offering increased visibility of opportunities across the sector. We are also looking to better understand employment trends through vacancy data submitted to the ASRP by employers.

The Department is also working with industry on maximising use of the existing support measures such as DWP’s Flexible Support Fund and Rapid Response Service to support aviation workers at risk of redundancy to stay in employment or move between sectors.

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