Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps he is taking to prevent job losses in the retail industry.

Retail remains a high employment sector – approximately 3 million jobs in the UK. More people are involved in retailing than in any other single industry in the country.

There were 84,000 vacancies in the retail sector as of August 2019.

In 2018, Government established the industry led Retail Sector Council to bring Government and industry together to boost the sector’s productivity and economic health. The Council has agreed its six priority work areas with four already underway. These are: Costs to Business, Skills and Lifelong Learning, Industrial Strategy and Employment workstreams.

As part of wider Government efforts to support adult training, we are also investing £100m to develop The National Retraining Scheme, which will help prepare adults for future changes to the economy, including those brought about by automation, and help them retrain into better jobs. This funding has allowed us to start delivering the first part of the service, Get Help to Retrain, whilst developing and evaluating as we build-up the scheme.

We have introduced Get Help to Retrain to 6 areas of England and we will be rolling it out across England in 2020. The digital service helps adults understand their existing skills and explore alternative occupations, and training opportunities to develop new skills.