National Apprenticeships Week brings fresh calls for levy reform
This week is National Apprenticeships Week, and with it comes the opportunity for stakeholders to set out their position on reform of the apprenticeship levy. Alongside the recurring theme of levy funding being used by firms ‘rebadging’ existing training programmes as apprenticeships, there is continued pressure for firms to have greater flexibility over how levy funds can be spent. A report from London First and North West Business Leadership Team has called for the Government to allow levy-payers to be able to use their funds to pay for a wider variety of skills training and to cover more than just the apprentices’ training costs. These are not new demands, but demonstrate the many ways in which the Government is being pulled on where the levy should be reformed. It is a debate that will rumble on, and one in which those with an interest in the space should be involved.
Haldane reinforces government focus on ‘levelling up’ regions
One of the Government’s most influential advisory bodies has echoed Boris Johnson’s call for the Government to ‘level up’ productivity and opportunity across so-called ‘left behind’ areas of the country. A report published this week by the Industrial Strategy Council, led by the Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane, calls for Ministers to set targets to help improve productivity in regions of the country where it is at its lowest. While this will add weight to the Government’s plans to invest in regional infrastructure projects set to be announced in next month’s budget, there is likely to be some reluctance in Downing Street to embrace the idea of setting targets in central government for local and combined authorities to reach. We can expect to hear more detail from the Chancellor over the coming weeks as to how the Government plans to invest in the regions, and to what extent a greater degree of state intervention is considered necessary.
Pressure increases on government to increase local funding
The Government has been criticised this week for failing to address funding challenges in local government frontline services. A report published this week by the Local Government Information Unit found that almost all local authorities in England are planning to raise their council tax by more than 1.5% in the next year, primarily to address funding shortfalls in education and children’s services. With the Government’s local government fair funding review expected to deliver little in the way of substantial additional resources next year, and no commitment to increasing funding in the Conservatives’ general election manifesto, local authorities are bracing for further hardship. While local government – and its suppliers – will have more opportunities to feed into the funding review, the next finance settlement and the Government’s spending review process later in the year, it should be expected that local government continues to experience constraints on its spending power.
Jamie Cater, the brains behind a lot of GK’s thinking, leads our policy work across the entire business, supporting our strategic communications work and providing strategic advice to investors during M&A activity.