LONDON: More than half of UK businesses fear an imminent “skills emergency” if they cannot access enough highly trained workers, but government plans to boost apprenticeships will do little to address the problem, the CBI has warned.
The survey revealing new concerns about skills shortages in sectors such as engineering, science and high-tech comes less than a week after the chancellor’s Budget announcement that large companies will be forced to pay a levy to fund better vocational training. However, the CBI argued that while this employee contribution might boost the number of apprenticeships and help ministers meet their target of creating 3m such placements by 2020, it would not deliver the high-quality training needed.
Of the apprenticeships started in 2013/14, just 2 per cent were “higher” placements leading to graduate-level qualifications, the business lobby said.
According to a poll of companies carried out jointly by the CBI and the education provider Pearson — which owns the Financial Times — two-thirds of businesses expected their need for staff with higher-level skills to increase sharply, but 55 per cent feared they would not be able to recruit enough trained workers. Sixty-six per cent of respondents said they already ran apprenticeship programmes, and 62 per cent said they were intending to expand their training schemes or to start one in the next three years.
The figure on apprenticeship expansions — which is the highest since the survey began seven years ago — comes in contrast to George Osborne’s Budget day criticisms that there were still too many large businesses which “leave the training to others and take a free ride on the system”. According to the chancellor, the number of people attending training courses away from the workplace has fallen from 141,000 in 1995 to 18,000 in 2014.
Responding to her members’ concerns, Katja Hall, the CBI’s deputy director-general, said although ministers had set out strategies for creating a high-skilled economy, businesses were facing a “skills emergency” that was “threatening to starve economic growth”.
