Member Article

Government needs a plan to reskill workforce if UK wants to achieve growth - new report

The UK is falling behind the rest of the world in reskilling its national workforce and the Government must urgently rethink its approach if we are going to see growth in this decade, a new report called Access All Areas: People from Enterprise Nation and The Entrepreneurs Network has found.

Since 2005, UK employers’ investment in training has fallen by 28 per cent in real terms . Businesses in the EU invest double that of the UK. At the same time 90 per cent of business owners say school leavers are not ready for employment and two thirds of parents believe the education system is not preparing children for the workplace. According to Government figures, more than five million working age adults are on out of work benefits and another 402,000 people are economically inactive.

Emma Jones, CBE, founder and CEO of Enterprise Nation, said: “We need a fresh plan to incentivise businesses to invest in skills and we need to apply a forensic lens on reskilling the millions of people who are economically inactive. The underlying equation is that skills = growth. Without the skills and the available workforce, we are not going to see growth in this decade.

“The Government must look to support interventions from the private sector and build on those that work well to create programmes that could be monitored to achieve high standards. This would create a knowledge bank of what works and what doesn’t, without the government having to fund projects with weak evidence. It must also consider allowing the 4.25 million self-employed access to tax-deductible training as the UK is one of the only countries in the OECD not to allow this.”

The report found that the Apprenticeships Levy has not had the impact on training it was expected to have. Just a third of Levy-paying employers say it has led them to increase the amount they spend on training. This is down from 45% in July 2017, showing confidence in the Levy has dwindled since it was introduced.

Elsewhere the report identifies a major untapped opportunity to equip young people with entrepreneurial skills that employers want, and employees favour themselves. More than half (51%) of young people have thought about or already have started a business. Embedding entrepreneurial education across the curriculum including universities and developing an entrepreneurial education strategy in line with EU countries, could help to transform career outcomes.

UK businesses large and small rely on overseas talent. While many small businesses can get by employing only domestic talent, a significant minority, particularly the most ambitious, reach a point where they need talent from outside the UK to grow. Before the end of free movement, this was less of a problem – following Brexit, the pool of easily employable talent has shrunk dramatically.

The report, which is available to download from the Enterprise Nation website, found that while opening the doors to the ‘brightest and the best’ via schemes such as the High Potential Individual visa (HPI) or the Scale up worker visa, this doesn’t help the 4.1m start-ups, early stage and micro businesses. Instead, they have to struggle with poorly signposted information and pay thousands of pounds to sponsor non-UK nationals.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Business News .