The Growth and Skills Levy Is Welcome. But Apprenticeships Alone Won’t Solve Britain’s Trade Skills Crisis

The Government’s new Growth and Skills Levy is designed to make apprenticeships more flexible and affordable for employers.

From August 2026, apprenticeship training for eligible 16–24-year-olds is fully funded, while from October smaller, non-levy-paying employers will be able to receive up to £2,000 when recruiting a new apprentice aged 16–24.

These are welcome changes. But they may not address the fundamental reason so many small trade businesses are reluctant to take on apprentices in the first place.

The cost of training is only part of the problem

For a small decorating, plumbing, electrical or construction business, the biggest cost of an apprentice may not be the training fee.

It is time.

An experienced tradesperson who spends several hours teaching and supervising someone is often giving up several hours they could otherwise have spent completing paid work for a customer.

And unlike a large company with dedicated training teams and significant management capacity, many British trades businesses consist of only one or two people.

At the same time, employment costs have continued to rise. Checkatrade research found that rising taxes, including higher employer National Insurance contributions, are already seen by many tradespeople as a barrier to growing their businesses.

Making apprenticeship training cheaper therefore helps, but it does not remove the wider commercial burden of becoming a training employer.

Only 12% of tradespeople took on an apprentice last year

This matters because the gap between interest in the trades and access to them is becoming increasingly obvious.

Recent Checkatrade research found that 48% of young people are considering a career in the trades and that apprenticeships are now viewed more favourably than university by many under-25s.

Yet just 12% of tradespeople surveyed had taken on an apprentice during the previous year.

In other words, interest in skilled careers is growing much faster than the traditional infrastructure available to bring people into them.

At the same time, almost one million young people are NEET

The scale of the wider challenge makes this even more urgent.

The latest Office for National Statistics figures estimate that 981,000 young people aged 16–24 are not in education, employment or training. Earlier in 2026, that figure exceeded one million.

Against that backdrop, the Government’s ambition to give technical education much greater status is encouraging.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham recently argued that Britain should “value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap”, alongside plans to provide young people with earlier access to technical education, work experience and connections with employers.

That direction is welcome.

But if Britain genuinely wants to move hundreds of thousands of people into productive skilled work, we cannot rely on one pathway alone.

We need complementary routes into skilled employment

Apprenticeships will remain essential. They provide an excellent pathway for many people and play a critical role in developing the next generation of skilled workers.

But expecting every small trade business to become a training organisation is unlikely to solve a labour shortage of this scale.

We also need to innovate.

That means developing new pathways that can prepare people before they reach an employer, use technology to accelerate the knowledge-building process, concentrate practical training around the skills actually required for work, and reduce the amount of time an experienced tradesperson needs to spend bringing a new entrant up to speed.

The objective should not simply be to increase the number of people entering training.

It should be to reduce the distance between someone wanting a skilled career and becoming capable of productive, paid work.

Building new pathways into the trades

At Renzo, this is the problem we are working on.

We are building flexible, employment-focused pathways into skilled careers, designed around real labour demand and the competence people need to begin earning.

The Growth and Skills Levy is an important step. But addressing Britain’s skills shortage will require more than making an existing pathway cheaper.

We need apprenticeships. And we need new models alongside them.