Mayors are to be handed a £100 million fund to expand apprenticeships in their areas, an announcement John Healey made in his first Labour Party conference speech as Chancellor of the Exchequer and set within an argument about young people out of work.
The money lands at a moment when the defence industry is short of exactly the trades apprenticeships produce. Wes Streeting told the same conference that there is neither an economic nor a moral justification for the sector hiring thousands of workers from abroad while a million young people are out of work at home, and committed the department he leads to what he called the Prime Minister’s mission to reindustrialise Britain.
“After Covid, and before the election, the Tories let the number of young people in this country not in employment, in education, or training rise to nearly one million,” he said. “Two thirds have never worked.” He credited the review being carried out for government by Alan Milburn with laying bare the challenge, and said the best thing that can be offered to a young person is not a benefit payment but a first job.
“So when I was first elected, I had as my first top three priorities jobs, jobs, and jobs,” he said, describing the closure of the last pit in his area at Silverwood in 1994 and a period when one in three men locally were out of work. “The jobs went away. Hope and opportunity went too.” He set his own first job, washing pots and glasses in a North Yorkshire pub, against the position young people are in now. “But every person, every young person should know the pride of getting their first job, and taking home their first pay check.”
Whether any of it reaches defence depends on where the apprenticeships are created, and the shortages the industry reports are specific. Welders, fabricators, electrical trades and nuclear-qualified roles all take years to train rather than months, and shipbuilders and submarine builders compete for the same people as construction and the energy sector. Yards have brought welders in from overseas while domestic training catches up with order books that now run for decades.
That gap has been raised repeatedly over recent weeks, and Graeme Downie, the Labour MP for Dunfermline and Dollar, told the ADS Skills Conference this month that the country’s real deterrent is not its weapons but the people who build, maintain and operate them, while the Scottish Affairs Committee reported that Scotland is well placed to benefit from rising defence spending yet risks missing out unless persistent skills shortages are addressed.
GMB made the same argument when the Programme Euston docks were confirmed for British yards, with Robert Deavy, the union’s Scotland senior organiser in engineering, saying: “We urge the Scottish Government to work with UK ministers to deliver the investment needed to support the necessary apprenticeships and training to secure this contract.”
Healey also announced £300 million of investment by Rolls-Royce across factories at Derby, Bristol, Glasgow and Rotherham, and repeated the six billion pound figure for shipbuilding contracts. The Local Apprenticeship Service fund will run through mayors rather than through departments, which puts the decisions about which trades to back with the combined authorities in places where shipbuilding, aerospace and nuclear work is concentrated. His first Budget comes in a month, and he told delegates that fiscal discipline would run through the core of it.
