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.
Stating shit they think the conference needs to hear, while next week, once all the clowns have left Liverpool, going back to doing fuck all useful and at the same time promoting lefty ideas, plans and ideologies which actively degrade the status, value and credibility of the UK! These fucking muppets are by far the most stupid, useless, less experienced wannabes ever to have the power over decent people!
Crude but 100% accurate.
@ the sad sack at the top – who hates the world with an unhealthy passion.
… Doesn’t have a clue that these policies were built throughout 2024, and the formal, policy framework has been actively driven by the government since September 2025. The then Shadow Defence Secretary John Healey, frequently criticised British procurement for “wasting taxpayers’ money” and leaving the industry “hollowed out”. During the run-up to the 2024 UK General Election, Labour officially integrated the commitment to a new ‘Defence Industrial Strategy’ into its manifesto. They framed it specifically as a tool to align national security with local community economic growth.
John Healey, now Chancellor, used his major 2026 conference speech to pivot the policy into a broader, nationwide “new age of industrialisation,” explicitly tying the defence budget to a pledge to support 130,000 new engineering, AI, and green-energy jobs across regional mayoral authorities by 2030.
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Large scale apprenticeship schemes are not a magic fix on their own; they are the essential fuel for a much larger industrial engine. The benefits of these schemes can only be fully realised when they are backed by a guaranteed order book and continuously modernised national infrastructure.
For the individual, this initiative offers a 40-year career rather than just a first job. Apprentices earn a living wage while mastering elite, highly technical trades, such as nuclear grade metallurgy, advanced robotics, and complex project management, without gaining a mountain of student debt. It creates a reliable, lifelong career path that anchors families and elevates entire regional communities.
By breaking the historic “boom and bust” cycle, this strategy systematically de-risks the future. Consistently injecting young blood into the workforce stops the catastrophic institutional memory loss that occurs when older engineers retire without passing down their specialised trade secrets. Furthermore, a reliable pipeline of fresh talent gives the thousands of supporting SMEs the confidence to invest in their own futures and take on ambitious new contracts.
This investment also triggers a national productivity dividend. As highly disciplined, tech-literate workers naturally transition into civilian sectors, such as high performance automotive companies, green-energy firms, or medical manufacturing enterprises, they bring world-class engineering standards with them, lifting the economic baseline of the entire nation.
Over time, this concentrated pool of world-class technical talent turns a region into a geographic magnet. It attracts global aerospace and technology giants who want to build their next high-value facilities precisely where the best workers already live. Ultimately, a robust apprenticeship scheme acts as a primary catalyst for turning government defence spending into permanent national wealth. It converts billions of pounds of public funding into highly skilled workers who will drive innovation, productivity, and manufacturing prestige for decades to come … provided the shipyards and order books remain funded to give them a place to work.
Reflecting this, the government’s wider strategy, codified under the DNE framework, explicitly treats this mission as a “National Endeavour.” The apprenticeships span thousands of roles far outside the shipyard walls. Guided by the “Defence Industrial Strategy”, this framework seeks to make “Defence an Engine for Growth.”
It begins as an intense industrial sprint to build the badly needed ships, subs, docks etc. but it is structurally designed to become a multi generational marathon to sustain those assets.
Oh the nasty man not being nice to your socialist hero’s! Oh dear, how sad, never mind! I see you believe any tosh these clowns tell you, typical weak minded and ignorant. I see you cut and paste your post, mmmmmmm not ideal. I actually love the world, as traveled it many times, I just don’t believe, like or support this inept bunch of socialist clowns! You may have bought the unelected PM mug at conference (very apt for the people of Makerfield) but that’s down to you. PS I see your staking me a bit, this will be fun!
Perhaps if it wasn’t so expensive to hire young people sitting at home getting benefits because they have a spot on their nose that would help!
IIRC back in the Stone Age wasn’t it industry that hired and trained their own apprentice’s?