The Government Training Levy

England

The Government introduced the compulsory Apprenticeship Levy in April 2017, to be paid by employers with annual pay-bills in excess of £3million. The Levy is to deliver new Apprenticeships and is charged at a rate of 0.5% of an employer’s pay bill.

The Government’s prime objective in launching the levy is to:

• Boost productivity by investing in human capital
• Sustained learning to build a more qualified and skilful workforce.

The Government has committed to an additional three million Apprenticeship starts in England by 2020, to develop vocational skills and increase the quantity and quality of Apprenticeships.

A key Levy principle is to deliver new Apprenticeships and support quality training by putting employers at the heart of the system, working with industry to produce quality standards by the industry, for the industry. It is the Government’s goal to ensure employers committed to training will be able to get back more than they put in by training sufficient numbers of Apprentices.

Scotland and Wales

In Scotland and Wales there are no compulsory levy funds in place although there are plans to roll this out over the next two years.

The DFL has developed relationships with local providers in both Scotland and Wales to allow a like for like delivery of funded vocational training to take place.
This approach will pave the way for when the Levy crosses over to those devolved governments so that the training programmes, systems and processes will already be in place to help smooth the introduction of levy funded learning in your business.