Nearly 1 million temporary workers locked out of government's apprenticeship scheme

Trade body calls on ministers to allow 960,000 temps into flagship training programme

Ninety-eight per cent of people on short-term contracts employed through an agency cannot access training through the levy (Getty)

A recruiters’ trade body is calling on the government to open up the apprenticeship levy scheme to temporary workers, saying such reform could help plug skills gaps, and raise productivity and wages.

Around 960,000 temporary workers, accounting for 98 per cent of people on short-term contracts employed through an agency, cannot access training through the levy because their assignments do not last the required minimum of 12 months for an apprenticeship, the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) has found.

The REC estimates that more than 670 of its member firms pay around £110m into the levy each year but are unable to use most of that money. Almost half of the recruitment agencies polled by the trade body have been unable to spend any of the funds.

“We must end the scandal of locking temporary workers out of the system,” REC chief executive Neil Carberry said in a statement on Monday.

“There are skills shortages in areas that training temps using levy funds could help to address, like hospitality, and health and social care.”

Other hard-to-fill jobs that would benefit from a reformed levy include the positions of teaching assistant, forklift truck driver and engineering manager, according to the REC.

Zooming in on a sector with some of the UK’s most acute labour shortages, a recruiter pointed out that a lot of people want to become a carer but can’t afford to do the training. Her firm can’t use its £30,000 yearly levy funds for its temporary staff, said Robyn Holmes, founder and managing director of recruitment agency Prime Appointments.

Under the two-year-old scheme, employers with a wage bill of over £3m a year must pay an equivalent of 0.5 per cent of that bill to HMRC. They can then access those funds and spend them on apprenticeships in England. Any funds that remain untapped after two years expire.

Even those temporary workers whose contracts do last more than a year are not eligible for levy-funded apprenticeships if they spend less than 20 per cent of their working time on training.

According to the REC, this requirement is “at odds with the very reasons for using agency workers” who are hired primarily to meet peaks in demand and cover absences.

Despite efforts such as the levy, in force since 2017, the REC said the UK remains below the EU average on the proportion of GDP spent on training and education, the proportion of employees accessing training and spending per employee on training courses.