We Paid Two Hundred and Eighty Thousand Pounds a Year Into the Apprenticeship Levy and IT Had Never Spent Any of It

Every employer in the UK with a pay bill above three million pounds pays the apprenticeship levy, half a percent of the pay bill less a fifteen thousand pound allowance, into an account it can then spend on apprenticeship training. Ours comes to about two hundred and eighty thousand pounds a year. The money sits in an online account, and anything not spent within twenty four months of being paid in expires.

I knew the levy existed. I thought of it as something HR ran for the warehouse and the drivers, and it was. Our warehouse operative and large goods vehicle driver apprenticeships are good schemes and have filled real gaps. What I did not know until a finance review last spring was that about seventy thousand pounds had expired unspent in the previous year, because those schemes could not use it all.

In the same year my department spent about forty thousand pounds of its own budget on training, and much more than that on contractors to cover gaps in service desk and network skills. Apprenticeships exist for exactly those roles, at several levels, from an information communications technician for someone starting out to cyber security and network engineering for people already in the job. Some of the people I was paying a contractor to stand in for could have been trained with money the business had already paid and was about to lose.

Nobody had hidden this. HR assumed IT would ask if it had a use for the levy. I assumed the levy was not for us. Neither of us had a reason to look at the other's numbers.

We now have two apprentices on the service desk, recruited from our own depots, and one of our existing engineers is on a cyber security apprenticeship. The levy pays for the training, not the salaries, so the salaries went through the budget round like any other post, and they cost less than the contractor they replace. HR and I review the levy account every quarter, and IT has a share of it planned a year ahead, so nothing expires because no one had a plan for it.

Before you ask the business for new money, find out what it already pays for that you could use. Some of it is sitting in an account with an expiry date, waiting for a department to ask.

– Serguey Shinder