Resilience is a top priority for this government. Ministers and officials regularly engage with International partners to learn from and share good practice in relation to resilience. There are no current plans to replicate Sweden’s model of civic duty.

The UK already has many reservist programmes: these include programmes for the armed forces, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, Mountain Rescue, Retained Firefighters, Coastguard volunteers, NHS volunteers and special constables.

The Government has set out its ambition for a whole of society approach to resilience in the Resilience Framework. The Deputy Prime Minister’s first annual statement to Parliament on resilience offered more detail on plans to build on the community spirit in our country and the willingness of individuals to volunteer in a crisis by developing an index of volunteering opportunities.

To support the broader training offer the Government has committed to the development of a UK Resilience Academy that will provide a full suite of learning and training opportunities for the whole of society.

The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority.

Please see the letter attached from the National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority.

The Rt Rev. the Lord Bishop of Derby

House of Lords

London SW1A 0PW

27 June 2023

Dear Lord Bishop,

As National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority, I am responding to your Parliamentary Question asking what are the levels of youth unemployment in the most recent period for which data are available (HL8749).

Estimates of youth unemployment are available from the Labour Force Survey (LFS). These estimates are published each month in our A06 SA: Educational status and labour market status for people aged from 16 to 24 (seasonally adjusted) dataset [1] .

The latest data available, covering the period February to April 2023, estimates the number of unemployed people aged 16 to 24 years at 465,000 (10.9%).

Yours sincerely,

Professor Sir Ian Diamond

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/datasets/educationalstatusandlabourmarketstatusforpeopleagedfrom16to24seasonallyadjusteda06sa

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what measures they are taking to improve access to apprenticeships that offer career progression and high-skill employment, particularly for those under 26 years old.

I thank the Minister for that slightly unenthusiastic Answer. However, the Government’s own social mobility commission rightly expressed its alarm that 90% of current apprenticeships go to those aged 25 and over, and as a direct consequence young people are becoming ghettoised in low-skill and low- or minimum-wage areas of the economy. Does the Minister accept that this evident imbalance, which embeds a lack of opportunity, mobility and aspiration among young people, is bad for the economy and the nation as a whole? Can she tell the House what specific measures the Government are going to take to address this mounting problem?

My Lords, on the Social Mobility Select Committee we heard excellent evidence, particularly from engineering companies, of 18 year-olds who join and go all the way up to the board of directors. We also heard that some City firms are addressing their recruitment needs by moving from

recruiting only graduates to recruiting a proportion at 18. Can my noble friend the Minister please outline how the 750 or so Whitehall Civil Service apprenticeships, including the Civil Service Fast Track, are put into the system so that young people who join at 18 have the structures and the encouragement that they can go all the way to being a Permanent Secretary in the Civil Service?

My Lords, I applaud the Government for seeking to provide more apprenticeships for young people. Those are certainly badly needed but is the Minister aware of the number of apprentices who leave their jobs as soon as their apprenticeship comes to an end, only to be replaced by another set of apprentices? In other words, employers are simply using apprentices as a source of cheap labour, with little or no benefit to the apprentices themselves? Do the Government have any plans to resolve that problem?

May I draw the Minister’s attention to the contribution made by the Baker-Dearing university technical colleges? They are teaching both vocational skills and standard O-levels and A-levels. This enables the people attending and coming out of them to do much higher-quality apprenticeships, in the spirit of the noble Lord’s Question.

The original Question sought to understand why the young were discriminated against so that 90% of apprentices were 26 or over. Can the Minister please answer why it was that that first tranche was so disenfranchised?

My Lords, the apprenticeship levy that is coming in next year is in danger of having some unintended consequences. Imposing a cap on what can be claimed per higher apprenticeship may drive employers towards more low-level apprenticeships, so that they can claim more of their own money back. Making the levy exclusively for apprenticeships may deter them from offering a wider range of training opportunities for their staff. Do the Government recognise those dangers, and what are they going to do to address them?

My Lords, Carolyn Fairbairn, the director-general of the employers’ organisation, the CBI, said last week that a radical rethink of the plans for the apprenticeship levy is needed if the Government are to meet their target of 3 million new apprenticeships, and that they need to be trialled before a full rollout. What is the Minister’s response to these concerns?

We have a major focus on improving apprenticeship quality through our employer-led reforms and the new Institute for Apprenticeships. We are supporting young apprentices in smaller businesses through the apprenticeship grant for employers. We have removed the requirement for employers to pay national insurance contributions for apprentices aged under 25. From April next year, when employers take on an apprentice aged 16 to 18, they will receive an additional payment.

This Government is taking a series of important steps to help young people gain a good broad education with transferable skills such as literacy and numeracy, as well as employability skills from work experience.

This includes our reforms to GCSEs to ensure that they are more stretching and provide greater assurance of core literacy and numeracy than the old GCSEs. We are also reforming Functional Skills to improve the rigour and relevance of these qualifications as well as improving their recognition among employers. The new Functional Skills qualifications will be ready to teach in 2018.

As of August 2015, the condition of funding has been revised, so all 16-18 year old full-time students starting their study programme who have a grade D GCSE or equivalent in maths or English must be enrolled on a GCSE or approved IGCSE qualification in maths or English to work towards attaining a good pass.

We have also built English and maths into the heart of traineeships and apprenticeships to ensure that young people have the literacy and numeracy skills needed by employers. Our traineeship programme is supporting 16-24 year olds to gain the skills and work experience they need to be able to compete for apprenticeships and other jobs. In addition, all of the new employer-led apprenticeship standards must demonstrate acquisition of transferable skills and offer more than just training for a single job or employer. Standards must ensure that an apprentice can adapt to a variety of roles, with different employers, developing the ability to progress in their careers.

There are a number of ways in which the Government assesses the impact of poor literacy on the economy.

On 28 January 2016, the OECD published its report ‘Building skills for all – a review of England’. The report was commissioned by BIS following the publication of the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills in 2013. Key findings from Building Skills for All are:

• Nine million adults in England have poor basic skills.
• Overall, in terms of proportion, this is average for OECD countries, but England’s young people lag behind other countries.
• A third of 16-19 year olds in England have poor basic skills – three times the proportion than in high performing countries.
• Eliminating the tail of low achievement could increase long term productivity growth by around 0.5%.

The BIS Research Paper 195 ‘Estimation of the labour market returns to qualifications gained in English Further Education’, published in December 2014, shows that there are higher returns to qualifications achieved at younger ages and that English (and maths) Level 1 and Level 2 qualifications provide an additional wage uplift for achievers of higher learning aims. Increased earnings and employment rates following training provide an indication of the positive impact on the economy of improving skills.

In 2012, when the PIAAC carried out the survey fieldwork for both reports, only 70% of 16-19 year olds were participating in education and training that leads to a formal qualification; compared to almost universal participation in some other OECD countries. Since then the participation age in England has been increased to age 18 and action has been taken to improve GCSE qualifications and raise standards in post-16 education. These reforms have been welcomed by the OECD in its latest report. .

Since changing the requirement for all learners who did not achieve a Level 2 in English and maths by the age of 16 to continue to study these subjects as part of their 16-19 study programme, we have seen a positive effect on participation and attainment. In 2014/15, 97% of 16 to 19 year olds without GCSE A*-C English and/or maths attending an FE institution continued their study of these subjects. In 2015, for 17-year-olds and over, entries for English rose by 23% (30% for maths). As a result, last year there were over 4,000 more GCSE passes at grades A*-C in English by students aged 17 and over (7,500 more maths passes).

On 5 February 2016 we published a new report on the impact of poor English and maths from the perspective of employers. Some key findings are:

• The vast majority of employers surveyed reported no issues with the literacy of their employees.
• Employers that do offer basic skills training reported positive impacts on aspects of work such as the number of errors (63%), better capacity to meet statutory requirements (58%), being able to introduce new processes (52%) and being able to produce higher quality products (51%).

The full report can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/poor-basic-literacy-and-numeracy-effect-on-employers

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is an independent body, and its report “Is Britain Fairer?” covers a five-year period spanning the Labour and Coalition governments. We welcome the positive areas of progress and note the key challenges to which it refers. The information in the report will be used by the EHRC to help develop its next strategic plan, covering the period 2016-19.

Giving young people the skills that businesses need is important. That is why our work to ensure 3 million apprenticeship starts in England over this Parliament is crucial.

According to London Economics, the lifetime benefits associated with the acquisition of Apprenticeships at Level 2 and 3 are very significant, standing at between £48,000 and £74,000 for Level 2 and between £77,000 and £117,000 for Level 3 Apprenticeships.

The latest data shows that 89% of apprentices are satisfied with their apprenticeship; 85% of apprentices said their ability to do the job had improved, and 83% of apprentices said their career prospects had improved.

The overall maintenance support available to students in loans will increase to the highest level ever for students from low-income households. The Government will also continue to provide maintenance loans to students from all backgrounds to cover the costs of living while studying. These loans are only repaid once borrowers’ earnings rise above £21,000.

The priority for younger workers under 25 is to gain skills and experience and secure work - something that is already reflected in the National Minimum Wage rate structure where the youth rate is currently £1.40 lower than the adult rate. Wages tend to increase through the early 20s as workers gain more experience. Therefore, the wages of younger workers will continue to be underpinned by the core National Minimum Wage as recommended by the Low Pay Commission at the highest possible level without affecting employment.

Government remains committed to supporting young people’s participation in sport and to ensuring that they can access sporting opportunities, regardless of their background. Sport England research shows that the most frequently stated reasons for young people doing more or less sport is not necessarily cost, but actually whether the ‘offer’ is right, injury/illness and also time-related pressures. Government is committed to ensuring that barriers to participation are broken down. Between 2012 and 2017 Sport England is investing almost £450 million to get more young people playing sport, with a focus on making sure that sport is delivered at the right place, at the right time and in the right style.