With
National Apprenticeship Week 2026 in full swing,
Make UK has urged the Government to adopt a ‘Skills Investment Pledge’ in response to falling apprenticeship numbers and a continued rise in young people not in education, employment or training. The organisation is calling for a clear commitment that all revenue raised through the
Skills and Growth Levy and the Immigration Skills Charge will be reinvested directly into workforce development.
Skills shortages remain one of the largest constraints on productivity for manufacturers, with an estimated 50,000 live vacancies across the sector. Despite record employer contributions via both levy mechanisms, Make UK highlights that billions of pounds collected each year are not fed back into the training system, effectively acting as an additional tax on business. Its Industrial Strategy Skills Commission also identified that limited local training provision remains a major hurdle for firms looking to take on apprentices. With more than £1 billion in unused levy funding paid by employers, Make UK argues that Government intervention could help unlock critical training capacity and reverse the decline in technical apprenticeship starts.
Recent Industrial Strategy commitments to allow levy funds to be used for short courses have been welcomed, but Make UK warns that this does not address the wider long-term decline in engineering and manufacturing apprenticeships, which have fallen by around 40% since 2017. The organisation says many manufacturers feel the current levy system restricts their ability to tackle skills gaps at a time when demand for advanced, digitally enabled engineering capabilities is increasing. Make UK’s proposed Skills Investment Pledge would guarantee that all levy and charge income is spent on training provision, supporting the expansion of apprenticeships, Skills Bootcamps and Higher technical qualifications, as well as strengthening funding bands in high‑cost technical disciplines such as engineering. It would also help rebuild capacity in further-education providers, which has steadily eroded over the past decade.
Ringfencing the levy in this way, Make UK argues, would re-allocate more than £1 billion a year towards workforce development by 2029–30, representing a 69% uplift in Government funding for apprenticeships. This could deliver as many as 234,000 additional apprenticeship starts annually. Even using more conservative assumptions than those employed by Government, the long‑term boost to the UK economy from a more highly skilled workforce is estimated at between £4.4 billion and £5.9 billion per year.
Robert Halfon, executive director at Make UK, said: “Manufacturing and engineering apprenticeships are in steep decline, yet billions from the Growth and Skills Levy and Immigration Skills Charge are not being used by the Government where they are needed most – risking valuable training being cut back. Ringfencing these funds through a Skills Investment Pledge could instead unlock hundreds of thousands of new apprenticeships, plug skills gaps, and deliver at the very least a £4.4 billion boost to the economy. The time to act is now – our young people and our sector cannot wait.”