Speaking during an interview with the Skills World Live Radio Show, Leaders Council chair and former Labour cabinet minister, Lord David Blunkett, has hinted that Sir Keir Starmer and his frontbench are considering broadening the Apprenticeship Levy if they get into government.
The £3 billion per year levy, Lord Blunkett says, could be widened into a “learning levy”, adding that it was time for “radical but doable” changes to skills.
Lord Blunkett is part of a “counsel of skills advisers” that is currently working with the Labour top team on forming skills policy, which will eventually feed into the party's next election manifesto.
Lord Blunkett said: “We will obviously be able to use the apprenticeship levy more imaginatively, creatively, as a learning levy.”
The former Sheffield Brightside & Hillsborough MP added that the final proposals for changes to the Apprenticeship Levy would be unveiled in the party’s policy paper on skills, which will then help form the party’s election manifesto for 2024, the year that the next general election is currently scheduled for.
The policy paper will be discussed publicly at the upcoming Labour party conference, set to run this autumn from September 25-28.
