Alok Sharma's Westminster Diary: February, 9
Published 10 Feb 2012 09:00
This week is National Apprenticeship Week and in order to promote this annual initiative by the National Apprenticeship Service I spent a part of Monday shadowing the work of Sheraine Sutton-Eaton, who is an apprentice at Norcot Early Years Centre in my constituency. The centre looks after children up to five years old and, although it's a few years since my daughters were toddlers, the experience of keeping young children entertained certainly came flooding back!
This excellent national event helps to raise the profile of apprenticeships amongst employers, individuals, teachers, parents and the media and highlights the importance of apprenticeships for building skills for the future and improving the life chances of young people.
Apprenticeships offer the opportunity to earn and learn on the job, and at the same time gain nationally recognised qualifications. They are also excellent in helping to build an effective skills base for employers.
The Coalition clearly recognises the value of apprenticeships and is fully committed to supporting apprenticeship schemes. Provisional data for 2010/11 indicates record growth in apprenticeship numbers, with some 440,000 people starting an apprenticeship during the year. In additiona to its on-going support, in the Autumn Statement the Chancellor also announced that the Coalition would fund 40,000 incentive payments worth £1,500 each for employers to take on young apprentices as part of the Youth Contract. I understand that the National Apprenticeship Service is starting to publicise this scheme to eligible employers.
Last year there were 920 apprenticeship starts in my Reading West constituency, with participants coming from a range of backgrounds and ages. This is very positive news, and I hope that even more businesses will sign up to take on apprentices this year.
In Parliament this week we had the second reading of the Financial Services Bill which aims to introduce new systems of financial regulation to try and ensure that we avoid the financial meltdown we came close to during the last
financial crisis.
Part of the problem during the last crisis was that, when the crunch came, no one knew who was in charge.
This Bill aims to address that regulatory failure and it was interesting to note that the Labour Party did not vote against the Bill at the end of the debate. Acknowledgement, of sorts, that the financial supervisory system Labour
had put in place before the financial crisis was simply not fit for purpose.
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