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Following the announcements of an 'apprenticeship levy' in the Summer Budget 2015, techUK met with BIS to discuss the proposal.

On Friday 24 June 2015, a techUK delegation met with officials from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and HM Treasury to discuss the new apprenticeship levy proposal and its potential impact on the UK tech sector. The apprenticeship levy was first announced in the Summer Budget 2015.

Please see a brief summary of the meeting, initial concerns raised by techUK and a delegate list available for download to logged in techUK members at the bottom of this page.

As requested by BIS, techUK is now compiling questions and concerns from the tech industry about the levy and will share these with BIS as an initial step in the consultation process. If you are techUK member and have any questions or comments to be included in this informal submission from techUK please get in touch with Laura Weidinger by Friday 7 August 2015.

The apprenticeship levy will apply to all large businesses, and is designed to mandate business investment in apprenticeships. The scale of this levy, its implementation timeline, the definition of 'large businesses' and the mechanisms by which the levied funds would be allocated to apprenticeship schemes remain yet to be decided. For initial Government positions on these and more details please see the meeting summary below.

Initial concerns raised by techUK included that:

• the apprenticeship levy may disincentivise important digital skills training beyond apprenticeships,
• it may lead to the tech sector funding apprenticeships in other sectors with less job growth, and
• it may cause unequal access to apprenticeship funding, disadvantaging SMEs.

techUK outlined the skills needs of UK tech businesses and what can be done by policy-makers and the tech sector together to grow a strong talent pool in the UK in the recent paper We're just not doing enough - Working together to meet the digital skills challenge.