Nearly a million young people are outside the door. Training for young apprentices is now fully funded. And some employers would still rather pay £3 to £4 an hour more for somebody trained somewhere else. Here is why that matters so much for the next generation, and what we lose if more businesses do not get behind this.
At the Hertsmere Think Tank at West Herts Golf Club, I was asked a question I have not been able to shake.
It is a fair question to ask. It is the wrong question to act on. And the fact that it still gets asked, out loud, at a business event in 2026, tells you exactly why so many young people are being left on the bench. So here is our answer. It is not a polite one.
Let us be fair to the question first. For £3 to £4 an hour more than an apprentice, you get someone who can walk in and get on with it. For a small business that is real money, and I understand why it looks like the sensible trade.
But it only adds up if you stop the sums at the hourly rate.
And the person you hired for £3 to £4 an hour more knows exactly what they are worth. The next employer only has to offer a little more than you did.
I do not think the person asking meant any harm. I think they said out loud what plenty of employers privately believe: experience is something you buy ready-made, and training is somebody else’s job. That belief is costing us a generation.
“Somebody with experience” is exactly who every other business is trying to hire too. Skills shortages are real. But if every business waits for somebody else to train the people it wants to hire, nobody trains anybody. We all end up fishing in the same small pond, poaching each other’s staff, pushing up salaries and wondering why nobody stays. A £3 to £4 an hour premium does not stay at £3 to £4 for long when everyone is chasing the same people.
Apprenticeships were meant to be a front door into work for young people. For years, that door got narrower, and the CIPD warned the system was encouraging employers to rebadge training for existing staff as apprenticeships.
“It is too expensive” used to be the go-to line. Not any more.
Training fully funded. From 1 August 2026, the government fully funds apprenticeship training for all eligible 16 to 24 year olds, for levy and non-levy employers alike.
A hiring payment of up to £2,000. From 1 October 2026, employers who do not pay the levy can get up to £2,000 when they take on a new apprentice aged 16 to 24.
No employer National Insurance. Employers pay no employer National Insurance on eligible apprentices under 25, up to the upper earnings limit.
A further £3,000 in some cases. Hire an 18 to 24 year old who has been on Universal Credit for more than six months and the Youth Jobs Grant adds £3,000.
Training paid for. National Insurance gone. Cash on the table. The only thing left for an employer to supply is the one thing no government can fund: time, patience, and a manager who actually cares whether the young person succeeds. That is the real cost of an apprentice, and it is exactly what separates good employers from the ones who post about skills shortages.
Those are not the numbers of a social responsibility project. They are the numbers of a business investment.
This part is our view, not a statistic. But put it next to the numbers above and tell me it is far-fetched.
When every entry-level job asks for two years’ experience and nobody will give anyone the first day, “entry level” stops meaning anything. Young people are told the ladder is not for them.
The longer a young person waits for a first chance, the harder the second one gets. A two-year gap at 20 reads very differently from a two-year apprenticeship.
Businesses keep poaching from each other and paying over the odds for people who leave after twelve months. Nobody asks who was meant to be growing them.
If the only young people who get a start are the ones with contacts or parents in the trade, we lose the talent of everyone else.
A route designed to open doors ends up as a training budget for people who are already comfortable.
Young people with nowhere to go do not disappear. The cost turns up in lost talent, lost tax, lost local spending and lost belief that work is worth it.
And for the business that would not take a chance on a 17 year old? In ten years, the person who could have been running its operation will be running a competitor’s.
Flip it round. Every employer who takes on one young apprentice builds a future supervisor who already knows their customers, their systems and their standards. Nobody had to poach them. Nobody had to pay a recruitment fee for them. They grew up in the business.
Multiply that across a town, a county, a sector, and the “skills shortage” starts to look a lot less like bad luck and a lot more like a choice we made.
The Com’mon People was built on mutual aid. Most small employers cannot build a training academy on their own, and they do not need to. That is the point of all of us. So we are asking every employer reading this to get behind this campaign.
Commit to one. Take on one young apprentice in the next twelve months.
Change the question. The next time someone asks “why would I employ an apprentice?”, send them this dispatch.
Share what works. Tell us what went right and what went wrong, so the next business does not have to learn it the hard way.
Opinions in this piece are marked as the author’s own. Apprenticeship funding rules changed in August 2026 and continue to change, so check the current GOV.UK guidance before acting on any figure here.
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