LABOUR are looking to give apprenticeships a “rocket boost” after the number of starts in Brighton and Hove fell to a five year low.

Brighton and Hove City Council’s administration is to launch a city employer skills task force in a bid to turnaround the year-on-year decline in city apprenticeships.

Children, young people and skills committee chairman Tom Bewick described the current situation as “pretty dire” as the city lagged behind the similar-sized cities of Plymouth, Coventry and Sunderland.

The councillor said the apprenticeship drive was part of his party’s attempts to deliver on their manifesto pledge to eradicate youth unemployment in the city.

Skills Estimates for 2014/15 indicate that Brighton and Hove will fail to create 1,000 apprenticeship starts for the first time since 2009/10 with numbers continuing a downward spiral from 1,698 in 2012/13 to 1,351 in 2013/14.

In comparison Sunderland created 3,500 and Coventry almost 3,000 in 2013/14.

Coun Bewick said that he aimed to lift the number of apprenticeship starts back up to more than 2,000.

Central to the apprenticeship drive, the administration has announced plans to establish a skills task force consisting of up to a dozen employers.

The task force would aim to meet four or five times over next nine months, reporting back to council leader Warren Morgan and the city’s three MPs.

The newly-formed group would look to encourage city employers to make solid pledges on apprenticeship starts, review employment and skills projects and pursue the possibility of an apprenticeship training company model which has been successful in Leeds, London and elsewhere in the country.

Coun Bewick, who was a Government adviser on youth and adult education for seven years and who has founded and led several business and public bodies in the sector, said: “We are absolutely committed to putting a rocket boost up for the whole issue of employment and skills in the city.

“For too long we have been languishing and when you compare us to similar-sized cities like Plymouth, Coventry and Sunderland, we are bottom of the pack.

“The ambition is just not where it needs to be for a dynamic and creative city like Brighton and Hove with 300,000 residents.”

Councillor Alex Phillips, Green spokeswoman on children, young people and skills, said her group were proud of their record in creating 9,500 jobs in the city during their administration, establishing a one-stop training shop for young people and unlocking funding for local jobs and apprenticeships at key development sites.

She said: “We recognise that there is always more that can be done to drive down youth unemployment further, but we do not want to see the privatisation of careers advice.”

"CITY HAS A LOT TO LEARN FROM THE SUCCESS OF LEEDS"

IT’S not often that youngsters in Brighton and Hove would have reason to envy their counterparts in the less glamorous surrounds of Sunderland, Plymouth and Coventry.

But they do when it comes to apprenticeships, according to Labour councillor Tom Bewick who has said we are falling well behind similar sized cities and failing hundreds of youngsters in long-term unemployment.

The chairman of the children, young people and skills committee said the city had a lot to learn from the success of Leeds, which creates four times as many apprentice start-ups in a year, and Coventry, which created almost three times as many.

He said: “While unemployment levels are low in the city compared to elsewhere in the country, for the 660 young people who have been unemployed for longer than six months, it’s just not good enough.”

To tackle the situation, the councillor will launch a city employer skills taskforce at next week’s committee meeting in a bid to tackle the decline.

Coun Bewick said the council’s role in the new taskforce would be as a “good civic leader” but the impetus and the detail of the apprenticeship drive would be led by the business community.

He said that one of the keys to the success of the scheme would be to engage with 98 per cent of the city’s firms that were small or micro-businesses that employ ten employees or less.

He added at present there were small companies that wanted to be part of apprenticeship schemes on a national level but have concerns about the level of red tape or that they would be too small to be able to mentor an apprentice. 

He said: “We are not planning for this to cost the taxpayer or the city council a single pound. It’s not about setting up another political talking shop.

“This will be led by a senior business figure in the city. We want the apprenticeship scheme to play to the strengths of the city including digital companies and the tourist trade, the retail and restaurant industries. The jobs that are created will have to be rooted in the real economy”.

The taskforce will have until later this year to report back with an “action plan”.

Coun Bewick is confident its impact could be quickly felt within the city.

He said: “The London apprenticeship company established over 1,600 start-ups in four years and in Leeds they had 6,000 start-ups in just two years.

“This is something that can be delivering within the four years of our administration.”

Coun Bewick said that while the council would give businesses the freedom to set the focus of the task force, the council still had a large role to play and had to look at how it could create more apprenticeships. He added there are currently 46 apprenticeships working for the council but said that figure could be five times that number.

The Labour councillor welcomed the recent Government announcement that schools and hospitals will have to take on more apprenticeships.

He said: “I want to see the encouragement for our young people in the city as teaching assistants and in school administration roles.

“We currently have 70 schools in the city. Ideally you could have one apprentice in each school.”

The Westbourne councillor recently took in a fact-finding mission to Coventry City Council where apprenticeships had quadrupled since 2011.

He said the drive was launched after a report discovered that less than 5% of employees were 25 or under.

Despite the challenges the council faced over the next four years in terms of rapidly receding central government grants, he said the authority could not neglect its duties as a youth employer.

He added: “We face a challenge here in reassuring the trade unions that even in the context of restructuring the workforce and the potential for cuts, we cannot allow that to get in the way of investing in our future, to invest in young people as much as possible.” 

One of the key challenges for the taskforce is the changing the perceptions around apprenticeships, he added.

“We need to break down the negative perceptions that people may have about work based training, out-dated perceptions that it’s a lot of oily rag jobs, just low paid, low skilled jobs.

“That is not the current state of apprenticeships, there are exciting new apprenticeships in law, finance and digital media, high paid and high skilled jobs.” 

Last week’s budget also saw the Government make another bold announcement in declaring their intention to introduce an apprenticeship levy on all large firms. Chancellor George Osborne said the scheme was designed to crack down on “too many large companies” who left the training to others and take “a free ride on the system”.

Coun Bewick praised the idea but said that its success would be reliant on the detail and called for a large proportion of the revenue from the scheme to remain where it was raised, allowing the programme to be shaped to the particular needs of each region.