Dear Andy
How you can help business, and business can help you
A week into our new Prime Minister’s tenure and I’m encouraged to note that he obviously had a close read of this post from Moving Tribes last year about the Starmer administration and the concept of the “First Hundred Days”:
The essence of that argument is that there is a balance to be struck when starting a new job like PM between trying to change too much too early on the one hand, and kicking off a load of long term projects but looking like nothing is happening in the meantime on the other.
History will show that Starmer skewed too much to the latter - everything kicked into a 2 year consultation or a lengthy implementation period, leaving the electorate thinking that the government were ignoring their real current concerns. The result, a historic level of unpopularity, was inevitable.
Burnham has therefore had to good sense to kick off his tenure with two important ingredients that Starmer missed - a clear articulation of his long term goals, and a series of largely symbolic short term actions to show he means business.
So how might he follow those up with the beginnings of meaningful change that people really feel?
Someone asked me earlier this week what I thought the retail and hospitality sectors wanted from the new Government, and it got me thinking about both that and the reverse - what the new regime might want from our sectors.
It is inevitable that any ‘what do we want from the Government’ piece defaults quite quickly to “cut taxes please”. And there is no doubt that both sectors are reeling from the employment tax hikes of the last administration and from the continued drag-anchor of business rates. The moves on the latter for some parts of hospitality this week are welcome, even if they prompted a good deal of “why not us” from the retail sector.
Realistically, though, I can’t see any really meaningful change in these taxes on the horizon given how short the country is of cash, and it would be unwise for any of us to forecast on that basis.
There is, however, another area where the game is less ‘zero sum’ and where something that would support the sector would also help achieve the government’s short term aims.
As we’ve covered here before, the rules governing how Apprenticeships work in the UK are farcically unhelpful. Businesses over a certain size pay a portion of their wage bill to the Government in the form of a levy which they can, in theory, call on to run their own schemes. It is so difficult, however, to access those funds that many don’t bother and indeed those who are truly committed to training young people often end up running schemes paid for outside the levy because it is easier.
Because that post is 2 years old, I thought I’d update the data it is based on, and the more recent data simply confirms the story - apprenticeships in the UK collapsed when the levy was introduced and have never recovered.
But here, then, is a potentially big idea. Don’t just change this obviously broken system but work with the retail and hospitality industries, two massive employers of young UK workers, to rapidly increase the opportunities being offered. Just getting back to pre-levy figures would mean 200k additional young people in work, a meaningful slice off the NEET figures we’ve read so much about.
And it seems to me we can go further still. This is a tough time to be running any retail or hospitality business, but our lifeblood is the customer service delivered by our colleagues. An influx of bright young people, funded by the money currently being wasted on the Levy, and delivered with a focus on training and personal development could be a huge win-win for the Government, our industries and the country at large.
No individual retail employer is going to make much of a dent by themselves, but coordinating through our trade bodies and with a willing partner in the government our combined sectors, already employing millions of young people, could make a big difference.
There you go, Andy - an easy self-funded idea on youth employment. Over to you.