David Anderson – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education

The below Parliamentary question was asked by David Anderson on 2016-10-12.

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, when she plans to respond to the letter from the hon. Member for Blaydon of 19 August 2016 on the application of the Apprenticeship Levy in Scotland.

Robert Halfon

The hon. Member should have received an email response on 14 October, with a hard copy to follow.

Skills policy is devolved, which means that the Scottish Government is responsible for managing apprenticeships in its own territory. This has been the case since the Scotland Act 1998 and UK employers understand that they need to engage with different funding bodies in different parts of the UK. The introduction of the apprenticeship levy in April 2017 will not change this position.

On 12 August, we published detailed proposals on how we will fund apprenticeships in England when the levy is introduced in April 2017. These are available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/apprenticeship-changes. We are committed to publishing the final apprenticeship funding policy information for England before the end of October. It will be for the Scottish Government to set out its own plans for funding apprenticeships in Scotland.

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