Apprenticeship Levy - what you need to know

The new Apprenticeship Levy will come into play on April 6th 2018 and will be paid by UK employers with annual paybills of more than £3 million.”

Key features of the Apprenticeship Levy include:

• Employers not in scope of the levy will have to pay 10% of the training costs 16-18 year old apprentices, with the remaining 90% paid by the government. This means that in actual practice the government will pay 90% of the costs of apprenticeship provision for around 98% of all employers.
• Employers with fewer than 50 employees will not be required to contribute towards training costs of 16-18 year old apprentices.  These will be 100% funded by the government.  In addition, when employers take on a 16-18 apprentice, they will receive £1,000 to help ‘meet the extra costs associated with this’.
• Employers will be able to use levy funds to retrain existing workers in new skills, even if they have prior qualifications.  This is intended to give employers ‘the freedom to make the training decisions that are right for them’, and to enable them to ‘train any individual to start an apprenticeship, as long as it is significantly different from their previous qualifications’.

Further details