Tugendhat pledges millions for FE in Tory leadership bid

Apprenticeships and skills spending will reduce reliance on migrant workers, according to Tory leadership hopeful

Apprenticeships and skills spending will reduce reliance on migrant workers, according to Tory leadership hopeful

A contender for the Conservative party leadership has pledged to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in further education if they win the contest and win back the keys to Downing Street. 

Tom Tugendhat, the shadow security minister, is one of four candidates campaigning at this week’s Conservative Party conference in Birmingham.

In his mainstage speech this afternoon, he claimed he would reduce demand for migrant workers by spending the money raised from the immigration skills charge on training UK workers and would “end the cap on apprenticeships”.

Reducing immigration featured in each of today’s mainstage speeches by the four candidates hoping to replace Rishi Sunak as Leader of the Conservative Party, though Tugendhat was the only one to make a commitment on skills spending. 

“I’ll set a legal cap on net migration at 100,000. Not a target, not an ambition, a cap. But a cap alone won’t work,” he said.

“We issued the visas because businesses need the staff for our care homes and our hospitals to look after our families.

“We need to fix migration by fixing the gaps in education and skills, in transport and in housing so that we can recruit at home and not abroad. I will end the cap on apprenticeships and use the immigration skills charge to invest in further education and train our own people.”

The other candidates are former education minister Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick and the former education secretary, James Cleverly.

Home Office data shows the immigration skills charge, a tax paid by employers hiring migrant workers, raised over half a billion pounds in 2022/23 and nearly £1.5 billion since it was introduced in 2017.

An FE Week investigation last year revealed the government could provide no evidence that funds raised from the charge were being spent on programmes to upskill UK workers. According to the Migration Advisory Committee, revenue generated from the tax was “not ringfenced or linked directly to any fund for training to reduce the reliance on migrant workers and is simply a tax on the use of migrant labour which goes to the Treasury.

This time next week, Conservative MPs will vote to reduce the number of candidates to 2. Party members then get to vote and the new Leader will be announced on November 2.

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2 Comments

  1. The Immigration skills charge (£1.6bn) is similar to the Levy in that it’s a tax.

    The main difference is that the levy was created and sold to the public and businesses as a hypothecated tax, whereby the funding raised would be spent on what they were raised for, namely apprenticeships. We now know that’s not been the case with billions being retained by the Treasury and currently an estimated £800m annual ‘surplus’.

    To use fashionable language, you could describe it as a blackhole.

    I’d liken the situation to the natural world and would urge policymakers to read up on the differences between symbiosis and parasitism.