Upskilling Britain for a high-wage future Policy briefing | Alex Chapman, Chaitanya Kumar and Alfie Stirling | October 2021

But the UK’s skills policy to date is inadequate for the urgency and scale of the challenge ahead, especially after a decade of the austerity- driven dismantling of the UK’s upskilling infrastructure. [...] But neither tackle the root cause of the issue – the UK workforce needs access to the skills required by well-paid, secure jobs, in the right places, for the long term, in the emerging zero-carbon economy. [...] This compares to an EU average of 28%.3 The main barrier encountered, reported by over 50% of people who wanted to study, was the prohibitive cost of doing so, due to both the price of the course and the foregone wages related to pursuing study. [...] The impact of significant numbers of SSVs in the labour market is to render a significant proportion of the jobs (24% as of 2019) inaccessible to those on the job hunt. [...] Our proposed Future Skills Scheme ultimately improves the resilience of the labour market against such shocks to the economy while accelerating the pace of upskilling and retraining in the UK, setting up firms and workers to succeed in the emerging low-carbon economy.