Royal Mail gifts £1m a year to SMEs for training apprentices

Royal Mail is offering £1 million a year of its unused apprenticeship levy fees to support training initiatives at small and medium-sized firms.

It is one of the largest ever apprenticeship levy gifts from a private company. Aldi also pledged £1 million a year in May and Gloucestershire county council is presently in the top spot on the government’s official pledge list, with up to £589,535 available to applicants.

Royal Mail is making the money available via its small business hub. Companies must employ fewer than 250 people to apply, and can use the cash to complete any government-registered apprenticeship course. Royal Mail said that these could include courses “to upskill small businesses on traditional skills as well as help them to adopt new technologies such as AI to boost efficiency”.

Alistair Cochrane, interim chief executive of Royal Mail, said: “We are hugely proud of our role in helping small businesses across the UK, but we want to go further in helping them to thrive in today’s competitive market.”

Cochrane took over from former chief executive Emma Gilthorpe last week, in the wake of the acquisition of Royal Mail’s parent company International Distribution Services by the Czech entrepreneur Daniel Kretinsky.

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The apprenticeship levy gift, formally known as a levy transfer, allows employers that would otherwise lose the unused training budget to HM Treasury to transfer up to half of their levy to a different employer instead.

The levy is a tax on employers with an annual pay bill of over £3 million and was introduced in April 2017 to improve the funding of apprenticeship training. The levy is set at 0.5 per cent of the employer’s pay bill and is collected monthly through payroll taxes.

Other large employers have pooled their unused levy monies into single pots from which smaller companies can draw for their training. In April, the BBC joined a £9 million scheme that has funded more than 1,500 apprentices in the Liverpool area. Other local employers that contribute include Liverpool Football Club, Airbus, Amazon, Matalan and QVC.

Royal Mail spent £7.1 million on learning and development initiatives for its 130,000 employees last year, which it said included apprentices.

A spokesman said firms that are interested in securing funding should search online for the “Royal Mail Means Business campaign”. To secure a levy transfer, employers need to have an apprenticeship service account, which can be set up on the main government website.

“If you are already part of Royal Mail’s supply chain, contact apprenticeships@royalmail.com with your apprenticeship service account ID to request a direct transfer,” the spokesman said. “If you are not part of our supply chain, visit the pledge page and search for ‘Royal Mail’ to apply.”