00:00My name is Chris Houston I'm the Managing Director of a steel fabrication
00:04business based in Tadcaster called Tadweld. As a lot of trades are we are
00:09reliant on apprenticeships as our primary route of people entering the
00:15workforce and we're really passionate about developing the next generation of
00:19young engineers and young fabricators here at Tadweld. Apprenticeships provide
00:23the foundational skills whether that you become a welder or a subject matter
00:29expert in welding for 45 years of your career there's some great roots in that
00:33technical expertise role as well but also I'd say at least 50% of our office
00:40based roles have a foundation in an apprenticeship. Business is really
00:45tough right now and there's been some really big increase in costs. We've got
00:50another big round of business rate increases coming in in April 2026. The
00:55business has less money to pay pay rises less money to invest in facilities in
01:01growth in in innovation and they're all the things that longer term ultimately
01:07drive more employment opportunities so it really is a double-edged sword between we
01:11absolutely recognize the need for taxes and and the investment in in local
01:15infrastructure and all of those kind of things but also really harming
01:19businesses ability to invest and grow and provide long-term sustainable jobs for
01:24the for the region in the community. I've been here for for 28 years now I did a
01:29four-year apprenticeship York College which given the skills what what I
01:33needed to get to where I'm today it was good it was obviously a long a long time
01:37ago but we did a lot of practical a lot of theory we've heavily invested in
01:42apprentices in the last few years there seems to be a real good demand for
01:45apprentices and I think it gives them a good a good understanding and a good
01:50skill to carry out throughout life. There's been quite a lot of public
01:54relation work done by the government about how they are really incentivizing
01:57apprenticeships and they've recently announced that apprenticeships for SMEs
02:03will be a hundred percent funded but that really is only the the training and
02:07development element of apprenticeship which currently costs us around 750
02:10pounds as an employer so that will save us 750 pounds but the increases in
02:16national minimum wage for apprenticeships have gone from six pounds an hour and
02:20will shortly be about ten pound 85 an hour so within a three-year period they
02:25probably added over ten thousand pounds worth of costs to the cost of an
02:28employer actually hiring an apprenticeship in the first place so I'm grateful for
02:32the 750 pounds saving but the ten thousand pounds on the other side makes
02:35things really really tough and as a result I know both ourselves and a lot of
02:40other manufacturing MDs that I talk to are genuinely considering how many
02:44apprenticeships we can take on in the future purely because they are so
02:48expensive and it takes a lot of resource from the organization to man so I
02:52love apprenticeships we're passionate about them we really want to make them
02:55work but they also have to be an employable option for for business
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