£200m falling as gently as snow : Levy accounts are now active

Apprenticeship Levy Accounts credited

 This week sees another mini-milestone in the development of the new Apprenticeship Levy funding system; as Levy paying employers now have their first payment available to spend.

This is because yesterday, falling as quietly as snow, c£200m was deposited into 20,000 levy accounts.

(This initial ‘credit’ should be 0.5% of April Payroll, minus any non-English pay, plus 10%.)

 You can check your levy account here.

If you haven’t yet set up your account please find below a simple guide to doing so.

Of course we don’t know how many employers have realised this yet and how many will ever do anything with it.

Whose money is it anyway?

Levy funding is an unusual ‘hybrid’ somewhere between an employer’s own money and the tax payers.

Understandably employers are being encouraged to negotiate on price and generally treat this as a commercial budget. And if this works it will mean that ‘Apprenticeships’ has 20,000 price and quality watchdogs. 

However how they spend it, what they can buy and when they can buy it is all tightly controlled.

Still £200m is a lot of money for employers to spend in a month (500,000 Apprenticeship monthly payments at an average of £400 per apprentice per month…) indeed it is probably as much as all the non-Levy employers have between them for the next 6 months.

If were in any doubt before who holds the purchasing power in Apprenticeships – we aren’t now.

How to spend it?

It is not worth rushing important recruitment or training decisions but there is no doubt that if the unspent levy pot grows too big it will become a target. Indeed recent Mayoral and Political party manifestos contained several suggestions about what they might do with any underspends…there is no doubt that we need to use it or lose it.

So if you haven’t already done so have a look at the plethora of Apprenticeships available

And talk to one or more of the 2,000+ Apprenticeship training organisations on standby to help you. 

 How to set up your levy account

If you haven’t already set up your Apprentice Service (previously referred to as DAS), you can now register and set up an account online via to do this you will need:

• the Government Gateway login details for your PAYE schemes (ask your payroll department if you don’t have access to this)
• your organisation’s Companies House Number or Charity number
• The ‘UKPRN’ of any provider that you wish to use for example Kaplan are 10000446

Create an account here.

Richard Marsh, Kaplan Financial UK