Healey unveils apprenticeship service in drive to reindustrialise Britain

Mayors will be given £100 million to fund a new scheme aimed at getting young people into apprenticeships, the Chancellor announced in his speech to the Labour Party conference.

John Healey said the new “Local Apprenticeship Service” would see teams acting like “football scouts” to link young people with firms, including those who had never been offered an apprenticeship.

He told the party conference in Liverpool: “The best thing we can offer a young person isn’t a benefit payment, it’s a first job with training and a wage.

“Our determination to help, matched by their determination to hope.”

Mr Healey described the service as “a down payment” on the work of former Cabinet minister Alan Milburn to tackle the almost one million young people not in employment, education or training (Neet).

The new service was the first announcement in a speech setting out Mr Healey’s economic vision for the country, pledging to bring about a “new age of industrialisation” for Britain.

In his speech, the Chancellor announced that Rolls-Royce would invest £300 million in factories in Derby, Bristol, Glasgow and Rotherham, describing the investment as a “new confidence in Britain lit by this Government, driven forward by business”.

And he stressed that his first Budget next month would maintain his party’s commitment to fiscal discipline, saying it would also give the public “breathing space” and drive “good growth and jobs in more places”.

But he warned that the UK faced more straitened times than when he had served as a junior Treasury minister under Gordon Brown’s chancellorship, blaming the Conservatives for the country’s debt burden.