Struggling British businesses have no confidence the Government will solving a chronic skills shortage, a survey shows.
A nationwide snapshot poll is the clearest sign yet once buoyant firms have seen belief in Labour slowly ebb away.
Some 64 per cent of 107 companies surveyed say they are suffering from an acute skills shortage and only 45% believe the Government will be able to solve the crisis.
The results also showed more than half are struggling to recruit and retain existing staff.
James Worthington, Co-Managing Director of branded workwear company MyWorkwear which carried out the poll, said: “Having been in business since 1976 and working with so many industries, we often pick up trends across a wide variety of sectors, and the skills shortage is definitely something impacting a large majority of our customers.
“There is little confidence from businesses that the Government’s approach will solve the crisis we’re seeing, and this is undermining confidence with 60% feeling the situation has worsened over the last six months. You can’t really make the most of new opportunities, if you don’t have the talent in place to meet customer requirements.”
Skills England has been set up to create a “coherent national picture of where skills gaps exist and how they can be addressed”.
Yet despite ministers claiming it will play a critical role in driving growth, supporting people to get better jobs and improve standards of living, two thirds of firms quizzed do not fully understand what it has been set up to do.
A competitive and highly-skilled jobs market, coupled with less appetite for traditional and increasingly prohibitively expensive university degrees, has seen huge demand for shop-floor experience
Engineering and manufacturing firms want the freedom and tax incentives to take on more apprentices to make the UK a global manufacturing powerhouse once more.
They say skills remain their number one priority, but training budgets have been torpedoed because of rising inflation, National Insurance costs and wage rises.
It comes as official figures showed the UK economy grew by 0.7% in the first quarter of the year, the fastest rate among the G7 group of richest nations.