Hot off the press! As part of our Access All Areas project, this week we released our third report with Enterprise Nation on Access to People.

The report focuses on small businesses, but many of the ideas would help businesses of all sizes. I’ll focus in detail on two recommendations, but I think all eight deserve serious consideration.

First, we should allow the self-employed to get tax breaks for learning new skill sets, even if they aren’t relevant to their immediate work. Currently, if someone wants to access training courses that help them start a new business, or expand into new areas of business, including anything related to their current business, they aren’t allowed.

Of course, there are limits to this policy. We probably shouldn’t be giving tax breaks to learn calligraphy – although it didn't do Steve Jobs any harm. Either way though, it is easy enough for the Government to decide what’s permissible, as is the case in the majority of other OECD countries.

Second, we should allow employers that pay the Apprenticeship Levy – which is 0.5% of an employer’s wage-bill if they pay more than £3m of wages in a year – to transfer even more of their funds to smaller companies down their supply chain, and consider replacing the Apprenticeship Levy with a Skills Levy.

I’m not going to pretend that lots of companies will make use of transferring more of their funds to smaller companies, but it’s nevertheless worth doing for the small percentage that do.

Replacing the Apprenticeship Levy with a Skills Levy would be more transformative. Despite the initial success of apprenticeships, they have fallen sharply across all age groups even with the Apprenticeship Levy. To increase uptake, the government could widen the scope to include other forms of accredited training. It’s an argument that has already been made by the likes of the British Retail Consortium, CIPD, and the Learning and Work Institute – particularly in trying to refocus training on young people.

The report also looks at changes to visas and immigration. In a week where record levels of migration have been announced, it might seem politically naive to call for more of it. But someone needs to to fight the good fight, if only to help shift the Overton window.

The main cause of the spike is humanitarian. As Oxford’s Migration Observatory notes: “the largest single factor is the introduction of visa routes for Ukrainian refugees and Hong Kong British Nationals (Overseas) status holders. Together these two routes contributed 45% of the 467,000 increase in visa grants between 2019 and the year ending June 2022." The rest is the result of students (39%) and work visas (23%). "Skilled workers, particularly in the health and care sectors, were the main factor behind the increase in work visa grants."

So most of this immigration is both temporary and necessary. Not necessary, of course, in an absolute sense, but certainly in a moral sense. The public agrees, overwhelmingly backing asylum for those fleeing the likes of Putin, and they are massively in favour of letting in doctors, nurses and care workers to tend to our sick and elderly.

The British public also likes international students, but that isn’t stopping the Prime Minister from exploring plans to only allow ‘top universities’ to accept immigrants. Gone is the previous target of boosting the value of Britain’s education exports to £35 billion per year by ensuring we have 600,000 foreign students by 2030 – a rarity in government targets in being met early.

Time to reread Made in the UK, our 2014 report with the NUS, which was prompted by Theresa May's crackdown on international students. History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.