Furthermore, news that the government is cutting skills funding for the Science Industry Partnership (SIP) has caused concern as SMEs that have been looking at how to benefit from the programme learn that the programme will stop in March 2016.

“My biggest concern is that with the cut in skills funding, there will be no route to market to support SMEs at a time when it is needed the most, to help improve the productivity of the UK economy,” says Tom Bowtell, the BCF’s chief executive officer.

He continues: “It’s been suggested that larger automotive and aerospace companies give vouchers to their many hundreds of tier 3 and 4 SME suppliers to help train their staff, through an apprenticeship Levy scheme.

“The majority of supply chains simply don’t work like this and many of our members’ customers are smaller companies that won’t pay anything towards skills funding. The result will be smaller companies missing out and it is often those small companies that need support for training, given that ordinarily they don’t have a training department.”

Bowtell adds that he would like to see tax breaks to encourage smaller companies to invest in skills.

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