Work and Pensions Committee
22 April 2026
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Work and Pensions Committee House of Commons
00:01 - 00:39
Speaker 1
One off evidence session with Skills England who are here today before the Work and Pension Select Committee. My name is Debbie Abrahams. I'm the chair of this committee, it's a pleasure to welcome you all. We have Phil Smith, who's chair of the skill at Skills England, Tessa Griffiths, who's the co chief executive officer, and Gemma Marsh, who's the deputy chief executive officer. Well, it's lovely, as I say, to to welcome you all.
I'm going to start questions, if if I may, and it's particularly to set the the scene, if you could. What what are the roles and responsibilities of Skills England?
00:40 - 02:34
Speaker 2
Well, let me start and say, first of all, thank you for this opportunity because I think, you know, we haven't had a chance to talk to the Select Committee and obviously having moved from DFE into DWP gives us a great opportunity to give you a bit of a sense of what's going on in Skills England. So, we're very interested to be here because actually I think the importance of what Skills England is is right at the top of the agenda, I think, for many people. And Skills England was officially launched in June, although it was announced by the Prime Minister around about eleven months before. And it was announced as an arm's length government agency to address broadly the misalignment and the structure of the skill system. I think most people would agree that the skill system isn't aligned and the narrative the Prime Minister gave at the time was that the skills system wasn't aligned to the growth aspirations or to the opportunity alignment that we needed for our economy.
And therefore, Skills England was an organization being set up as an arms length government agency to be able to address that broader mismatch. And of course, we'll talk more about it, I'm sure, but we see that mismatch everywhere from the issue around meets, graduates and so on where the system isn't aligning to what we need for economic growth. And just as a small aside on that, as a result of this role, I actually Industrial Strategy Council, which is important because that's clearly the government's growth strategy. And I also sit on the Labor Market Evidence Group, which is the group that's pulling together not only the devolved nations, the combined authorities, but also the home office, DWP and so on, to look at the balance with domestic skills versus migratory skills. So part all of that is within the remit of Skills England and what we need to achieve.
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