Key Facts

• The UK government will offer a bursary of up to £4,500 per year to parents on benefits whose children start apprenticeships, to help replace lost Universal Credit payments and encourage young people into work.
• The bursary scheme is funded through the growth and skills levy, a tax on employers with annual wage bills over £3m, with a total of £30m allocated for this purpose.
• An estimated few thousand households will benefit from the scheme, which aims to address the "perverse effects" of the benefits system on young people's employment choices, as highlighted in a Social Security Advisory Committee report.
• The report noted that some families, such as single parents with a disabled child, could lose up to £340 per week in benefits if their child started an apprenticeship, exceeding the expected apprenticeship salary of £258 per week.
• The government hopes that the bursary will remove a barrier to young people taking on apprenticeships, allowing them to "earn and learn" and contributing to efforts to reduce the number of young people not in education, employment, or training, which currently stands at over a million people aged 16 to 24.