The UK Chancellor has put two skills schemes into one announcement: apprenticeship brokerage in all 14 mayoral authorities, and a restored Union Learning Fund aimed at workers adjusting to AI. Neither depends on an employer having an HR department.

On 28 September the government said it will extend its apprenticeship brokerage pilot to all 14 existing Mayoral Strategic Authorities with directly elected mayors, with local services running across England from Spring 2027. The £100 million of additional funding over two years doubles the number of areas matching young people with local businesses.

The same announcement restores the Union Learning Fund in England at £15 million a year. The government says the fund previously generated 180,000 learning opportunities every year, and that people do not need to be union members to benefit. Support ranges from English, maths and digital skills to training for jobs in growing industries such as advanced manufacturing. The government says the brokerage expansion and the fund are paid for by savings found by the Department for Work and Pensions, with details to come in the Budget.

Why it matters for HR

The fund’s stated purpose includes helping people adapt as technology, including AI, changes the workplace. It works through trade unions’ workplace relationships and routes learners into training through their employers and existing programmes. For an employer, that means a learning request may arrive from a union learning rep, not from the L&D budget.

The two schemes reach different ends of the same problem. Brokerage matches young people to small employers. The learning fund reaches people already in work. An employer that plans for both can treat local brokerage as a hiring channel and the union route as one way to cover basic digital skills. That sits against our reporting on employers free-riding on workers’ AI skills and on why workers fake their AI fluency, where the gap was support at work. A funded outside route does not close it, but it gives HR something to point people to.

Source: UK Government