Sir Keir Starmer vowed to “fire up” training of more skilled workers in Britain and end the “over-reliance” on immigration.
A new Skills England organisation will work with the Government’s independent migration advisers to identify current and future skills gaps in the UK.
The Migration Advisory Committee and the skills chiefs would then produce plans to tackle the labour shortages.
“We are going to make sure there are highly-motivated, ambitious, talented young people who want to work in your business,” the Prime Minister told bosses at the Farnborough International Airshow, Hampshire.
“We won’t be content just to pull the easy lever on importing skills.
“We are turning the page on that.
“We’re going to fire up the training of more UK workers.”
While praising workers from overseas, he added: “All too often young people in our country have been let down, not given access to the right opportunities or training in their community.
“That has created an over-reliance in our economy on higher and higher levels of migration.
“It cannot be right that some people don’t get to feel the pride of making a contribution, the dignity of work, just because we can’t find a way of creating a coherent skills system.”
However, efforts to skill up the domestic workforce and cut dependency by firms on overseas workers have been trumpeted since Gordon Brown’s premiership more than 15 years ago and have yet to successfully plug labour force gaps.
Many sectors including hospitality, social care, the NHS and construction still rely heavily on workers from abroad.
Firms will be given more flexibility on spending a Growth and Skills Levy, raising several billions, so it can be use beyond apprenticeships.
But the Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned: “The history of these wider training subsidies..suggests that the result is often that much of the spending goes on training that firms would have provided and paid for even without the subsidy.”
According to the Department for Education, skills shortages doubled between 2017 and 2022, and now account for 36 per cent of job vacancies.
A Conservative Party spokesman said: “We hope Labour will continue the good work of the Conservative government which saw 5.8 million more apprenticeships created since 2010.”
