Biba Manifesto 2026: Expansion to the growth and skills levy would help industry grow

Trade body Biba has called on the UK government to make a raft of policy changes aimed at expanding the insurance industry’s talent pool and training and upskilling its current workforce.

The call to action comes in Biba’s Manifesto 2026, which was launched at an event at parliament yesterday (14 January 2026).

In the manifesto, Biba has highlighted three main areas in which it feels the government can make positive policy changes. One of them is expanding flexibility in the growth and skills levy to the insurance industry.

Currently, all insurance firms with an employee wage bill of over £3m must pay 0.5% the value of said bill into the growth and skills levy pot to fund training, apprenticeships and skills programmes.

However, the government recently announced a suite of shorter-term, more flexible apprenticeships to all “critical industries”, from which the financial services sector is excluded.

As such, Biba has called for the industry to be included in the expansion, to reflect “its importance as one of the eight pillars of the government’s industrial strategy”.

The trade body also called for apprenticeship levy gifting – the practice of gifting unused levy funds to other employers – to be expanded beyond its England-only scope to include Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Furthermore, it has requested that certain levy-supported programmes for SMEs be opened to all age groups.

Fully levy-funded SME apprenticeships are currently reserved for under 25s, but with insurance suffering from an ageing workforce not seen in other sectors, Biba has called for this to be expanded to all age groups.

Skills and training

Beyond calling for policy changes, Biba has reaffirmed its commitment to work with the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) to endorse its online learning tools, champion its apprenticeship routes and produce new skills resources.

Graeme Trudgill, chief executive at Biba, told Insurance Times: “Training and skills is a really important part of what we do. There’s some work we think the government can do with the growth and skills levy – making that more flexible and making sure we can gift apprentice levy funds.

“We also work really closely with the CII. We’re supporting professional standards and we have our Broker Assess training tool. That’s a really important and massive commitment to us and many thousands of brokers use it every year.”