So basically, the apprenticeship levy is paid by all businesses that earn over a certain amount,

and there's going to be a music queue coming up in a moment.

But it's an extra payroll tax that businesses pay, and if they hire on apprentices rather than graduates, they can then get it paid back to them and kind of have a free

employee. And so just as an experiment, I'm now going to ask Nate to please play the theme of

Oceans 11 quietly whilst I explain how this startup explains the

university, sorry, not the university, explains the apprenticeship scheme. And it's going to sound like I'm

describing an elaborate crime. Will the government pay for my apprenticeship scheme?

The short answer is yes.

The apprenticeship levy, it works like an additional payroll tax.

Set at 0.5% of an employer's annual pay bill,

the levy applies to employers for the presence in the UK

and an annual pay bill of more than 3 million pounds.

Your pay bill is based on the amount of earnings subject to

national insurance contributions, so in a nutshell, any person who's on your payroll and paid

through PAYE is included in your pay bill. When you spend an apprenticeship training in England,

the government will apply a 10% top-up to your levy account every month, but at the same time,

those funds enter your digital account. So for

every one pound that enters your digital account to spend on apprenticeship training, you get

£1.10. Some employees may find that the funds in their digital account aren't enough to cover

the full cost of training all of these apprentices they want to bring on board, and in those cases,

the government will contribute 90% of the total cost of the additional

delivery. Sounds too good to be true, right? To be honest, there's one catch. Funds expire 24 months

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