The government should scrap all its training schemes and give the money directly to companies, believes business magnate Lord Alan Sugar.

Speaking at last month’s launch of specialist science recruiter Hyper Recruitment Solutions (HRS), Lord Sugar told the 100 or so guests he thought funding for the various training programmes could be better used by companies to upskill what he described as “the lost group” in the UK.

He was asked at a Q&A session about the skills gap in the science and technology industry. “Let companies train their own people,” he asserted. “We need to stop all these initiatives and give the money to employers to train the lost group on the job.” 

He didn’t see the point of work experience, where ‘trainees’ would be passed across from one manager to another, without someone properly assigned to the trainee. He emphasised that firms needed to “encourage people to work from the bottom up to the top”.

At the event, held at the Royal Society of Chemistry in London’s Piccadilly to mark the launch of HRS, his joint venture with the latest winner of the BBC’s The Apprentice, Ricky Martin, Lord Sugar said that in the UK, “science is not fashionable — it’s nerdy stuff”. He went on to say that in France an engineer is “up there with a doctor”. “We need to change that perception [in the UK].”

HRS, he said, as a specialist recruitment company and led by someone who, as a scientist, understood the business, would be much better placed to find the top talent science and pharmaceutical companies are looking for. “That’s why we will succeed and not just be A N Other,” he said.