To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills what recent estimate he has made of the number of small and medium-sized businesses in Leeds North West constituency which are employing apprentices. (319500)

Information is not currently available on the size of the employer for apprentices. For the 2009-10 academic year, this information will become available on the Individualised Learner Record (ILR) when a unique employer identifier will have to be provided by all employers of apprentices.

We can provide an estimate of the size of employers, nationally, that offer and have recruited apprentices from the National Employers Skills Survey (NESS). These data are based on repeated surveys of up to 79,000 employers across all business sectors in England. Table 2 shows information from the published 2007 National Employer Skills survey¹ on the number of organisations that had any staff undertaking an apprenticeship in the 12 months prior to interview, by size of employer.

To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills how many modern apprenticeships have been started in Leeds North West constituency since 1997. (319502)

Table 1 shows the number of Apprenticeship starts in Leeds North West parliamentary constituency from academic year 2003-04 onwards, the earliest year for which comparable data is available.

Information on the number of Apprenticeship starts by Parliamentary Constituency, Local Authority, Government Office Region and for England is published in a quarterly statistical first release (SFR). The latest SFR was published on 17 December, and re-issued on 21 January to include provisional national estimates of the number of apprenticeship starts and achievements in the first quarter of 2009-10:

http://www.thedataservice.org.uk/statistics/sfrdec09