At the Resolution Foundation’s pay event last week, someone asked a question about immigration. Alison Wolf was leaving but, just as she was on her way out she remarked that, while immigration might not have had an impact on wages, it has reduced the amount of training given by employers.

Well you can’t leave a comment like that hanging so I had a brief Twitter conversation with her afterwards to make sure that I’d heard her correctly. I had. There was, she said, a huge drop in employer training well before the crash and that a link to immigration is consistent with the evidence though difficult to prove with the data we have.

I decided to do a bit of digging. There has indeed been a drop in training provision which started sometime around the middle of the last decade. As this LLAKES report found, since the mid 2000s, there has been a steady fall in the proportion…