The aim is to drive up skills levels to boost productivity

A government-commissioned study estimated that training increased by less than one percentage point.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies said it was likely that those who did train under the National Employer Training Programme would have done so anyway.

The education department said that take-up had since increased greatly.

Skills shortage

Chancellor Gordon Brown announced last month that the programme would be rolled out nationally.

In his pre-Budget report, Mr Brown referred to the Leitch review of UK skills.

This said the UK was in danger of falling behind internationally because of a skills shortage.

It said delivering current plans would be difficult.

Mr Brown said: "The final Leitch proposals for reform will come next year.

"But to step up the pace of change now, the National Employer Training Programme - which offers free training for employees, help for all small firms with their costs - will, from next summer, be expanded nationwide to provide training in 50,000 companies for 300,000 employees a year."

What you have to think about is why has the policy failed to attract a more substantial number of employers? Researcher Helen Simpson

Lord Leitch's report said the first broad objective of the government's skill strategy was to work with employers to enhance skills.

The main vehicle for this would be the �230m National Employer Training Programme, now branded as Train to Gain.

Pilot schemes begun in September 2002 had supported more than 26,000 employers and 220,000 employees in the north-west of England and the West Midlands.

As part of its evaluation of those pilots, the Department for Education and Skills commissioned the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) to assess the extent to which they had increased levels of training.

It used specially commissioned large-scale surveys to compare those areas with other parts of England.

Possible reasons

The IFS said the impact was an increase in training of about half of one percentage point.

The results "did not demonstrate across-the-board, systematic evidence" that employers were providing more training or their staff were taking it up.

A likely explanation was that a substantial proportion of the training that was done under the scheme would have taken place anyway.

It may also have been that employers were diverted from other forms of publicly subsidised training.

"If a cheaper way comes along they would use it," Helen Simpson, one of the IFS research team, told the BBC News website.

"The fact that those who did take it up were the type who would have trained anyway isn't surprising," she said.

"So I guess what you have to think about is why has the policy failed to attract a more substantial number of employers?"

But that had not been part of the team's remit, she said.

Increase

A second possible explanation was that the training that was done under the scheme was instead of other training - perhaps because training providers did not have the capacity to do both sorts.

Ms Simpson stressed that the findings related mainly to the first year of the scheme.

"Since then, the numbers of people signed up in the pilots has increased a lot."

The IFS report says that, going forward, it may be the case that additional training generated by the policy would increase.

And a spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills said that since the IFS study was undertaken the scheme had reached nearly a quarter of employers in the pilot areas.

"The Employer Training Pilots Programme is increasingly attracting businesses who would otherwise do little or no training," he said.

The satisfaction rate had been more than 90%.

And the Learning and Skills Council said each year the scheme was attracting more employers who would not otherwise have invested in training their staff.

Most who would have provided training anyway said it was unlikely to have been the same training to the same people - and there was evidence the programme had allowed employers to train more people over a shorter period.

"We are also introducing a range of measures to target more hard-to-reach employers in order to ensure that we maximise the breadth of impact of the programme," it said.