The current government's solution to this skills gap seems to be tripling the price of higher education and slashing the number of Masters and PhD places.
They haven't trippled the cost AT ALL. This is the problem, thousands of people, mostly not well off, often not going to uni used to pay tax that paid for people to go to uni. Now the people who GO to uni PAY to go to uni and the thousands of people who don't go don't subsidise them.
The COST is the same, the person who pays has changed. As others mentioned, the worth of a degree has been greatly lessened. If you make every single level of education passable by the dumbest idiot in the country, the degree doesn't actually tell you who is smarter, it just tells you who spent a few years at uni and who didn't. Degree's used to tell you who spent a few years at UNI and passed a difficult course that less smart people couldn't even get into.
The 300k immigrants doing crap jobs instead of UK born people, is in large part because too many UK born people believe they are "above" jobs because they got themselves a degree.
For years Labour has been pushing stupid people into uni for no reason, to accomodate those people they've been lowering the difficulty of degree's. This can't be reversed until uni is once again just for the smarter portion of the population, and the knock on effect is harder a levels and gcse's, theres a reason why the UK is slipping down every education league table.
Pushing stupid people out of education, stopping poor people subsidising them, and making degree's worthwhile are all hugely beneficial steps forward.
Remember Labour who were fighting tooth and nail over the horrific uni fee's, and now their plan is should they get in power, to have them anyway? Labour flat out lied to everyone about what the country could afford, and spent us into oblivion. THey ruin things, make the other parties look bad trying to fix it, then take the credit when it works.
This country couldn't do anything more positive for themselves than outlawing the Labour party.