Why was there never a dub for Skip Beat? I don't quite understand it - the manga is popular, ongoing and their are plenty of fans, and yet - from what I've researched - there was never a North American licence and never an English dub.

Why was there never a Skip Beat dub?
The anime of Skip Beat was in 2008/09 , by Hal Film Maker. Shortly after the anime, Hal Film Maker merged into the parent company TYO Animations. There may have been some issues with licensing works from a company that didn't exist anymore.

This was also around the time of legal online streaming's emergence - so interested studios (possibly Funimation, who took on B Gata H Kei - Hal Studio's next production) had a lot of business decisions and work at this time.

Most dubbed anime go under a lot of cost analysis to see whether it is worth it to produce. Usually shounen works are the easiest of works to pull a profit on. Shoujo works are harder to sell, so perhaps it was decided by most companies that it just wasn't worth it.

Any of these could be potential reasons and this probably isn't a very satisfying answer, but unless there's an official announcement by a involved company, we won't know due to company secrecies.

The longer it remains unlicensed however, the less likely it is to be picked up as it slowly looses the target audience's interest.