Build June (2016)

Build Magazine 74 The latest figures for the recruitment of first year ‘craft’ construction trainees provide a shocking indictment of the industry and of the vocational education and training (VET) system in Britain. This sector was once, next to engineering, one of the key industries in which apprenticeship flourished, underpinned by a statutory levy-grant mechanism and regulation through the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB). However, in 2005/6, out of the 38,447 first year construction ‘craft’ trainees, only just over half were involved in work based training of some sort and the remainder were on full- or part-time courses in Further Education (FE) colleges; only 10,308 were following an apprenticeship programme, mainly at National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) Level 2, with far higher proportions to be found in the north of the country than the south. Ten years later, in 2015, and despite all the efforts by government to promote apprenticeships, first year construction trainee numbers in Britain had fallen to a historical low, with 11,586 to be found training in the same occupations, only 35% of whom were undertaking some kind of work-based training and only about 3,000 following an apprenticeship programme. In an industry employing nearly two million, this represents less than two apprentices for every 1,000 workers, compared to over 40 per thousand in Germany, where they are all at the equivalent of Level 3. To compensate for this training deficit, construction employers in Britain have increasingly come to rely on recruiting workers trained in other countries, so ‘poaching’ from VET systems elsewhere. At the same time, 36% of employers in a 2013 survey of 809 construction firms reported hard-to-fill vacancies, while only 14% offered apprenticeships, symbolising what might be regarded as employer disengagement in VET. One reason for this calamitous situation is the exclusive character of the industry, which considerably limits the recruitment pool. There has been little change since the 1980s in the proportion of women working in construction (less than 1% in the manual trades), whilst the proportion of those from Black and Asian ethnic minority (BAME) groups (only 2% of construction workforce and 3.4% of managers) has if anything fallen. Furthermore, the High Court proceedings on blacklisting revealed a number of large construction firms have been actively seeking to exclude trade unionists since the 1970s. These court proceedings follow the discovery in 2009 by the Information Commissioner’s Office of 3,123 individual files of mainly constructions workers, held by the Consulting Association, which acted as a covert vetting service funded by amongst others AMEC, Balfour Beatty, BAM, Carillion, Costain, Laing O’Rourke, Vinci and, above all, Sir Robert McAlpine. Can the industry any longer afford to be so cavalier with its workforce and disregard what were genuine grievances and attempts to improve its employment and working conditions? Another reason for the training collapse is these very same employment conditions, above all the Construction Industry Scheme, which represents a special tax status or employment subsidy for those who are ‘self’ rather than ‘directly’ employed, which almost half (924,000) of the two million strong workforce belong to. Added to this, 91% of the 251,647 firms in the industry employed less than 13 employees in 2014 and over 50% under three employees, whilst an unknown number come under agencies and the larger firms have anyway long ceased to employ operatives. This hardly provides an appropriate training infrastructure for young people, especially given the considerable health and safety risks on construction sites. However, it is all too easy to blame the industry, when it has been successive governments since the 1980s that have failed to curb the decline in training and productivity, continuing to insist on an employer-led VET model. Symptomatic of this is the Board of the CITB, which has been transformed from an original tripartite body in the 1960s to one which today contains no single employee representative and only one independent FE college member. Why is it assumed that VET is the sole responsibility of the employers especially when most of the little training that now takes place is based in colleges? The existing and future workforce depends for its livelihood on the development of knowledge, skills and abilities that will be of value in the long-term over working life, while the construction labour process itself has become more complex and demanding of a high level of abstract Can the construction industry afford to continue to be so exclusive? Construction Professor Linda Clarke, Director of the Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment (ProBE) at Westminster Business School, University of Westminster.