The next meeting of the Construction Leadership Council later this month is due to consider a far-reaching proposal to establish a “Construction Competence Council” that would attempt to wrap the industry’s plethora of training schemes and in-work qualifications in a single framework.
A new Council governing a new approach to skills and training is a key proposal in the 117-page Competence in Construction report, commissioned by the CITB to fulfil part of the Action Plan in the industrial strategy for construction, Construction 2025.
The report was written by Pye Tait Consulting, also responsible for a 2011 study on the effectiveness of ‘competence’ card schemes in construction.
According to the CITB, the report aims to “help the industry with its thinking about what competence is and means, and how it is assessed and recorded. As such, it gives recommendations over how that might be governed in the future going forward to ensure that there is consistency of approach with card schemes, qualifications, training, curriculum, and so on.”
It has received the backing of the Health and Safety Executive. HSE chief inspector of construction Philip White is quoted on the press release as saying: “This research report offers the construction industry the building blocks for understanding and agreeing how to deliver a truly competent workforce across all construction related activities.
“We hope the industry will embrace the report and set the agenda for developing its recommendations without delay.”
However, the proposal has not yet been endorsed by any other organisations within the industry. The CITB is now hoping to promote discussion among trade associations, professional bodies and others ahead of the CLC meeting.
The report outlines what it sees as the problems with the industry’s current situation on skills and qualifications, including:
- The need to expand on the current focus on health and safety competence to cover other aspects of job roles;
- The unnecessary complexity, confusion and costs of the “certification and their cards” systems and the frustration it causes to employers;
- The need for more independent assessment of qualifications and training;
- The fact that ‘competence’ is not fixed over time but needs to be refreshed.
But the report does not include any specific proposals on streamlining the multi-card systems that operate for various specialist trades, instead deferring the question of how to reform the system to its proposed new “industry-wide Framework for Competence for the UK construction industry”.
This would be developed by the brand-new “Construction Competence Council”.
The report spells out various options for the structure of the council, which could include representatives of the CITB, the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board, other sector skills councils, card-issuing bodies such as the Construction Skills Certification Scheme, professional bodies such as the CIOB, employer bodies and unions.
The Council’s structure and constitution could be discussed and agreed at an annual, national conference, while the scheme could be funded by a small slice of the fees charged for each skills card.
CM also contacted CSCS, the UK Contractors Group, the NFB and the CIOB to gauge reaction to the radical shake-up it proposes, but all said they had not had sight of it before publication and would find it difficult to comment.
But the NFB’s policy manager Paul Bogle, stressing that he had not yet read the report, said: “We do need to have a clear idea of what competency is, so that we can raise skills and create access paths to construction, and make it more attractive to people coming in.”
The CITB has been the most appalling failure.
The grants you get back barely cover the cost of filling out the form, the organisation costs a fortune, if you read the minutes of their meetings they are pretty dismal. They have been responsible for the atrocious drop in standards across the whole industry, I don’t think they have anyone who understands the industry and you try and get information out of them they fight like stink.
I bumped into an ex-colleague not so long ago and I said after you left didn’t you work for the CITB, his response was no one “works” for the CITB, I think that’s probably right from my dealings with them. They only seem interested in maintaining their pay grade and pension.
They pander to the large contractors and my experience is large contractors do not produce good tradesmen, the best tradesmen come from small to medium sized builders who have a traditional mix of tradesmen and a variety of small mixed contracts that give tradesmen a general appreciation of construction work. It’s the smaller contractors who need proper support.
Then when it comes to Surveyors and the like, during their year out they sit in front of a computer and never actually go on to site, Architects and Engineers now seem to be extremely well qualified but have no understanding of construction, they can’t see or understand what is right in front of their very eyes. It’s also very sad that the people who have a major say in the industry, Egan, Latham Morrell and Hansford seem to have little knowledge or understanding of the real industry.
Architects draw childish pictures, engineers then have to make them buildable [very un-economically], contractors don’t really know how to build them, engineers and Architects certainly don’t, it’s a real sad state of affairs. Why does every Eco building have to look like a badly built shed?
Now we seem to have a preference for the NEC form of contract, written by lunatics, does anyone actually read it before they decide to use it?
Main Contractors now want you to go through pre-qualification with the likes of Capita’s Construction Line, why would you want to give this leviathan more money; they do nothing to improve the skills in the industry or actually make it more efficient. It seems to me that the People at the top do not trust their staff or their own judgement when they sublet work. Again this exemplifies the lack of knowledge and experience of the senior people in the industry and they sit on various Boards including that of the CITB and generally get it wrong and cause the people at the bottom of the food chain to suffer!
I don’t see how it will ever change for the better now. Sad, Sad, sad when you think of what a great and important industry this could and should be.
We need to get rid of the CITB it’s a waste of money and has not served the industry well!!