The government’s planned new skills quango will partner rather than replace the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB), industry leaders have predicted.
Following the announcement this week of early details of what Skills England will do, senior figures who will work with the new body said they did not expect radical changes that could interrupt the drive to recruit thousands of apprentices and skilled site workers.
Rather than infringing on the CITB’s work, construction sector experts expected the new organisation to get a leg-up from the CITB’s wealth of sector knowledge.
“I am assuming the CITB will play a key role [in Skills England’s work] and will slot into the overall picture developed with Skills England,” Federation of Master Builders chief executive Brian Berry told Construction News.
“The CITB works closely with the construction industry – they have been developing a longer-term plan [for] skills and training,” he said.
For instance, he pointed to the CITB’s warning earlier this year that nearly 250,000 new workers are needed in the next four years to cope with output growth in the construction sector.
“There is a ready-made plan which will form part of Skills England’s plan for the full economy,” he said.
It is expected to be up to a year before Skills England is launched.
Berry, like other construction industry experts canvassed by CN, does not expect the two organisations to clash: “They should be complementary – the CITB offers an effective plan, which Skills England will surely look at. It should hopefully be a collaborative working relationship.”
National Federation of Builders head of policy and market insight Rico Wojtulewicz agreed that the relationship between the two organisations would likely be “informative”.
“The way I thought it would work in the short and medium term was that the CITB would be able to help inform Skills England about industry operation, skills shortages and future needs,” he said.
“Skills England, alongside industry, will then be able to identify how that is best tackled or supported outside of CITB.”
Wojtulewicz welcomed the government’s creation of Skills England, saying: “We need an overriding organisation focusing on skills challenges to the UK.”
He pointed out that the CITB focuses entirely on training and not employment.
“You need an organisation focusing on training and retaining of workers across the industry,” Wojtulewicz said.
“Skills England might be useful because it could key in the business department, Treasury and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. All government departments need to work together on this problem and not in isolation – that is what we will push Skills England to do; that is what the last government did not do.”
But the FMB’s Berry warned that the industry still needed to see more details about Skills England, and that the potential year-long setup process could cause delay in the sector at a time “when we need it least”.
“We really need to build more homes and infrastructure, and hit the ground running, but that [setup process] will take time,” he said.
Berry also warned that skills funding currently allocated to the construction sector should not be moved to other sectors, and that organisations such as the FMB would keep an eye on this. But, following a meeting with housing minister Matthew Pennycook after Labour’s general election win earlier this month, he said the “mood music is positive”.
However, he said: “Let’s not underestimate the task ahead. It’s a big challenge to build 1.5 billion homes. We haven’t built 300,000 homes in one year since 1969.”
The Department for Education declined to comment.
