{"id":513393,"date":"2025-01-30T10:06:18","date_gmt":"2025-01-30T10:06:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.constructionnews.co.uk\/?p=513393"},"modified":"2025-01-30T11:05:24","modified_gmt":"2025-01-30T11:05:24","slug":"mark-farmer-on-why-construction-industry-training-board-reform-is-needed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.constructionnews.co.uk\/skills\/mark-farmer-on-why-construction-industry-training-board-reform-is-needed-30-01-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Farmer on why Construction Industry Training Board reform is needed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Farmer\u2019s review of the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) was released today (30 January)<\/a>. In an interview with Construction News,<\/em> he explains his recommendations, and why improving quality is important in driving up the number of people employed in construction.<\/p>\n

You recommend a merger between the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board (ECITB) and the CITB? How did you come to that conclusion?<\/strong><\/p>\n

If I\u2019m honest, my view here is primarily driven by operational efficiency but also maybe just a general level of collaboration and shared thinking. I found some really interesting work happening in ECITB. The key issue to recognise here is that the engineering construction sector is hugely less fragmented than the mainstream construction sector. So the ECITB\u2019s job is different. It\u2019s not easy, but it\u2019s less difficult than CITB\u2019s, in my view.<\/p>\n

What that has enabled ECITB to do is get its head above the parapet and think about the bigger picture for that sector, or for the subsectors, including oil and gas and nuclear and offshore wind. And they have driven some really interesting stuff around competency. So they are probably ahead in some respects around competency and policing competency. It might not be a slam dunk just to take the ECITB work and apply it in construction but I think cross-fertilisation of ideas could be no bad thing.<\/p>\n

I like the idea of the leadership teams collaborating and integrating better, while respecting the individual subsets. So if you were to line up the two industries, you’d probably have oil and gas, nuclear, renewables, civil engineering, building construction, and housebuilding. But all of those subsectors have very common challenges and opportunities. Having an umbrella that sits over all of those subsets just feels like a more efficient way of delivering the agenda.<\/p>\n

Is it fair to say that you\u2019ve come on a bit of a journey in terms of industry reform since Modernise Or Die <\/em>(Farmer\u2019s 2016 report into labour issues in construction)? It feels like this new report is accepting that the industry isn\u2019t going to modernise itself quickly?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s a fair observation but I think they\u2019re two different reports. Modernise or Die<\/em> was very much a blank sheet of paper. It was that wake-up call to the industry as to what it needed to do, what was coming in terms of future challenges, and a bit of blue sky thinking in terms of the art of possible. And clearly, the intervening nine-year period has been a pretty up-and-down ride. There\u2019s been a recognition of a lot of what I said, but also some really turbulent headwinds that have prevented much of what I talked about really coming to fruition.<\/p>\n

This review is much more about the mechanics of government. It\u2019s an arm\u2019s-length review so the questions that I have to answer don\u2019t prevent me thinking of the big picture, which I try to do. What has definitely coloured my judgment in terms of this report\u2019s recommendations, is that change is hard. There\u2019s no two ways about it.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re going to drive change in an industry like construction that\u2019s such a complex beast, it is all about system level change and the wider ecosystem within which the industry operates and constitutes itself. That definitely influenced how I structured the recommendations in terms of a little bit of pragmatism around what I\u2019ve observed, particularly in the move towards reforming production techniques.<\/p>\n

There is a general sense that the industry recognises that there is a burning platform, but there are no big-bang quick fixes. So we\u2019re not going to have an overnight revolution. What this report is doing is trying to think about incremental change. What are the levers towards incremental change, but at scale? So the cumulative impact of a series of smaller things can scale up to being something more significant.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re really clear in the report about the reasons there is still a need for <\/strong>ITBs.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes. If you go right back to 1964 when the legislation was enacted that initiated the idea of ITBs, they were set up to address market failure in skills and training. It\u2019s fair to say that is still needed in construction. It’s due to the project-based nature in which the industry trains and operates, the fragmentation, and the way the operating model is even further atomised with self-contracting and self-employment.<\/p>\n

So assuming that the industry will have the incentives to do the right thing and invest in human capital and upskilling is a big, big ask. This is why I think the ITB is still relevant.<\/p>\n

You mention that firms need to move away from the idea that they should get out exactly what they put in via the levy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is definitely a bit of big-picture thinking needed here. It\u2019s hard because each employer is operating in their own sphere. But if we\u2019re going to be strategic, if we\u2019re going to look at things at an industry level, we need to view that pot of money much more holistically.<\/p>\n

The whole idea of ITBs, particularly the CITB, is emotive. Whenever there\u2019s a consensus vote, or a levy vote of any kind, all the emotion comes to the fore, and it\u2019s clear there are parts of the industry that are less than enamored with the ITBs.<\/p>\n

We need to retain the idea of the levy, but we need to spend it more effectively, and the things we spend it on need to change. I\u2019m hoping there\u2019s a sense of responsibility and leadership and the biggest businesses have to help the broader tail of the industry. And that\u2019s been happening. If you look at the distribution of levy grant, there\u2019s a net redistributive effect. The issue is that it probably needs to be more.<\/p>\n

Employers currently pay two levies \u2013 the CITB levy and the Apprenticeship Levy. Your report stopped short of saying the Apprenticeship Levy be aimed just at new entrants and CITB levy should be aimed at improving the skills of the existing workforce?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it\u2019s quite as binary as that, but it\u2019s fair to say that\u2019s the direction of travel. To do that requires expending the CITB levy on other stuff, including programme-wide existing workforce interventions. You don\u2019t want to do that at the expense of less funding for apprenticeships. That then drives the need to get more out of the Apprenticeship Levy, or the Growth and Skills Levy as it\u2019s now called.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019ve held back from saying that they should just compartmentalise the two. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s the case. It\u2019s purely about the emphasis of spend and ultimately, there\u2019s a broader point about the industry recovering more from the Growth and Skills Levy. It\u2019s under-recovered by quite a few sectors, and construction is one of them. And it\u2019s one of those things that, as a really important industry for the economy, the government and Treasury should be making a bigger allocation for drawdown of the Apprenticeship Levy within the construction sector, alongside the CITB levy being appropriated as well.<\/p>\n

The report also talks about how the industry might have limited capacity to absorb apprentices. Is that a problem?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a really important point because everyone focuses on the attraction challenge that we have. There\u2019s a whole cohort of kids every year that are doing post-16 further education courses in construction-related qualifications, and very few of them, for whatever reason, end up in the industry or in qualified employment.<\/p>\n

So there is an attrition issue that I\u2019ve tried to highlight in the report. A lot of people in the industry are aware of this, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s publicised enough. Kids that actually are pretty close to our industry at age 16, who have got the propensity to think of construction as a career, are not managing to get into paid employment with a traineeship, apprenticeship, whatever it might be. There\u2019s massive attrition. It\u2019s as much as 60 or 70 per cent.<\/p>\n

Part of that is kids doing full-time courses that don\u2019t even get to the point of starting a traineeship or an apprenticeship. And then there\u2019s a fall away from people that start apprenticeships but don\u2019t finish apprenticeships. There is no scientific way of of proving why this is happening. But anecdotally, it would appear that actually some of it, quite honestly, is kids that think they want to do construction and they don\u2019t, and they just change their mind, which is fair enough.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s also clearly an issue with the ability to find placements in the industry, particularly employed training positions. And I think this really goes to the heart of this absorption challenge. There is a natural ceiling on the number of apprentices that could be absorbed into the industry every year, which is not just dependent on things like CITB funding.<\/p>\n

There is a bigger issue with the construction industry\u2019s pressures around the actual cost of training. The indirect cost of mentoring young apprentices and the productivity challenges around that are significant. And there\u2019s also this \u201cfree rider\u201d concept that people often talk about, which is that they would much rather have an oven-ready, trained and skilled person, rather than have to go through the process of skilling them up.<\/p>\n

So there\u2019s much more reliance on other people doing the training, and then people leveraging off that when someone\u2019s competent. I think that really goes to the heart of one of my recommendations around more diversified pathways into the industry. How do you get people work-ready, productive and competent quicker? How do we also create flexibility around direction, so that if they want to change slight direction, they can do that in a modular way around course content.<\/p>\n

Not only would this drive attraction, it would enable the industry to do more with these trainees quicker, so they can earn money and be productive and competent on the site, and not risking the quality of the work. If we address that, we take some pressure off the need to go out and just grab people off the street. We want motivated, enthused people, but we also need the industry to have the ability to employ them and give them a pathway into the industry.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve\u00a0 seen examples, particularly in bricklaying, where the cost of delivering work could be reduced. So the overall cost of a bricklaying gang, if you configure it differently and use an accelerated apprenticeship model, can be less than if you use the current quite long-winded linear apprenticeship model. If you scale that, that means the industry could take more of those kind of trainees on, as long as there\u2019s a business case for doing it.<\/p>\n

I also think we had to get real as to the quantum of the pool we\u2019re fishing in, and what that means for future workforce planning. The construction skills network targets \u2013 <\/strong> 250,000 workers by 2028 \u2013 <\/strong> it\u2019s just put out there as a target. But is anyone really testing that number? Have we got any hope of getting near that?<\/p>\n

You seem to imply that quality \u2013 or competency \u2013 is as important a consideration as numbers<\/strong><\/p>\n

The reason I think competency is important is that ultimately, I think there\u2019s a correlation to productivity that then enables the industry to have greater capacity. So there\u2019s a line of thought here that if you can get everyone more competent, they\u2019re likely to be more productive. And some of that relates to things like defects and waste and getting things right first time. So 20 per cent of industry costs are related to rework in some shape or form, and a lot of that\u2019s got to be linked to mistakes and areas that are due to competencies, and we can eradicate some of that. We can do more with the same resource, which has got to be part of the challenge here, as well as the attraction and the additionality piece.<\/p>\n

I also think part of competence is behavior. We talk a lot in our industry about culture. Some of the barriers to making our industry more attractive actually come back to what it feels like to work in the industry. And some of these are behavioral aspects. So if competency is going to be properly judged on behavior \u2013 <\/strong>including things like just wanting to do the right thing, doing a good job, really caring about an outcome \u2013 <\/strong> I think that will indirectly influence people coming into the industry. If we\u2019re serious about trying to move the dial here, some of those softer issues need to be looked at within the competence framework.<\/p>\n

You recommend new output-focused KPIs to measure progress on the ITBs\u2019 skills agenda. Do you have any view on what those might look like? <\/strong><\/p>\n

My view is the KPIs need to be about outcomes relating to some of the things that I talk about being implemented, whether that is a workforce planning tool, or working with the Department for Education (DfE) to look at new course content and the pathways into the industry or new apprenticeship models.<\/p>\n

Employment and training outcomes are a key measurable. At the moment, apprenticeship achievement is a KPI that the DfE records, and I think we need to have more focus on not just end achievement, but monitoring what the longer-term employment outcomes are. But I don\u2019t want to load too much onto the ITBs, because a lot of this is beyond just the ITBs. In fairness to them, this is about system-wide change. So the DfE has a responsibility. Industry and employers have a responsibility. But I\u2019ve challenged them to think more strategically about being the conductor of the orchestra in some of this.<\/p>\n

Tell us about the vision you have for digital skills passports?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This can also be an emotive area around because it\u2019s the beginning of standards-led policing of the workforce – what you might argue is a licensing-type approach, which has been talked about for a long time. My view is that we can\u2019t shy away from that debate – it is implicit in the drive towards increasing industry capacity, going back to my competency and productivity point.<\/p>\n

We have some regulatory drivers from the Building Safety Act that are starting to push that. But that needs to be turbocharged. A digital skills passport would be an enabler for turbo charging that but it takes it much broader, beyond safety critical work, into the wider construction industry. It might be that we increasingly see a role for the insurance market to assure the quality of construction. It may well be that they start insisting on the likes of worker passports to be able to take a view on underwriting risk. It might come from investors. Or might come from funders.<\/p>\n

My view is that it should come from government procuring its own work on major public programmes. There\u2019s got to be some initiators of driving a compliance-led culture to the workforce. Clearly one of the short-term risks here is that you might lose some people, as we\u2019ve seen in the recent withdrawal of the industry accreditation scheme under the CSCS card. And you might say that goes against everything we\u2019re trying to do. We\u2019re trying to build capacity.<\/p>\n

But the industry just needs to have an honest debate about whether it needs more people with a higher competency in productivity, or does it just need more people, just head counting? And my view is, in the longer term, it should be the former. We should be thinking about the quality of the workforce, we should be looking at the ability to drive overall output and actually have some form of policing that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Farmer\u2019s review of the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) was released today (30 January). In an interview with Construction News, he explains his recommendations, and why improving quality is important in driving up the number of people employed in construction. You recommend a merger between the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board (ECITB) and the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129711,"featured_media":491259,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false},"categories":[565,570,559,575],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n