Construction training projects in London, Sheffield, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol, Nottingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Newcastle stand to benefit from a new £10m funding boost delivered by the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB).
The Joint Investment Strategy (JIS) will see £5m of CITB levy funding matched by £5m pledged by the cities using funding from central government’s City Deals programme.
London will receive £1m in CITB funds to create a £2m fund, while the remaining eight cities will receive £0.5m that will be matched locally by a further £0.5m.
The Greater London Authority has already committed £1m from its budget, while Sheffield is also ready to launch, with the first projects to be funded going live in early 2014.
"With the support of the industry and local government in Greater London and the core city LEPs, we now have the tools to generate skills and jobs that will make a real difference to people around the country."
William Burton, CITB
The JIS will target three categories of construction training: business growth for construction SMEs; reskilling unemployed construction workers, for instance by training ex-plasterers in the skills needed for external wall rendering; and getting more clients to use the National Skills Academy for Construction’s client based approach, which helps to set and achieve targets for skills, employment and apprenticeships.
The exact mix of projects will be decided locally by the city councils and Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), but the projects will be delivered and managed by CITB.
The first schemes will become operational in London and Sheffield from the start of 2014, with the other cities coming on stream later in the year.
The strategy is based on the principle that construction is a key route out of recession, with a need for the construction industry and local government to work in partnership to take the sector back to growth through skills and employment.
Construction is proven to deliver a return on investment impacting on growth – each £1 paid to a construction worker returns 90p to the local economy, and the sector is also a robust engine for employment by being 40% more labour intensive than manufacturing.
The official launch of the strategy was marked at a recent event addressed by Matthew Hancock, minister of skills and enterprise. Attendees at CITB’s London and Core City LEPs Joint Investment Event discussed joint local government and industry construction skills strategies.
The initiative is launched against a background of a growing skills challenge. Over the next five years, 19% of the national construction workforce, almost half a million people, will reach retirement age.
The CITB says that the number of competence based NVQs awarded has fallen by 30%, yet the UK has one million young people who are not in education, employment or training.
William Burton, interim chief executive of the CITB, commented: “As we face a skills gap in construction, it’s vital that people around the country have the skills to benefit from construction through important initiatives such as the joint investment programme. CITB is playing an active role in delivering skills and training to the industry; in 2012 that took the form of over £165m in skills support across the UK.
“With the support of the industry and local government in Greater London and the core city LEPs, we now have the tools to generate skills and jobs that will make a real difference to people around the country. This strategic matched investment between local government, the industry and CITB will support this vital long-term plan.”
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The current skills shortage lies jointly at the doors of the Unions and the National Contractors, in that, in the ’70s they forced through the ridiculous change to apprentice payscales wheeby a 1st year, 1st six month apprentice was paid 45% of a tradesman’s rate. This resulted in a shortage of apprenticeships, and ended in the current situation.