Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 320-324)

MR DAN WRIGHT AND MR SIMON WITHEY

26 MARCH 2007

  Q320  Chairman: You recognise the symptom?

  Mr Withey: I have seen the issue in a number of companies around the country, yes, and obviously it is a result of budget limits, and so on. I guess we are where we are, in a way, on that.

  Q321  Chairman: A profitable company and an international, global player will not take on more apprentices because the Government will not pay for them. You are red in tooth and claw; you started off saying about the market; but surely a company which does not take on highly qualified people should go to the wall, should it not?

  Mr Withey: We would not stop recruiting young people just because government money dried up for apprenticeship training, for the VT Group. If we had used our allocation and we wanted another 20 young apprenticeships, we would fund those ourselves, if that was the requirement of our business, and I think any decent company probably would do that.

  Q322  Chairman: What do you think, Dan; is it a crazy world?

  Mr Wright: Almost certainly. I think it is slightly different, because if you take a company like McDonald's, there is just no way we are going to stop bringing people in and training them to do what they need to do. What we do is accredit their training and we give their employees a qualification to walk away with; so it is slightly different. The hot issue in the hospitality industry is that for many years it has moaned about the lack of skills, of really top-class, qualified people coming through, and what they have not done is invest enough in the development of those people from their own programmes, so now I think they are suffering the consequences of that, because of years of lack of investment there. I think there is a bit of a crazy world scenario there and now, openly, the hospitality industry is criticising itself for many years of lack of investment.

  Q323  Chairman: Do not hold your breath; galloping over the horizon comes the free training for Train to Gain?

  Mr Wright: Train to Gain will not deal with the level of skills shortage which the hospitality industry talks about.

  Q324  Chairman: Almost every training programme we are talking about is subsidised by the Government, is it not?

  Mr Wright: Yes.

  Chairman: That might not be all. It has been a really good session. Could you keep in touch with the Committee; you have complemented astoundingly and very well the information and the evidence we had in the first session. If that happens, that we get that kind of match, we are always very happy; so thank you very much indeed.





 
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