Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-159)
CONSTRUCTIONSKILLS
27 NOVEMBER 2007
Q140 Roger Berry: You say in your
submission to the Committee that 87,600 new recruits are needed
to join the industry every year for the next five years, and you
also say that the United Kingdom does not face any skill shortages.
How do you explain that?
Mr Rogerson: First, the industry
has grown by about 20% over the last five years, so in itself
that has created certain issues, and it is forecast to maintain
at that level for at least the next five years and beyond from
our skills forecasting, but the industry is not facing an individual
widespread skill shortage. Clearly there are pinchpoints in certain
occupations and areas but generally the recruitment target of
87,000 employees is being met in various ways, through new entrants,
people who are upskilling, people already in the industry increasing
their skill level, and also by craft recruits and craft occupations.
Whilst we through our own managing agency train about 7,000 apprentices
a year on a full framework which includes employer engagement,
there are a further 20,000 people entering the industry through
technical colleges, other education areas, and through some occupation
run colleges, all entering the industry with some form of qualification,
including NVQs, so that the 7,000 figure quoted earlier relates
only to those coming through our management agency as opposed
to those entering the industry. We do have a Construction Skills
Network arrangement where we take information from all our partners,
from clients, from local authorities, from planning authorities,
and also from architects and surveyors, so we are looking all
the time at where demand is being created; we are trying to programme
that demand and trying as well to look at the skills which will
be required, so we are trying to face out and meet the requirements
that we can forecast. The biggest problem we have at the moment
is a changing skillset in that methods of construction are changing
all the time. There is more off-site manufacture, and therefore
assembly becomes more important than craft skills in some areas,
and obviously that is quite a challenge to us. So the constant
upskilling of existing workforce is just as important as claiming
new entrants.
Q141 Roger Berry: You did not mention
migrant workers. What proportion of the 88,000 annual increase
would be met by migrant workers?
Mr Rogerson: It is difficult to
say. There is some current research going on, but our view at
the moment is that migrant workers represent between 6% and 8%
of the workforce in the United Kingdom. That is not necessarily
evenly spread, as you might imagine, but that is our best forecast.
We should have some more robust information in the next few weeks
or months and obviously we will share that with you at that time.
Q142 Roger Berry: Are there particular
skill gaps they appear to be filling, or is it too early to say?
Mr Rogerson: I think at the moment
it is across the piece. They certainly come with good skills,
and I can speak from my own experience as an employer, in that
we employ Polish slaters who come with excellent skills and qualifications—who
I hasten to add do pay National Insurance and are registered here,
and are not in the black economy or employed by a gangmaster.
Clearly there are more migrants working in the London area than
in other areas and probably they barely exist in Scotland where
there is a different full employment, and I very much endorse
what the previous speaker said, that the training is much better
in Scotland and the north of England; it dissipates as we get
into the Midlands, and formal training, because of self-employment,
almost disappears in the South East and London areas. I share
that view.
Q143 Roger Berry: You say that long-term
reliance on migrant labour is not sustainable. Is that based on
the assumption or the evidence that migrant workers return home
rather than stay in the United Kingdom?
Mr Rogerson: From my own personal
experience most migrant workers do not bring their families; they
simply come here as a single occupation. They tend to work in
two five-month blocks in that they have a month off for a summer
holiday and a month off for Christmas in the United Kingdom. My
own experience is that they seem to stay in this country for between
two and a half and three years during which time they amass money
to send home and many of them go home and create employment in
their own country. That is very much my personal experience, I
do not know that there is any data, but I have talked to other
colleagues who employ immigrant labour and they seem to have a
similar view.
Q144 Chairman: That suggests it is
going to be difficult to find any of the 87,600 annual increase
you require from migrant workers, because the net flow is likely
to be diminishing very considerably.
Mr Rogerson: We are not seeing
that because those people go back and some other people follow
them. Re-recruiting is not a problem.
Q145 Chairman: So we will be seeing
more migrant workers coming to the United Kingdom to help plug
that 87,600 gap?
Mr Rogerson: I think we have to
remember that they are members of the European Union—
Q146 Chairman: I am not making a
value judgment; I am trying to pin down your assessment of the
organisation of the domestic skills we have to provide to enable
the construction sector to flourish in the United Kingdom. I am
not asking is it good or bad, but how many of those 87,600 will
have to come from United Kingdom born nationals and how many will
come from immigrants to the UK?
Mr Rogerson: Given that we are
coping at the moment we have to assume that somewhere between
6% and 8% is going to come from immigrants, because the thing
is working at the moment and therefore the assumption is that
something of that order will follow.
Q147 Chairman: Your working assumption
is that the proportions will continue in the future? That is helpful.
Mr Lobban: If I may comment, Chairman,
we are producing a new forecast. My colleague referred to the
Construction Skills Network; we produce forecasts five years ahead
and do them every year, so the new ones will be produced early
in the New Year. We try to determine what the training requirement
is in each region, and the training requirement in London would
be obviated by people coming down from Scotland or the north of
England, but also people coming from abroad, and certainly immigrant
labour is a far higher proportion in London and the South East
than in the North, and we programme all of that in. My feeling
from the early work that I have seen is that we are not assuming
that immigrants will add in a big net way; we are seeing it flattening
off in terms of the way we are currently producing our projections
over the next five years.
Q148 Chairman: So formal figures
will be published in January?
Mr Lobban: Early in the New Year,
yes.
Q149 Mike Weir: Your memorandum highlights
the fact that employers are providing insufficient workbased placements
even though they are prepared to have people who have undergone
apprenticeships. Is it safe to assume from that the problems industry
faces in providing insufficient training lie with employers rather
than an insufficient supply of willing workers?
Sir Michael Latham: I think one
has to say first very strongly, and I say this regularly, there
is no shortage of young people wanting to enter the construction
industry—no shortage as all. The shortage is the number
of employers prepared to take them on as apprentices, and this
is something which we are continually involved in. There is at
the moment, as Alan said, a very substantial proportion of apprentices
taken on in Scotland because in Scotland there is still an employment/apprenticeship/direct
employment culture which is good. The further you go down south
the less that is the case. We have found that there are somewhere
between seven and a half and 10,000 youngsters who are full-time
students at colleges of further education, particularly in the
south of England, who have not got an employer. If they have not
got an employer then, first, they have not been scrutinised by
CITB, by ConstructionSkills, and secondly, if they have not got
an employer they will not get any site experience, and if they
have not got any site experience they cannot get an NVQ and cannot
complete a framework apprenticeship. What we have done, therefore,
in conjunction with the Major Contractors' Group of the Construction
Confederation and also with the Major Home Builders' Group who
are part of the Home Builders' Federation, is arranged with them
that they will place a number of these boys and girls who are
not getting any site experience with their subcontractors so they
will get some site experience at the end, because they are doing
at the moment a two-year full-time course at colleges of further
education, and as they come to the end of that course they will
then be placed with their subcontractors. We were hoping this
year to have a thousand youngsters involved; I do not think it
will be as much as that, but our intention is to strengthen this
and to press it as much as possible. We call them "programme
led" apprenticeships and I think this is a very important
step forward. We have not had to do this in Scotland because all
the boys and girls up there have been placed with employers.
Q150 Mike Weir: Why is it that they
have been, up to now at least, unwilling to provide these placements?
Is cost a consideration? Or is there any other reason?
Sir Michael Latham: I think there
are a number of reasons. I go round the country a lot talking
to builders and I often ask them: "Do you take on apprentices?"
and they say "No", and I ask why not, and they say:
"Well, we might lose the boy before he finishes his time
and he will be poached and go and work for someone else".
In which case I normally say to them "How many employees
have you got?" "25" or whatever—and I think
it is worth mentioning, Mr Chairman, that of the 73,000 firms
on our Construction Industry Training Board register, about 93%
of them employ less than 10 people, so we are talking about an
industry of very small firms—and I say: "How many of
them have been with you all the time since they were 16?"
"None of them". And I say: "Well, that is what
happens in the industry. People move around and have done since
the Middle Ages and there is nothing new about that, but what
you need to be doing is taking on more people as youngsters, and
the way you are likely to keep them is if you pay them properly
and see they have a good job and have a chance of moving up through
the firm and so on". But there is a lot of resistance to
that and the further you come south the more resistance there
is. I have also to say, following what Alan said, that there are
hundreds of thousands of people now who are working on a self-employed
basis, some of them genuinely self-employed, some of them working
for labour gangs and those labour gangs do not do any training
at all.
Q151 Mike Weir: Are you suggesting
there are many people working who are not suitably qualified for
the jobs they are doing?
Sir Michael Latham: Yes, and we
have something we can do about that, and I will ask Mr Lobban
to say something about our on-site assessment and training programme,
if I may.
Mr Lobban: The industry has typically
recruited in a fairly informal way. The vast majority of the companies
are extremely small businesses; the industry is very much run
on a subcontract basis, risk of contracts is passed down on the
contract, and people have quite often started work on site as
a labourer without necessarily doing a formal apprenticeship,
and then through the years they have learnt the tools. We have
found a way of assessing them and of training them on the job,
it is called "on-site assessment and training", and
this year we will qualify 50,000 people who are now fully qualified
working in the industry who were working in the industry before,
and had learnt and become fairly competent but we give them the
top-up training to make them fully competent. That programme started
about five years ago and it is growing strongly. I have to say
it is also reinforced by the CSCS scheme, where people have to
have a card to get on some of the major sites where there are
a lot of subcontractors. They also have to take a computerised
health and safety test in the same way that people have to take
their driving theory test before they get a driving licence, so
all of that is beginning to encourage a more formal approach to
looking at qualifications and competence within the industry,
so we are running with that on sites.
Q152 Mike Weir: Given the concerns
we had from the union in an earlier session about the health and
safety culture on many sites with a large amount of self-employment,
are you working with the unions on this scheme to ensure that
the health and safety element is, if you like, engrained in many
of these sites?
Sir Michael Latham: There is a
health and safety test which is essential in order to getting
a construction skills certification scheme card, and at the present
time the number of people who have taken the health and safety
test is over a million, I think, and if you have not taken the
test you cannot get a CSCS card. I am very pleased to say, and
you have already had Alan Ritchie and I believe you are hearing
Bob Blackman later, that they both sit on CITB's Board, and indeed
Bob Blackman is also Chairman of our Health and Safety Committee.
So we have the closest possible relationship.
Q153 Mike Weir: And how many of the
site operators, or are any of them, prepared to assist on this
scheme for people who already have a card to increase the health
and safety culture within their sites?
Sir Michael Latham: At the end
of the day I believe it is up to the client to assist and monitor.
Many clients do. Of course there are very large numbers of sites
throughout the country, particularly small ones, where nobody
has ever got a CSCS card because nobody has ever asked them for
one. But there are a growing number of sites, I am pleased to
say, where the client has insisted and often made it a contractual
commitment for people on the sites to have a CSCS card, which
involves you having done the health and safety test first. I personally
am surprised that this has not been a requirement of all public
sector contracts, and I hope that it will be.
Q154 Mike Weir: Given the vast majority
of workers in the construction industry are white and male, what
work is being done to promote diversity in the workforce?
Sir Michael Latham: It has been
a long process over many years. Going back 10 years, the industry
had quite a poor reputation generally among younger people who
might be thinking of coming into the industry, and we did quite
a lot of work to try to turn that round. We do a lot of market
research, particularly with younger people, and we have seen a
very big change in their image of the industry, and there are
now many tens of thousands of people seeking to come into the
industry every year. That was not the case with females and visible
ethnic minorities. We had to do quite a lot more work to turn
their opinions around and do quite a lot of positive image work.
We did work with schools and television campaigns, and a lot on
the web now, and younger people are very into the web. We have
many contacts and hits on our website and we have competitions
and encourage them to apply, and I am now pleased to say that
we are now in a situation where we also have tens of thousands
of females and ethnic minorities who want to join our industry
as well, so that is the demand side. We then have to consider
how they get into the industry. Arranging training is one thing;
getting an employment starter job is another, and that has been
particularly difficult in the case of more diverse and perhaps
atypical recruits, partly probably to do with the informal nature
of recruitment in the industry which has tended to be through
family contacts. We introduced a 13-week trial period where we
paid for people from diverse backgrounds to start a job with small
and medium sized employers so they could get used to them and
see that they were of value, and that has been very successful.
We have just put 600 people, either females or ethnic minorities,
through that programme this year, and that programme is growing.
Another area where it is possible to do more is in an area where
there are long-term contracts and we have been talking about self-employment.
It is not just an issue between direct employment and self-employment
but also of long-term employment. If an employer directly employs
somebody for a few weeks and then releases them they do not necessarily
see them as somebody they want to invest in, but if they believe
they are going to have a long-term relationship with the person
then they will invest in training and see that they will get that
back over the years. Now the area where there has been a huge
long-term amount of work has been the social housing refurbishment
programme, the government programme, Decent Homes, and we have
been able to go in and work with housing associations and registered
social landlords where they have a major programme of work ahead,
and worked with their framework subcontractors and placed local
people, who have tended to be female and more of visible minority
background, and that has been also very successful in getting
a more diverse recruitment into the industry. We have also been
working at the higher education end and we have instituted a shared
basis where, if employers are prepared to sponsor someone on a
construction-related degree course at university, then we pay
half of the sponsorship. That has been very much targeted towards
the diversity agenda as well and we have had a much higher pick-up
of female and ethnic minorities and that programme has been very
successful. As well as encouraging the sponsors, it has also encouraged
many other people to apply and, even if they have failed to get
sponsorship, we have seen a pick-up in applications to construction-related
degree courses, so it has been a push over many years. We are
by no means there and it requires a lot more work and it requires
a lot more integration with the funding bodies so that we actually
take people into initial training and then ensure they move into
employment and they are not trained for unfortunately unemployment,
which has been the experience in many cases.
Q155 Mr Hoyle: With different parts
of the industry to work with, and we have got self-employment,
sub-contracting and supply chain fragmentation, are you lobbying
for changes in these areas and do you accept what UCATT have said,
that they believe in greater direct employment?
Sir Michael Latham: I have first
to say, Mr Chairman, that it is not our role to lobby for change.
I am answerable to the Minister at the DIUS and we are a statutory
body and that is the reality of the matter. What we do do is we
recognise, first of all, that the workforce is highly mobile,
that there is this tremendous reliance on sub-contracting, that
the supply chain has fragmented, that self-employment levels are
high and that major construction contracts are often let solely
on cost rather than on quality which is, I think, a shame, but
that is the reality. What we do do and what it is our job to do,
in my view, rather than lobbying for change in the structure of
the industry, is to support employers of all sizes with recruitment
and training needs, and it does not matter what the role is of
the man or woman on the site, we have to try and help them to
upgrade their skills. We are working, as Peter Lobban said a few
moments ago, on all sorts of different aspects in this regard,
but particularly we are working on the on-site assessment and
training programme which has allowed us to upskill a very substantial
number of labourers. We are also working on the programme-led
apprenticeships, as I mentioned a few moments ago, and indeed
we also introduced our new National Skills Academy for Construction
by which there will also be substantial numbers of people trained
as they go, so all those things we are doing. However, it is not
for us, as an impartial body, to be lobbying for change in the
workforce of the industry. That is perfectly proper for the unions
to do that and it is perfectly proper for the employers to do
that if they want to, but not for us.
Q156 Mr Hoyle: Now that you have
waffled on and not answered the question, can I just try and pin
you down a bit. Do you believe in the greater use of direct employment
as a group? Try yes or no.
Sir Michael Latham: It is not
our job to decide that.
Q157 Mr Hoyle: So you do not have
opinions? Are you in robotics?
Sir Michael Latham: Mr Hoyle,
we are bound by our requirements to work for our stakeholders
and our stakeholders are both employers and trade unions and they
have different opinions.
Q158 Mr Hoyle: Do you think the construction
industry will benefit from more direct employment?
Sir Michael Latham: Yes.
Q159 Mr Hoyle: We are beginning to
get somewhere. Thank goodness for that!
Sir Michael Latham: But that is
my personal view, as an employer.
Mr Hoyle: At least we have managed to
get an answer that is more suited to the question.
|
