Welcome to today’s session of the Business and Trade Select Committee as we continue our inquiry into small business strategy. Thank you to all our witnesses for joining us here this afternoon. Tim Balcon, the Government have set out some very ambitious targets: to build 1.5 million homes, retrofit an awful lot more homes, upgrade 5 million homes and embark on a number of big infrastructure projects. Does the country have the workforce to complete that work?

As it stands now, it probably does not, but all the activity that you just described there will happen over time, of course, and it will build. The Construction Skills Mission Board is a mechanism where industry and Government have come together to address that very issue. Can we get the capability and skills we need? The answer is yes, but it will mean that the skills system and employers have to work hand in hand and in partnership to develop processes and collaboratively agree action plans to do that.

You have set out that we need almost 250,000 people over the next four or five years in order to get this task done. Where are those people going to come from?

As we speak, if you look at colleges, there are around 100,000 to 110,000 people in a construction-related course every year. About 60,000 of those—a little less than that, 57,000—will not achieve or will not go into a job. Nearly two-thirds of those who start a construction-related qualification will not end up either completing that course or going into a job. If we make the skills system, the process by which we train people, more efficient, the people are there. Colleges will say that construction courses are generally oversubscribed. They are generally very popular for lots of reasons, so the numbers are there. We need to convert the numbers going into training or considering construction into employment.

That is a heck of a drop-out rate. Is that ultimately what we are talking about: that two-thirds do not complete the course?

Yes.

Do you have a sense of why that is?

Often when I talk about this it comes across as being quite critical of colleges, and that is absolutely not what I am trying to say here. The colleges would love employers to be at the end of their training to put these people into work. In a sense, the colleges are training people but there is an absence of jobs or where the jobs are, which is a key issue. Linking job vacancies into training would be a game changer and a massive step forward. One reason why that is difficult is that the industry is made up of 98% SMEs or micro-businesses, so companies under nine people. Their ability to engage in a formal skills infrastructure is clearly very limited. The way that construction companies recruit is generally word of mouth; they do not advertise vacancies. Only companies of a certain size would use organisations such as Indeed.com and those general recruitment companies. They tend to recruit by word of mouth, so a friend of a friend, friend of the family or someone they met in the pub, just to get people through the door. There is an informal recruitment system into construction, which is not allied to the 110,000 people we have in training.

Are you saying that the two-thirds of people are dropping out because they are going into work early or they are changing their mind about their forward path in life?

Some will get a job, although it is hard to say how many. One thing I really would like is to have some destination data from colleges, which we do not have. Some will get a job. Some of those who are in training will see a job working as, say, a delivery driver, and they will leave their course to go and take a job such as that.

Are there particular skills shortages that you can already see hampering us in achieving these extremely ambitious build targets?

It is generally across the board. Take the major trades, so the bricklaying, the carpentry and the groundworks; it is across the board there, but also—we are joined here today by Josh—you have the specialisms. I do not think that roofing is a specialism, by the way, but you have those roofing or flooring kinds of activities, where training is harder because the numbers do not really give a college a full classroom. It is hard to put that training provision in place.

When we are thinking about filling this 250,000 target, does the industry have a view about how many workers will be needed from abroad and how many workers will come from the UK?

We have not done that. We have said that, if we create a skills system for our indigenous workforce, that will relieve the pressure of getting workers coming from abroad. By the way, the 250,000 that you mentioned was the number that we published before the housing targets, the infrastructure targets and the retrofit targets, so you can add another—

The number should be bigger.

It is another 110,000 on top of that over five years.

Right, okay. That is a huge number.

It is.

Josh Clarke, what is your perspective on the frontline? What kinds of skills shortages get in your way?

We are a medium-sized business based on the south coast in Eastbourne. We are a third-generation company. We really struggle with getting young blood into the industry. I have spoken to various other contractors in the south-east and it is across the board nationally as well. No one is coming through, for whatever reason. The average age of a roofer, specifically, is 50, which does not work for the game that we are in. The issue that we are having is that, from our side, where we are based down in Eastbourne, the provision of training and the locations is not great enough. For our guys to go for training, they go to Leytonstone in east London.

Wow.

For a 16-year-old lad to go from Eastbourne to Leytonstone for a week is quite daunting. It has changed a lot in the last few years. When I was 16, you probably would not bat an eyelid, but now people are a bit more cautious. There was another training centre down in Littlehampton, which is along the coast and closer, but it has closed because it cannot get the numbers.

That is interesting. When you think about your firm and the contracts that you want to get stuck into over the next year or two, give us a sense of how serious the skills gap is for your firm.

It is very hard to keep guys anyway with the issues going on—with the insurance hikes and everything—and to keep them trained. We have ambitions to grow, but that ambition is being hampered by the prospect of not having enough guys to do the work.

If you think about this year and the headcount you have at the moment, in an ideal world, how many extra people would you need?

We could probably take on another 15 operatives. The problem is that the work we do specialises in heritage and that sort of thing, so it is not new build work. A lot of our best guys have been trained from the generations above and passed down stuff that you cannot learn at college. It has to be out on site. It is fine to have an apprentice coming through, but 10 apprentices are no use whatsoever to us.

What is your total headcount at the moment?

It is 55 employed.

So 15 is a pretty significant gap.

Then we have another 65 subcontractors as well, so they are pretty much constantly in demand.

When you hear the kinds of targets the Government have set out—a commitment to build 1.5 million homes, retrofitting to meet the 2050 target, upgrading 5 million homes over five years and major infrastructure projects—do you think that there is a hope in hell that we can achieve all that with the workforce we have today?

Honestly, no. It is not going to happen.

It is pretty evenly spread, in fairness. As part of the work we do with the mission board, we have taken the house building and infrastructure objectives and mapped that workload across the country. That tells us where the workload is. We are trying to understand where the hotspots of work activity are. It is fairly evenly spread, but there is different work in different parts of the country. For example, in Liverpool you will find a lot of work in retrofit and domestic maintenance. In Suffolk you will find more of an engineering bias, with building a nuclear plant plus the reservoir plus the hospitals programme. Either one of those examples needs all the skills that we are talking about here. It is just the numbers. Going back to the point I was making, we are mapping across Great Britain where the hotspots of work activity are. Because we have done that, we can then identify the roles that are needed to do those jobs. We know that there is about £3 trillion worth of construction project activity taking place in the next three years across Great Britain.

We use a tried and tested methodology. A lot of the projects that we are talking about are £250 million and above. There is a database of those projects. We can take that, then speak to local regions to understand their business-as-usual workload. There are a number of assumptions, plus hard data in terms of work activity. If you take the projects I am talking about there, some of those are still waiting to happen. For example, if you take Thames Gateway, everybody wants Thames Gateway to happen. There has been a go-ahead, but it is not going to go ahead as we speak now because it requires funding. Project activity is there, but we need to understand precisely when that is going to happen. For the mapping that we have done, we probably have the best data that we have ever had, and that is because we have been working with colleagues in Skills England and the DFE. Then we have mapped the training provision on top of that, so we understand what training provision is available. We can drill right down to things such as roofers, so we can see how many roofers are in that area and what the provision is like. Then we can come up with some solutions or interventions as we see necessary.

That is right, generally speaking. Plumbing, bricklaying and carpentry are the core construction products that colleges generally train on, because they can get volume of numbers through that. As we have just heard, roofing is separate. As an example on roofing, we have just set up a roofing qualification at our own college but it took us 18 months to find a trainer, so it is an issue.

That is a really important question. Thanks for inviting me to be part of the panel this afternoon. Skills England has a really important role to play in this. We were established formally in June, so we have been going for four months or so, and in that time have done some useful things, as Tim mentioned, putting together data and publishing reports that show where skills gaps are and where they are likely to be in future, so that we are all working from the same data. In the past, some of the problem has been around people talking at cross-purposes, but now we have a single authoritative voice in the form of Skills England’s reports. If you have not had a chance to see them and you like lots of data, please have a look. If not and if you prefer a short version, they have excellent executive summaries. We are very live to the fact that there are difficulties in finding trainers and tutors for some of these courses. It is a competitive market. When there are big construction projects on the go, there is an economic drive towards people working in those projects, rather than coming back into colleges and teaching, where you earn less as a trainer. We are matching and understanding where those gaps are with colleges, working with the Association of Colleges, so David and his colleagues, to see how we can think in new ways about solving some of those problems. That can be through more innovative ways of teaching, so some blended learning, some on-site, some distance learning and some online or AI. Those are the sorts of things that Skills England is helping to promote, so that we can solve some of those tricky problems, such as lack of tutors.

They are doing lots of things. You have to remember that there is an enormous need for more skilled people in the workforce, but the demand from learners needs a bit of attention as well. We know that there is massive stereotyping, so schools will push people into construction training not knowing why, other than just thinking that that is probably a good place for them because they are not doing very well with their GCSEs. That is why you get quite a lot of drop-out. They go into it, whether it is bricklaying or even roofing, and then find out that it is not for them. Josh was saying earlier that, after a day on a roof, you know whether you want to work on a roof or not.

By 10 o’clock, you know.

There is a really important job about getting the right demand from the right learners and the right young people and adults. We are not solving this with young people; we are solving it with adults who are already in the workforce. We need them to be persuaded that they have a future in construction, and then we need to find the training that they can do. There is a demand issue from learners themselves. There is still a perception issue about the sector. People do not understand how many jobs there are, what jobs are available and what progression possibilities there are. There is a reality about some building sites still, which is probably not particularly attractive to people who are not white, straight men. We have to recognise that. There is some change in the industry. We have to work harder at getting people to think, “If I go and work for that company, it will be a great company to work for.” Across the industry, there is some attention to be paid to that. Colleges are paying as much as they possibly can to attract the lecturers. A college just down the road is paying £50,000 to £55,000 for a construction lecturer, when many of its other lecturers are on £35,000 to £40,000. It is doing that just to make sure it has people. Across the country, there are more people wanting to be trained who cannot get the lecturer to be able to train them. It is a massive problem. The Government, to be fair, are trying and starting to put a bit more money into it, but it is not enough.

David, we have already heard some scepticism about whether we are going to be able to put in place the workforce to build all these things. What is your view?

The capacity is not there at the moment. As Tim said, the partnership that is being installed now, the Construction Skills Mission Board, is a fantastic vehicle. I have quite a lot of hope that that will start to make a change. The Government have put some money in, but they need to think about more. They put £600 million in, which sounds like a lot, but the scale of the challenge is enormous and there is massive competition. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is saying, “We need people.” The nuclear industry, reservoirs and roads need people.

You have seen skills policy through many iterations over the years. What is your confidence level now that there is a plan in place to deliver the workforce?

I am much more confident now, because we have a partnership between the employers and the colleges. That is the first time I have seen that properly. Too much in the past, it has been pointing fingers: “It’s them over there that are falling short. Colleges haven’t got the quality. Employers aren’t offering the work experience.” There is probably some truth in both of those, but we need to solve it together.

We will take that as qualified confidence, in that case.

Picking up on some of what we have been talking about, I will start, Josh, with your view, because you indicated this earlier. What are the main problems for you as an SME trying to access the skills you need, whether that is across the system or actually just the workforce? Can you give us some colour?

The training process is quite hard to navigate. That is a common thing that we hear from various people. I think that that is changing slightly.

I entirely agree with that.

The actual process of the application, the funding and that sort of thing makes it very tricky to understand. We are fortunate enough to have a lady who is brilliant at it and gets it, but it is not the same for everyone. If you do not understand, you almost give up.

Can you just talk us through, literally, if you have 15 people who you would love to go and hire, what you would do, beginning next week, to try to get those people?

Initially, we would probably ask our operatives whether they know of anyone. Then we would look at other companies and see whether there is anyone who is skilled who we could take, unfortunately, which does not help the situation, I know. You can go out for apprentices, but it is not a quick fix. Essentially, it is going out and trying to find trained operatives already from people who we know to bring them into the company. A lot of our guys have been with us for 20-plus years. They have family and friends. They know of other people. Sometimes you find an absolute gem, and they love the industry and get on with it. Separate to all that, going back to the very start, on trying to get more people into the industry, we need to change the perception in schools that the industry is down low in the hierarchy of needs. We recently did some mentoring with a local school. We had 15 kids and halfway through I said, “Why have we got these children?” They are like, “They’re not great academically, so we thought they’d excel here.” That is your perception. The schools have got it wrong as well. If someone is really good at English and maths, why can they not be a roofer? Why can they not be a painter, decorator or electrician? They are almost palming them off to try to get them a career or some knowledge in something. Ultimately, we would go out and try to find other local operatives and take them for ourselves, or train new members of staff.

Moving on a little bit from that, I chair the SME house builder APPG. I did a visit a couple of months ago to the National House Building Council in Lichfield. It has a new training site there where it is shortening the process, removing some of the stuff that is nice to know but not need to know, and saying, “If we need to build a house, what are the skills that they need to build this house?,” so speeding that through. That is happening in some places, not everywhere. Is that a model that we need to be ramping up? We get the interest. We get people through the system and then they start to say, “I like this and I’ll stay,” or, “I quite like the idea of changing from being a roofer to a bricklayer,” or vice versa.

In the new build industry, a house is very standard, give or take. It is not a listed building. If there could be a college course, such as there is for bricklaying, plumbing or electricians, with the basics, that would help solve some issues. Within a year, they would be able to potentially tile a house on a new build site.

It is linking with a site that is already up and running, so they are on site. It is shortening that period of being in the classroom, which, for many, may not suit them, so they drop out, because they do not like it.

Also, every time they are going off to college, they are losing productivity on site anyway, so that is slowing down the process. If there is more on-site training, that is going to speed up everything.

Brilliant. Tim, what do you think? You have a knowledge of these and quite a number have been going up around the country.

We work very closely with NHBC. That model that it has developed is exactly the right model. I am trying not be overly critical here.

You are among friends. You can be as critical as you like.

Yes, okay. Thank you. The current qualification system is too inflexible to deal with the needs of the construction industry. NHBC has taken the bones of what is in an apprenticeship—we are now doing an access course—and said, “If we had to streamline that and make that more efficient to give employers what they want, what would that look like?” NHBC has come out with part of that answer. With NHBC, we are now developing a shorter course that gets people on site very quickly to see whether they are going to stand the test of time and whether it is worth investing in it a little bit longer. Ultimately, a progression route for individuals can build up that says, “Rather than spend two years on a course, I can spend eight or nine weeks and develop some skills. If I really like it, I can then develop some more skills.” The other thing about the skills system, which is probably what turns some employers off, is that it is qualification-based as an outcome. Employers are looking for productivity and competence-based as an outcome. It is just about nuancing what we have, not about radical reform. The bones of what is in the qualification are not far off; it just needs aligning better to how employers use it in the way that Josh has described.

That is really positive to hear. I guess the next question would be that, if we can shorten, curtail and get that right to get some of the churn going, which is what needs to happen, we also need to retain people and train them to the next skill level. As you say, there will be heritage buildings and complex, different methods of construction. You want to get the people who are really keen. Is there some thought also about how, if we can get almost this foundational principle right, we then take it to the next stage and what that looks like?

We had a Construction Skills Mission Board meeting yesterday, and this topic was brought up. In effect, it is a career pathway. Regardless of which qualification or route you take, it is founded on a determination of competence to some degree, but you can build on that competence as you build your learning and training. What is missing to many employers is that they cannot make head or tail of whether it is an apprenticeship, a boot camp or a foundation. All this is just different language. We need clarity that says, “If I take an individual on, I can train him on this thing.” If they are good at that, they can go to the next thing and the next thing. Regardless of what qualification route or pathway they learn, the employer knows what skill level that individual achieved by doing that. That is the next step.

Josh, you were nodding at that point.

In our industry, in roofing, there is a clear pathway from start to finish, from labouring to learning to batten a roof. To get the basics at a college, for NHBC for a new-build, will not take long. Then you can go year on year and look at the training. Where do you want to go next? What are you good at? What are you not so good at? What do you need to do? My issue at the moment is that the funding to do the training has been cut, I believe. We are now worse off. We are going to be putting our hand in our pocket more to pay for the training for the guys. We are all going, “Train, train, train,” while you have just cut our funding.

That sounds like a problem.

Yes. It does not make sense at all.

David, do you feel like the local skills improvement plans are working with businesses?

Some of them work quite well. Most of them did not in their first iteration. They did not get into the detail enough. We have to see much more engagement and targeting in sectors. The numbers Tim is talking about are all over the country and then, in some places, incredibly localised, for example the nuclear industry. If you go to Bridgwater, there is a massive need there. Those needs were not reflected in the local skills improvement plans enough. We have to get deeper into them and engage businesses in them more, because the answer is always about trying to influence demand for those jobs and then create the pathways, again as Tim was saying, to help people get into those industries. There is lots to do on the local skills improvement plans. The first year was a good start. You would not expect every one to be great. We have to learn from the weak ones. We have to get them much more tied into the local economic growth strategies and engaging the right employers, because some of them simply did not do that.

I was trying to avoid getting into the vexed issue of careers education, but you have left me no option at this stage. Given that we now have pretty good spatial understanding of where the skills shortages are, what on earth are we going to do to bring an incredibly fragmented academy-based school system to the table?

It is really tough. Josh was explaining the work they do with schools, but the culture in schools has to change. This is what I am saying about the perceptions of the industry. We have to get not just the careers specialists to understand the sector, but the teachers. We need teachers not to think, “Little Johnny or Jenny is not particularly bright. I will put them into construction,” because that is what happens. It is not malevolent. It is not necessarily a bad thing that they are trying to do. They think that it is the right thing for them. If we do that, we will end up putting them into jobs that they will really struggle in, and they will not progress. They will not be able to get the skills to stay on site and stay relevant.

Do these LSIPs currently incorporate any kind of plan to weave schools into the delivery mechanism?

No, because it is not part of a system.

Is that not an error?

Yes, it is a massive error. The Government said that we need local economic growth strategies. You then presumably want the skills improvement plan to speak to that.

Anyone who works with schools knows that you actually have to start with junior schools.

Absolutely, yes. You have to start really young. You have to start with five, six, seven or eight-year-olds, absolutely, for certain. Employers need to help us with that, because schools and colleges cannot do that on their own.

For the last six months we have been going into local schools, offering back and advocating for the industry, basically. We have a little training that we take in. They have a little go and play with some tiles. We talk them through what we do. The uptake has been unbelievable. It has been really positive. We cannot change anything by ourselves, but we are still trying to do our bit.

That might be a recommendation that we come to. Weaving schools, including junior and infant schools, into LSIPs is a common-sense thing to do.

In places such as Dudley, there is low employment and high levels of people in in-work poverty. How do you think you can get residents or learners without any qualifications who are in SMEs to access education as employees?

This is a really important issue. We could get every single young person in the construction industry possible and we still would not solve the problem. We need people who are working in other sectors to come into the industry over the next five to 10 years. That is a bigger challenge than getting young people. You know Dudley. It reaches out to SMEs, does it not?

It does indeed. It is an excellent college with 11,000 students and is now becoming a construction college. It is a good format and I thought that I would ask the question anyway.

The reason it gets that connection is that it is offering SMEs more than just skilled people. The skilled people bit is important, but it is offering them an understanding of the technology, what technology is coming and how business techniques are changing. It could be digital skills as well, to help change the business and do the innovation that the business needs to grow and be successful. Then you provide the skills that are coming behind that. That innovation role of colleges needs to be much stronger. There is a brilliant pilot going on, supported by UKRI. We need that to be mainstream, so every college is getting innovation money to work with SMEs on how to improve their businesses and then providing the skills there. I hate to say it, but, in the end, we need more money going into training adults who are already in the workforce. The adult budget is less than half of what it was when I used to manage it 20 years ago. It is less than half in cash terms. The opportunities for adults to retrain have absolutely plummeted in the last 20 years. That needs to change really quickly.

There are colleges and places that are doing some excellent work. How are we modelling that as a benchmark for other areas that maybe are struggling or have some challenges for that to be replicated across the country?

Skills England has a key role to play here. One lens with which we examine issues such as this is through place. We can have a national policy, but it does not always make sense in individual areas, as you know. The model of the technical excellence colleges is a great one, starting with the construction ones and seeing how that works and how we can replicate that in other sectors. Understanding the role of place, the role of mayors, and working really closely with MSAs, the strategic authorities, to understand and share data and insight on which kinds of interactions are working well, where the support for people who are leaving college and going into their first jobs is working well, and how we can help to replicate that across the country or share that good practice, is really important. We are seeing some really good things coming through.

How is that shared?

There is a lot of complexity in the skills system, as we have been hearing. A role for Skills England is to help to hide the wiring and make it easier for people to understand the system as a whole, so, whether you are a learner, a college, another provider or an employer, making it easier to understand how the system works and how the system works in your area. That is very high up on our list of things to do quickly and we are working on it right now.

To decode what you have said, how would that work for Josh, for example, who currently has to send roofers from Eastbourne to Leytonstone to get trained?

There are local skills dashboards, conversations with mayors or strategic authorities, local authority partners, ERBs and the conversations that happen around the LSIPs. It is about local knowledge.

Literally, if Josh has to find 15 roofers, are you saying that he has to turn to a local skills dashboard?

Not necessarily, no. We have heard the number of ways in which he is doing that now, but it is another tool in the toolbox to be able to look and see.

Literally, if Eastbourne college does not have roofing training and the nearest provision is in Leytonstone, we are going to have a problem.

Separately, for the last four months we have been working with East Sussex College. We have had meetings to try to make this happen down in Eastbourne or somewhere local, to put a roofing college in. It is very early days and it is running the numbers to see whether it can make it feasible. If it can, and if this can work, it would be fantastic for the whole of the south-east. It is our biggest problem. When you are talking to someone at an apprenticeship roadshow or workshop, and you say, “Your son or daughter is going to go off to Leytonstone,” straightaway there is a barrier.

I can imagine.

You go, “It’s not that bad,” and they are like, “But we don’t want to go up there.”

Building a construction centre at a college, with the confidence that it is going to be running apprentices through it, is a three-year process, minimum.

In four months, we have found a tutor who is willing to do that side of things. Essentially, everything is there. It is just finding the funds and running the numbers to make sure we get the people through the door to make it work.

Sarah, Skills England is obviously fairly new. You said that you have only been fully established since June. The big sea change, with the arrival of the growth and skills levy as opposed to the old apprenticeship levy, has broadly been welcomed. Would you agree with that? There is possibly a little warning sign ahead. The National Federation of Roofing Contractors told us that there is no SME representation on your board and limited engagement with the organisation. Is that a straw in the wind? Is there a difficulty there with the SMEs and your engagement with them? What might you be doing about that?

That is a really important question. Yes, we are still fairly new. However, we have an active and enthusiastic board and chair, in Phil Smith, who is very interested in what we can do to support SMEs with their training needs and filling those skills gaps. Before we were officially launched, we conducted a lot of engagement with employers, including small and medium-sized employers, and representative bodies for SMEs. You are right. We had a series of engagement activities, resulting in a report we published that showed the sorts of things we are talking about today that SMEs find difficult with the skills system: it is complex and some of the courses feel long and difficult to complete. There was lots of clear feedback about the opportunities within the new growth and skills levy, seeking more flexibility, shorter courses, modular approaches and those sorts of things. Skills England is a delivery executive agency. Policy is made by Government Departments. The sort of feedback and insight that we can give to our policymaking colleagues and Ministers is around the importance of listening to what will work for SMEs.

You said there that you spoke to SMEs as you were ramping up.

Yes, and umbrella organisations.

Is that an ongoing process? Are you going to make that part of your ongoing process?

It is absolutely ongoing. Yes, we have an SME engagement plan, which is quite extensive and will include a series of regional roundtables. Regional, as I mentioned before, is really important. There is direct engagement through some of the umbrella organisations and individuals representing small firms too.

You spoke about how vigorous your board is. Is there room on that board for someone from the SME sector?

The board is appointed, but we would love to invite people to come and talk to us about specific things, such as the experience of SMEs. We have a number of board members who would like to take this forward, give it some attention in a smaller forum and talk to people directly. That would be helpful if we were able to do that quickly. The other thing that we heard loud and clear from SMEs is that pace and agility in the system has been an issue. Amending and updating things, such as training programmes and apprenticeships, has in the past taken quite a long time. That is another bit of delivery that Skills England can help with, in terms of speeding up that process, listening quickly and making those changes to apprenticeships, including the work that we are currently doing on short courses.

David Hughes, you and I have probably discussed these issues for about 15 years now. It is great that Skills England has embarked on a listening exercise in its first year. It does not sound like any of this feedback is novel or surprising. Can I get your take on what actually needs to happen next?

We have a massively national system that does not work everywhere, and it particularly does not work for SMEs. We know that. We have known that for the last 15 to 20 years. Part of the solution—and this is to DFE really—is that the policy cannot be made in Whitehall and be applicable in Dudley, Sandwell and every part of the country. We need more trust in the providers so colleges know what their employers want. The average college works with about 1,000 employers. It is loads more than you can ever hope to engage with. It is impossible, so we need them to have that flexibility, but they do not have any. We have been saying that for a long time.

They do not have any flexibility on what?

On the qualifications and being able to deliver the type of thing the NHBC is delivering. They cannot do that. They are not allowed to do that.

We are locked into a kind of Stalinist, top-down system.

“Stalinist” is your word, Liam. I would not use those words in this building. It is a very national system and the colleges are sort of vassals in it. We want them to have the power to meet local employer need. Ofsted has been looking at colleges to say, “Are they meeting local employer need?” Across the country, it has said that they are brilliant at it. They know exactly what the employers they work with need. They just need some help to have the powers to be able to do this.

Sarah, so that we understand the full circle of life here, you have got this fantastic feedback that confirms everything that everyone has been saying for the last 15 years, which is great. What are you going to do with this feedback now? Are you literally now having to wait for Ministers to amend a qualifications framework?

No, it is an evolution.

I think we would agree that it is quite a slow evolution.

Shorter apprenticeships have already been introduced. New foundation apprenticeships are available from August this year. There are short courses that we are working on the development for to be available from April next year.

I want to check this specific point. Do you now require Ministers to amend a qualifications framework to introduce the kind of flexibility that David Hughes has asked for?

No, not for the things that I have listed. For other things that might come forward—

Sarah, with all respect, you are talking about another national set of qualifications being designed. I am saying, “Trust some of the colleges to get on and do it.” We have invested in 10 technical excellence colleges in construction. Let us trust them to be able to meet the employers’ needs and see what happens. What will happen will be fantastic. People like Josh will go, “Bloody hell, we are getting what we need finally.” If we try to design it in Whitehall all the time, we will get it wrong again and again. It will be too rigid and slow, and will not be meeting employers’ needs.

Apart from Switzerland.

There are places such as Holland, where they allow 80% of a qualification to be set nationally and 20% to be set locally between the college and the employers. That is a really fantastic way of doing it. We are not asking for complete chaos. We are saying, “Just have that edge of agility in the system.” We have been pushing that for ages.

I will follow up with that question. Sarah, what do you think about that Dutch scenario?

Flexibility is good. Assuring quality is also important, so it is a balance. There are really good international examples, as David has mentioned. Looking at the potential of things such as short courses that are currently being developed could solve some of this. They are not being developed in isolation in Whitehall. They are with employers and experts in their sectors, such as Tim and his colleagues on the construction front. There is a lot of work going on and we can update you in due course on it.

I appreciate that. Redesigning courses makes lots of sense, but there is that idea about localisation and trying to split out and give some explicit flexibility; let us say a 20/80 split or whatever it might be. Is that something that you think is a good way to head? Does that make sense?

Looking at what happens already in many colleges, you see flexible provision. You see local context used with a national framework. It is not quite as simple as national versus local. It is about finding the right training to meet the needs of those local employers. That is the most important thing.

There is a risk in shortening the courses. If you bring everything in and make it quicker, two things might happen. The quality is going to go down, and accidents are going to go up, because everyone is rushing through the system and they do not have the knowledge that they should have. You might find that that happens and you have another issue on your hands.

The CLC—Construction Leadership Council—has recognised that this industry does not have one definition of competence. It has spent the last 18 months on a fabulous collaborative programme across the industry, where employers have come together to determine what competence is and how we describe it. Now that we have that, it then allows for flexibility at a local level to be able to deliver qualifications based on those competence statements. On top of that, if you had an appropriate assessment methodology—and you can, again, apply some agility into this—you can have a national developed programme, set by employers and delivered on a local basis, but, running through its core, you still have those competence statements. That would be critical to any agility that you put into a system. Q254       Mr Reynolds: Sarah, FE Week has reported today that Skills England will be moving into the new DWP super-Ministry. Apprenticeships, adult further education, skills training and careers will be controlled by DWP, but responsibility for higher and further education, training and careers for those aged 19 and under will remain under the Department for Education. Why are we splitting skills between the DWP and the Department for Education? Is this not just going to confuse everyone 10 times more than we are confused already?

Following the reshuffle and changes in ministerial responsibilities, responsibility for adult skills has moved to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. The important thing to also note is that the Skills Minister, Jacqui Smith, remains a joint Skills Minister across the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions. Q255       Mr Reynolds: Where is the front door? We have spoken on this Committee a number of times about the front door. In the last 40 minutes, you have used the words “colleges,” “training,” “learning” and “teaching” on a number of occasions. When I hear those words, I think of the Department for Education, yet Skills England comes under the Department for Work and Pensions. Where do people go to? Is there anyone who is actually responsible, or is this just another area where it is going to get caught in the crossfire and go back and forth between Ministers?

The front door for skills is Skills England. We will continue to build that front door and make sure that we are hiding the wiring so that people can understand the system much more clearly. The division of responsibilities between education and work and pensions brings some real benefits, particularly in bringing skills closer to work policy. For example, the Skills England vision is better skills for better jobs. If you see it through that lens, it really makes sense.

Just on that point, most employers—particularly small employers—do not care where this sits. They are really not that interested. What they are interested in is, “Can I get an individual? Can I get them trained?” CITB has set up what we call a new entrant taskforce. It is a team of people who go around knocking on doors of very small businesses to say, “Do you want to recruit somebody?” Very often, the answer is yes, because they have recruited over 4,000 apprentices this way. The new entrant support team takes all that wiring away and does it all for them. The only thing that we are asking of the employer is that they support the learning experience and give them good employment. We have found that to be one of the most successful programmes for SMEs that we have ever done.

That is incredibly useful. Thank you so much indeed to our witnesses for helping us light up this debate. That concludes this panel.