Skills & Training Priorities

This review has noted that the extreme cyclicality of the industry leads to a number of de-risking behaviours that impact on the incentives and ability of the supply chain to invest in skills. There is a more general need for industry to work more closely with its supply chains and fully understand how its clients can bring greater confidence to ensure greater skills investment. Longer-term contracts and shared framework contracts have had a visibly positive impact in some construction subsectors and this is the desired outcome across some of the more short-term, cycle led, markets if at all possible, such as real estate.

As part of a CITB reform programme, the desired skills and training priorities need to be identified and used to design an appropriate grant funding scheme. This would run alongside the R&D / Innovation programme highlighed in recommendation 4 to combine to an integrated innovation and skills programme of grant funded activity. In relation to skills and training, it is recommended that CITB grant should be focused on:

• Maintaining the principle of the existing CITB grant support for traditional apprenticeships and expand this to non-traditional, accelerated training arrangements that focus on long-term employment outcomes and measures to incentivise employment continuity. The current proposed CITB levy simplification measures are useful but concentrate on payment not grant recovery. Ease of application and support for SMEs needs to step-change.

• Looking at options for a larger scale version of the current CITB-funded 'Shared Apprenticeship Scheme' (SAS) where payroll burden is held by regional employment vehicles. This might offer an opportunity for a centralised labour force to be developed, trained and then held post qualification, taking payroll burden off the SME sector and enabling a direct workforce to be flexibly deployed. This might also help professionalise the current private umbrella / payroll intermediary sector.

• Directly supporting the establishment of appropriate training course development & industry alignment, not just for apprentices - including BIM and digitisation (in tandem with SFA / HEFA).

• Creating new open data enabled tools to increase visibility of demand and initiatives that drive skills development and R&D investment.

• General applications from parties for skills development & training related initiatives, including support for funding of employment.

• Work in helping develop, fund and accredit new industry training programmes with a focus on BIM and digitally enabled professional and trades qualifications in conjunction with HEFE sector.

There is also a need to recognise where organisations and bodies that sit outside of levy paying scope will also be required to influence a skills and training agenda fit for a modernised industry. Some examples include:

• Industry bodies and professional institutions should liaise with the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education and the Higher Education Funding Agency to ensure degree course accreditations reflect industry's changing needs, including digital engineering.

• Professional services organisations should individually or in multi-disciplinary collaboration, establish a new offer to market which integrates pre-manufactured solutions into a final on-site solution. This differs from normal contracting methodologies and should be more about logistics management, haulage coordination, on site assembly and traditional trade integration in a de-risked environment. The commercial model for this means less risk for the 'integrator' and should be recognised as such by funders, supported by lawyers, and use standard forms of contract that reflect an integrator approach alongside a large pre-manufactured element.

• In association with the above, there is a need for the legal profession to further develop and promote a wider range of user friendly collaborative, multi-party contracts that embrace BIM and a different mix of participants between designers and supply chain, including specialist provisions for the integration of pre-manufactured solutions and frameworks sitting across multi-project opportunities.