Tackling the skills shortage – Interview with Graham Hasting-Evans: Part I

In the first of  a two-part interview, UK Construction Online talk exclusively with Graham Hasting-Evans, Managing Director of the National Open College Network (NOCN), about the skill shortage, construction workers from the EU, and the importance of giving people a chance.

Can you tell me a bit of your background?

I am a chartered civil engineer and have been in the construction industry for over 40 years. I’ve worked in Europe, the Far East, the Middle East and, of course, mostly in Britain.

I was responsible for the employment skills on the London Olympics as Head of Apprenticeship. I now work for NOCN which is engaged in quite a few construction apprenticeships but we are also working on projects such as the Hinkley Point power station.

 

What is your take on the current skills shortage in the Construction Industry?

There are three issues that I think contribute towards skill shortages. One is the industry itself – it is a tough job; you’re out in all weathers so it isn’t as nice and attractive a job as sitting in a nice warm office. So the industry by its very nature will always have difficulty getting recruits. It’s a bit like coal mining and steel making in those long ago times; it’s not an attractive industry necessarily.

You then add onto that the boom and bust cycle. All governments do it, whatever political colour, if they want to inflate the economy they spend a lot on construction, particularly public sector infrastructure construction or housing, and then you get a skills boom. Then when the economy is in trouble, which happens roughly every eight years, they slam on the brakes and construction gets halted.

This creates a situation where even when you have skilled somebody up, they hit a recession and are out of work. They find other employment in other sectors and don’t come back. So you have quite a high churn rate in the industry and people are probably getting older by then too. People do drop out although we have a lot of skilled people that are older and we do have a demographic problem in the industry. I think it is those two factors that contribute towards the skills problems within the industry but underlying.

I don’t believe the construction levy causes the skills problem; in fact I think that if we hadn’t had the levy for the last 50 years, the skills problem in the construction industry would be even worse than they are. I think that is quite an important point because the levy is under pressure at the moment with the introduction of the government’s apprenticeship levy, which they are bringing in without sufficient thought as to what would happen with the construction levy.

Therefore the construction levy is currently under threat, which I think is a bad thing. I do genuinely think things would have been worse without it.

The third factor is training capacity. There is a fair amount of training capacity in the old ‘biblical’ skills – bricklayers, plumbers, carpenters, and electricians – the older trades if you think of it that way. There’s not a phenomenal amount of training capacity in the infrastructure type skills such as civil engineering, concreting or formworking.

Plant operating is better and that is primarily due to JCB because they run a free plant training skills programme and have done so since the Olympics. There are major parts of the industry where there really isn’t the training capacity but an over supply in capacity exists in other areas so it then becomes difficult to uniformly train to match the skills demand from in the industry. This creates a mismatch in skills in training capacity.

 

How is NOCN playing its part in trying to tackle training people and things like that?

We obviously work with training providers, employers and major projects like Hinkley Point. What we’ve been doing specifically is to start to add qualifications and apprenticeships into areas that previously didn’t have them.

We do the biblical training but we have put a particular focus on our contribution being to try and help to fill in the gaps where there has been a lack of training resource or qualifications and a lack of apprenticeships.

For example, on Hinkley Point we have bought in a number of infrastructure civil engineering apprenticeships working with industry and EDF. We have also worked in London with Lambeth College and with Canary Wharf to bring in reinforced concrete formwork training and apprenticeships. We are doing the same up in the north around Gateshead and the Sheffield area.

We perceive there to be a particular area where we can add some experience and try to help fill that gap and it is predominately in the civil engineering infrastructure area; that’s where some of the worst skills deficiencies are. I’m not saying there’s not in the other areas as well but the new forms of construction is where we have been trying to plug the gap.

 

Could you tell us about the trailblazer apprentice scheme?

We are involved in quite a number of the construction trailblazers. A member of our Board of Trustees shares all the construction trailblazers for the government. So we as an organisation are working ‘across the piste’; none of them are finished yet but there quite a few of them that are close to being ready for approval. Again, we have been focusing on areas where there has been traditionally no proper training, no proper apprenticeships or a poor quality of apprenticeships. This means civil engineering, infrastructure, piling, steel erections – those areas where there just hasn’t been the training or structured training and process in place so we carried through that thrust into the trailblazers.

The thing that worries me and I know it worries lots of people, is it takes a long time to develop the trailblazer. They have been at it a few years, which to me is too long. Although I support the policy thrust of improving the quality of apprenticeships and broadening out the range of apprenticeships.

 

Part two of the interview will be online next week

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