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

In the final part of a three-part interview,  UK Construction Online’s Matt Brown talks exclusively with Graham Hasting-Evans, Managing Director of the National Open College Network (NOCN), about a lack of civil engineering apprenticeships, migrant workers impact on the skills shortage and not writing people off. 

Do you think enough is being done to promote the benefits to employers of apprenticeships from the government and the media?

I think you literally have two parts of the construction industry. You’ve got the civil engineering infrastructure part and you’ve got the building part. In the building part there has been a long history of apprenticeships so the government almost doesn’t need to promote them; it is in the psyche.

In the civil engineering infrastructure side, that’s not so true and therefore I think there is a need. The government produced the infrastructure report about a year ago now and talked about the skills gap in infrastructure but beyond that you don’t hear very much about it from the government.

 

Do you think it just lip service or do you think maybe they are just prioritising other areas?

I don’t think they have followed it through. At the moment, while they can draw in skilled labour from Europe they are less worried. Following the EU referendum that may be different!

At the moment the industry has been able to fill most of the skills gap from Europe and therefore there has been less spent on it. The big worry in the industry is that the apprenticeship levy is going to damage training because it is going to replace or it is thought it is going to replace the CITB levy or that they are not going to work well together.

Therefore the impact of the apprenticeship levy is seen as fairly negative in the industry. I know that is strange as there is a lot of the industry working on the improved apprenticeships. I think there are two parts of government policy here which are related but aren’t necessarily linked. Improving the quality of the apprenticeships, you could do without bringing in the levy because the construction industry could do that and just keep the existing levy but the government isn’t allowing that.

The government is saying everybody, including the construction industry, has to pay the apprenticeship levy and the way that is panning out at the moment is not being made clear and we still don’t have a clear set of information on how the levy is going to work even though it is supposed to be coming in April next year. What the construction industry has been told so far is causing considerable alarm and there are real thoughts that the number of apprentices will be cut from the construction industry, which is really worrying.

It is a real worry and that is because the government has failed, in my view, to work out how it brings in the general apprenticeship levy into sectors that never had a levy before, which is a positive thing, with sectors like construction and engineering that is the ECITB levy where there has been a levy in place for over 50 years. In my view, the government should not implement the apprenticeship levy in those areas. They should keep the existing levy but bring in the new style of apprenticeships, but they are not doing that. They are bringing in the levy without any understanding and without any agreement as to how they might work with the old levy and what is the future of the old levies and that uncertainty is causing considerable concern in the industry.

 

There are a lot of workers coming from Europe coming into Britain; do we lose a lot of our workers going to work in the EU?

Not as many as come back. No I would say inevitably some go abroad, some go to the Middle East, Gulf States. In fact we train people and employers send them off to the Gulf States, so that happens and that has always happened in the industry.

I did my time in the Middle East and the Far East; it is a global industry, the British construction industry. There are the opportunities to work all over the world and that has been the case for a long time. We will get some of our workers who will go and work abroad but that is small compared to the workers coming in from Europe. They are coming in because they are better trained and they have got the appropriate skills which we don’t seem to be able to train and develop in the UK.

We are back then to my point about a mismatch in training capacity and resource in the UK. We just haven’t got the training resource and capacity aligned with the demand of the industry and therefore the gap is then filled from people coming from Europe who are trained in that way and have got better apprenticeship systems.

The Northern European countries – so that’s Scandinavia, Germany, the old Eastern Bloc countries – they have got a good quality of apprenticeship systems as we did about 30 years ago. Unfortunately, we let ours go and we are now trying to rebuild it so our workers are able to come in and get job ready.

If you’re an employer and you need somebody, you’re going to take them. You don’t have any alternative. They are European citizens so they can currently come here ready to work and they have a great work ethic.

The operative level – the crafts people – are the ones coming in from Europe and we are not growing enough of our own of those. Progressively we’re not growing enough technicians, project managers and engineers. So perhaps in previous times we had a reasonable number of the level 4’s and above, even that now is starting to become a problem and a skills gap.

So when you get in to the level 4’s and above, you are now starting to see skills gaps and people having to be brought in from Europe and interestingly probably more from outside Europe and even from the Commonwealth.

The numbers coming in are much greater than the numbers going out and we have to bring them in because we just cannot grow or seem incapable of growing enough of own resources to fill the gaps. That leads us back to the gaps in training resource capacity, the government is probably not making the industry attractive enough and all of these factors start hitting together and we end up with skills gaps.

 

What’s obvious from your background is that you don’t write people off and are willing to provide people with the skills to change their lives. Can you tell us a little about your ethic behind this?

We are the only awarding organisation and apprenticeship assessment organisation that is a leader in diversity. Our charity started from not writing people off and giving everybody a chance. I have always believed before I joined NOCN that we should give people a chance and most people respond well. It is very rare that somebody doesn’t respond.

I remember many years ago I had a gang served up to me because they were useless. I suppose they changed my mind on the training, I was a young manager at the time and I asked them why they were the lowest performers. They said they have never been properly trained. I sent them on a three-week training course and within six months they were my best gang.

It was a personal experience; it taught me not to write anybody off and deal with the problem. If you train people properly, most people in my experience want to do a good job. It’s training, explaining and managing and all the rest of it.

So it’s in my personal ethos but it’s been ground into NOCN; it is its reason for being. Hence, it’s a leader in diversity: we don’t write anybody off.

 

Read part one of this interview here

Read part two of this interview here

 

If you would like to read more articles like this then please click here

 

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