Interview with Graham Hasting-Evans: Tackling the skills shortage

UK Construction Online talk exclusively with Graham Hasting-Evans, Managing Director of the National Open College Network (NOCN), about the skills 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 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 chairs 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.

Do you think enough is being done to encourage more mature people to retrain in the construction industry because a lot of the apprenticeships schemes seem to be targeting young people?

I think they do need to encourage people and it is interesting that on quite a few of our apprenticeships we do get older people. They’re not talking about the school leavers, in fact, I would say that half the people are adults that are unemployed. We as a charity started off helping the unemployed to get into work – that is why we were set up 30 years ago.

I think more needs to be done to encourage adults into these apprenticeships and that can be done for people that are not just unemployed but those in the workforce that are perhaps a labourer with limited skills. They could go into an apprenticeship and become an excavator driver, a steel fixer or roofer for example. Most of the employers see upskilling the existing workforce as an important aspect. In that sense, the employers have got a different view than the government. The government focus is all about young apprentices. I think there should be a focus on young apprentices but not at the expense of adult apprentices. They should be encouraging upskilling in the workforce.

 

Do you think older people get the opportunity or there is a biased towards younger people in the construction industry?

The industry in my experience is quite open. We even take people out of prison where other industries won’t. It is quite an open and welcoming industry, though probably not for women but that is changing.

There isn’t any problem with them taking older people; there is no issue. There is nothing in the industry that stops it, it’s government policy I think influencing things where they put the money. So if they put the money into younger people, it draws people in that direction. The government I think has not focused enough on adult skills and they have spent too much time and money focusing on younger people.

Do you think training and employing ex-offenders might offer a solution to some of the problems?

Quite a lot of prisoners do go into construction. I don’t know the full percentage but I think about 60-70% of prisoners find their way into construction because it is an open industry because if you can get the skills and it is a real opportunity to upskill people.

The construction industry doesn’t have that bias as long as you are honest on the site. Obviously they wont make you the financial director if you’ve been in for fraud!

In my time, I have worked with people that were ex-prisoners; as long as they do the work, we don’t care. There is no prejudice in the industry around that but the concern that people have got is drug taking. Most roles involve handling some type of tools or machinery, therefore they have to be clean.

Otherwise, it’s a massive health and safety risk both to themselves and others. That’s the issue – they would be more worried about drug taking rather than whether you have been in prison or not.

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.

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