by Ross Clark - Wednesday, 5th September 2007 - 1 comment

I received a letter the other day from Cambridgeshire County Council, giving me the exciting news that the council was shortly intending to send out a questionnaire to help it improve its services.

But before the council did so, it wanted to conduct a little research, so would I care to answer the following questions: “What questions do you think we should include on our questionnaire? How often should we send out our questionnaire?”

It would be funny if it weren’t so typical of the way government business is conducted.

Public bodies no doubt start out with the best of intentions, but there is no question about who they are really there to benefit: the pen pushers who run them.

Take the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB), which exists, theoretically at any rate, to fund training schemes for construction workers.

In order to achieve this it has the right to levy a tax on all construction firms with an annual wage bill in excess of £61,000.

Eligible companies are charged at a rate of 0.5 per cent of the wages they pay to direct employees plus 1.5 per cent of the value of payments they make to sub-contractors. In 2003 employers paid a total of £106 million in the form of levies to the CITB.

Businesses that offer training to their employees are eligible to claim back some of this money in grants: the idea being that companies that do not help to train the industry’s future workforce help to subsidise those who do.

But how much actually gets through to trainees and how much is simply swallowed by pen pushers at the CITB?

My suspicions were aroused when I discovered that firms who enquire about claiming grants are sent a 45-page Training and Development Plan information pack, containing 18 different forms which must be filled in detailing what each trainee will do and what hours they will work.

Among the fatuous questions, firms are demanded to divulge such information as the ethnic origin of each of their existing employees.

As with so much legislation, the burden is one thing for a large construction business with the resources to fund a dedicated training department, and quite another for a small firm that simply wants to take on a few apprentices to learn on the job.

Rather than solving skills shortages in the construction sector, the CITB risks making them worse.

The idea of taxing construction companies to train workers would make more sense if the state wasn’t frittering away so much taxpayers’ money on pointless university courses.

Who pays for beach bums to spend three years at college learning “Surfing Studies”? We do, of course. Who pays for all the Media Studies courses, the Lesbian-Feminist Awareness modules, the Peace Studies classes? Why, taxpayers of course.

Yet when it comes to learning something useful like plumbing or bricklaying, the construction industry is expected to bear the full burden.

Or rather, it is expected to bear the full costs of training plus a fair wad on top to pay the wages and pensions of non-productive civil servants.

While the CITB raised £106 million in levies from business, it paid out only £82 million to businesses in the form of training grants.

A whacking £21 million was spent on its own management costs and a further £6.5 million on recruitment and the career development... of its own staff.

If you thought your money was being spent on teaching people to mix cement, forget it. The CITB’s latest wheeze is an advertising campaign called Positive Image 2004 to try to sell a career in construction to young people.

Advertising space has been bought in newspapers and the sides of buses, and, we are reassured, “key elements of the campaign were tested with focus groups to make sure that our messages are being delivered and picked up effectively by the target audience”.

The official aim of the campaign is “to communicate the positives of a career in construction to all 14-17 year olds, especially women and ethnic minorities, and to highlight that it is a career you can be proud of”.

Hopefully, these budding Bob the Builders won’t find out too much about how entrepreneurs are being fleeced to pay for the pensions of public servants – otherwise they might all opt for careers in a quango like the CITB instead.

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