Industry chiefs will today accuse the Government of wasting millions of pounds on an “alphabet soup” of quangos and colleges that fail to provide skilled workers. They dismiss the provision of skills and training as “dysfunctional” and “irrelevant” when it comes to meeting the needs of business, writes Liz Lightfoot.

The report, published by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), suggests that the Government has squandered £3 billion on Further Education Colleges. It states the number of vocational qualifications has swollen to nearly 6,000, but claims that many of these qualifications have been designed by consultants rather than employers, making them of doubtful economic value.

In what is a blow for Chancellor Gordon Brown, who has made skills training one of his priority areas, the CBI says fewer than half of employers have received useful information from the Government’s skills bodies. The employers now want the Government to scrap ring-fenced funding for Further Education Colleges, forcing them to compete for money with employer-provided training. They also say they should be placed in the driving seat, designing qualifications to suit their needs and those of the economy.

Under Gordon Brown, the Treasury has pumped much money into training budgets. Individual Learning Accounts – the first initiative announced in the 1999 Budget to provide life-long learning opportunities for everyone in the workforce – had to be abandoned after more than £1 million was siphoned-off by fraudsters.

The Careers Service was then relaunched as Connexions, the £450 million per annum quango that spent a large proportion of its budget on advertising but was condemned by schools as being unhelpful and is about to shut down.

Then there’s the complex bureaucracy of the Learning and Skills Council, made up of 47 local branches distributing £9 billion a year and which was reformed into 148 “local partnership teams” with the addition of 25 Sector Skills Councils.

The CBI is also calling for a new, professional Careers Advisory Service and a reduction in the “bewildering number of skills bodies”. “We don’t want another shuffling of the deck chairs within a dysfunctional system,” said Richard Lambert, the CBI’s director general. “Instead, a closer relationship between business and training could really help us face up to globalisation with confidence.”

Dr John Brennan chief executive of the Association of Colleges disputed the CBI report, saying that Ofsted had judged 99% of college provision to be satisfactory or better for 2005-2006. “Colleges already compete in an open market very successfully, as so many employers right across the country can testify,” said Brennan.

Mike Cahalane Security Consultant

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SMT