House of cards

What is going on with the Construction Skills Certification Scheme? First there were news stories saying it was in the black, next came reports it was in the red to the tune of more than £5m. A report commissioned by the CSCS Board and leaked to the press seems to suggest that the whole thing is being run on a rather amateurish, ad-hoc basis.

On top of all that, only 8.5% of the so-called biblical trades - carpenters, plasterers, bricklayers and painters - hold CSCS cards. And according to the report’s author, consultant Bob Bilbrough, if the current rate of NVQ and card take up continues it will be 20 to 30 years before the 2010 target of a fully-carded workforce is achieved.

So the scheme is not reaching the trades for which it was initially intended and those running it don’t seem to know what’s going on. It’s bound to make people wonder if there’s any point in getting a card or insisting that workers have them.

Basically the situation is still in flux. There was an Annual General Meeting on 25 January, just before CM went to press, but no decisions on how the scheme will go forward were made. Board members will meet in mid-February to thrash out their differences. In the meantime, here is a brief rundown of how things got to this situation and possible routes forward.

Cross-purposes

CSCS Ltd is controlled by a management board which consists of representatives from the Construction Confederation, the Federation of Master Builders, National Specialist Contractors Council, GMB, Transport and General Workers Union and UCATT. Back at the scheme’s inception, the board appointed CITB-ConstructionSkills to administer the scheme.

Last year it appeared that CSCS was making money for the first time. When CITB presented accounts to the CSCS Board showing the scheme was £700,000 up, chairman George Brumwell wrote to CITB-ConstructionSkills chief executive Peter Lobban saying that he believed CSCS needed to establish a much greater degree of financial independence. Then in December CITB-ConstructionSkills came up with another set of accounts, taking into account all the related costs of setting up and running CSCS which showed the scheme to be in debt by £5.47m.

The unions which sit on the board were angry and called for greater transparency in CITB-ConstructionSkills’ accounting. The employers meanwhile expressed their support for CITB-ConstructionSkills through a letter to Building magazine.

CM asked Brumwell what was going on, but he declined to comment, saying only that he wanted to concentrate his efforts on getting to the biblical trades. Construction Confederation chief Stephen Ratcliffe would only comment: “We have become pretty frustrated that there are other stakeholders that have their own agendas that are getting in the way of the real issues.” CITB did not want to talk about it either.

This year will see CSCS’s 10th anniversary. Since 1995 it has issued around 700,000 cards, covering perhaps one third of the construction workforce, excluding the domestic sector. But many of those 700,000 have come through affiliations with other card-issuing trade associations.

The goal of a fully qualified workforce by 2010 looks unobtainable. The Major Contractors’ Group (MCG), which took a stand by trying to insist on cards, has had to admit defeat. It missed its first target of a 100% fully carded workforce by the end of 2003. And its bid to insist on cards from the beginning of January 2004 failed. The MCG’s last published figures (also from the beginning of last year) showed around two-thirds of the workforce had cards. Since then it has done further audits, but has not published the results. A spokesman said the MCG members were hitting over 70% but they were not making the figures public because they didn’t see there was a benefit in it.

Clients aren’t helping either. FMB director general Ian Davis says FMB firms which are committed to the scheme are becoming frustrated because no client ever checks whether or not their workers are card-carrying. That includes local government and housing associations who will specify a fully CSCS carded workforce but never audit.

It is going to take a major change in approach to get to those hard-to-reach bricklayers and the like.

It’s frustrating. other stakeholders’ agendas get in the way of the real issues

Stephen Ratcliffe

If Bilborough’s report is anything to go by, the first step is a major overhaul of the way the scheme is managed. His recommendations include revising the management structure to allow better decision-making, employing a chairman part-time, giving CSCS Ltd its own HQ and perhaps most importantly developing a medium- to long-term strategy.

If there isn’t a strategy in place, it does make one wonder what everybody has been working to. Davis, who sits on the board, likens CSCS to a family business which has grown to a point where it needs a more professional management structure. Founding father Tony Merricks had his hand firmly on the tiller from 1995 until he stepped down last year when ex-UCATT chief Brumwell took over.

A major part of any strategy would be how to grow the scheme. There are a number of ideas on the table.

One plan is to target public sector clients and larger private sector clients to police contractors on whether they have cards. “Government has got to face up to its responsibilities,” says Brumwell. “I am now going to home in on them and do a reality check on all those people who say CSCS cards are a requirement.” One strategy would be to go after one of the biggest central government departments such as the NHS.

The options

Another growth strategy would be to set up more affiliations. This is ongoing, but Bilbrough says that CSCS should prioritise the schemes it goes after.

Then there’s the thorny problem of how to get the tradesmen in. Target NVQ holders who don’t have CSCS cards, says Bilbrough. But he also flagged up that lack of resources is slowing the uptake of NVQs - a major barrier to people getting CSCS cards. One suggestion is to forget about the over 55s who will be leaving the industry soon and concentrate on younger people. Another is to look at other ways of proving competency for older and foreign workers, perhaps a one- or two-day test.

All these things, of course, will require funding. And how much money may or may not be there at the moment is something of a sore point. Bill Jenkins, CSCS secretary, said after the annual general meeting on January 25 that management accounts presented by CITB showed that there was a ‘substantial amount’ of cash in the pot.

It would be a difficult proposition for CSCS to cut loose financially from CITB-ConstructionSkills when so much of what CITB-Construction-Skills does is inextricably linked to CSCS. And CITB’s ability to get funding as a skills council will certainly be important. But that will no doubt be a matter for debate between employers and unions on the board.

Davis’s view sounds sensible when he says: “Let’s draw a line in the sand. We need to establish costs of the scheme going forward and how we are going to fund it.”

There will be a board meeting later this month, where members expect to somehow thrash out just what they think the ongoing strategy should be. For the sake of those firms and individuals who have committed to CSCS, let’s hope the differences can be swiftly resolved.