Another worrying trend with some local authorities.

Planning permission, Section 106 obligations may include the need for placing apprentices on site. A few years back the penalty for not fulfilling the apprentice quota would be a fine. Because the fine was significantly lower than the cost of an apprentice, builders would pay the fine. Resulting in no apprentice placement and a bit of extra income for the Local authority.

Now the fines are more substantial so it encourages builders to take on the apprentices. However anecdotally, some LAs are placing onerous obligations on the builder, which are not possible to achieve and exacting fines on the missed placements, often with a bloated penalty. This does come across as going too far the other way

There are so many obstacles to getting apprentices on site already, muddying the waters with self serving mechanisms does not help.

As a Flexi-job apprenticeship agency working to get construction apprentices site placements and into college is an increasingly perplexing task. The apprenticeships are longer now and, keeping an apprentice on-site for that length of time is almost impossible.

There must be a better way of getting the remaining 70% of college students into paid apprenticeships and traineeships. At the moment, the colleges get a benefit, the industry gets cheap unqualified labour, but the diploma level students (70%) are wasted.

We are in a real dilemma of targets and costly consultations without any real understanding of how the industry actually works.

In my opinion every building company must have a quota of apprentices on their payroll. The apprentices can be any age and be paid a decent wage. They must be enrolled with a training provider and be given the onsite experience they need for their chosen trade / profession by their employer.

When applying for planning permission the builder concerned can show that they are abiding by the quota system. Local authorities should not be able to decide that the apprentices must be local but should use the builder’s record to see that they are doing the right thing overall.

There obviously must be an external monitoring body, probably aligned to communicating with the apprentices themselves. Money is there but is often not used or wasted. We have the apprenticeship levy, CITB, National Apprenticeship agency, et al.

Denise Brennan