Skills

Ardmore Group has restructured its business to build on its soaring turnover. Revenue leapt from £273m to £404.8m in the year to 30 September 2021. The residential-focused contractor has forecast further growth for its current year and has restructured the business to better manage it. The group is now comprised…

The Unite union is pushing for a 10 per cent increase to a national wage agreement. It has submitted the claim to the Construction Industry Joint Council (CIJC), which sets the pay level for around 500,000 construction workers. It argued that the increase was necessary to meet higher living costs…

The National Open College Network (NOCN) and the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) have settled their legal dispute over the Construction Plant Competence Scheme (CPCS), Construction News can reveal. Last June it emerged that adult-learning body NOCN was suing the CITB over “significantly lower-than-expected income levels and data-transfer issues”, as…

Construction vacancies fell slightly as 2021 drew to an end, but remained high compared to historic levels. There were around 42,000 construction job vacancies in the three months to the end of December, according to new data from the Office for National Statistics. This was down marginally from 43,000 in…

The man who leads the CITB’s dialogue with Whitehall has announced he will be leaving the organisation. Steve Radley, who has been head of policy for the Construction Industry Training Board since 2014, will depart in March. A statement from the skills body said Radley had “led the company’s engagement…

The Mayor of London has called on the government to create a temporary visa scheme for foreign construction workers in order to alleviate shortages. The final quarter of last year saw vacancies hit a 20-year high. This comes after the number of EU-born construction workers in the capital fell 54…

The CITB should be either reformed or replaced by an alternative to avoid a labour drought, a House of Lords committee has recommended. The cross-party built environment committee, which was set up in May 2021, said after nearly a year of review: “The government should consider how the Construction Industry…

Prisoners will be trained in construction skills to help with their rehabilitation on release, as part of a new government initiative. A white paper released by the Ministry of Justice has outlined plans to give prisoners better education, including vocational qualifications, with construction named as one field in which they…

Skill shortages are the biggest concern for specialist contractors going into 2022. A survey of specialist contractors in the UK has highlighted the range of business concerns looming for the year ahead, with material shortages, a lack of skilled labour, and delays to projects cited as worrying problems. Almost two…

The infrastructure sector is still short of the number of female recruits it needs and some misguided positive discrimination programmes have made things worse, a government-backed report has said. Enhancing Equality, Diversity and Inclusion for Transport Infrastructure Skills, produced for the Strategic Transport Apprenticeship Taskforce, found that, while there had…