Speech by Peter Rogerson to the National Association of Shopfitters AGM
Feb 7th
Good morning/afternoon ladies and gentlemen.
I’d like to start by thanking Richard and everyone at the National Association of Shopfitters (NAS) for inviting me to speak at your annual meeting and contribute to this discussion on skills in your sector. I’d also like to offer warm congratulations to Richard on his new presidency and hope that the NAS can enjoy further successes as a key specialist sector, particularly when it comes to training and skills. It is certainly encouraging to see a president of a specialist association take this issue so seriously and with view it with sincerity and passion. CITB-ConstructionSkills certainty looks forward in assisting the NAS as they move forward with this agenda.
I would also like to take this opportunity to explore a few of the key challenges which our two organisations currently face and how collaboration between CITB-ConstructionSkills and the NAS is working and can continue to work successfully in the future.
In addition, I’m delighted to be here in person, on behalf of CITB-ConstructionSkills, to present a cheque to the Richard as he takes on the mantel of leading NAS over the next few years. This money represents NAS’ share of CITB-ConstructionSkills Grant and it will enable the organisation to continue to make a significant investment in training for the foreseeable future.
As you all know, shopfitting is based on a strong craft tradition which has flourished, perhaps somewhat against the wave of technology, in recent years. Most of the people working in the industry - including senior managers and company directors - will have received training at a highly skilled craft level. But traditional skills have been developed over the years to embrace new materials and modern technology. As Richard mentioned, the shopfitting industry is a great example of how skills can be acquired and maintained despite the steady change in tools and working practices. Companies have themselves developed new methods of operation to deal, not just with the volume of new regulations, but also with the needs of their clients in a rapidly changing business environment.
Although shopfitting essentially falls under the wider construction umbrella, being such a specialist sector, your skills and training needs are very specific and I will talk about a few of the ways in which our two organisations have worked together to address these bespoke requirements shortly.
With such a wide variety of projects taking place here in London and other developments, both large and small, taking shape nationwide, the construction industry is experiencing a significant boom and there has never been a better time for the NAS to make the most of its association with its wider construction industry colleagues.
But closing the skills gap continues to represent one of the most significant challenges facing the UK in the next decade, particularly if we are to compete with the emerging markets in India, China and Latin America. Although skills challenges are widely acknowledged by all of us in the industry and frequently debated in the media, Lord Leitch’s recent wide-ranging report into skills in the UK has again brought training provision in industries such as ours into the spotlight. Fortunately, for those of us concerned about these issues, which as Richard mentioned, rarely seem to go away, it is worth emphasising that construction is already making huge in-roads into developing programmes of demand-led training, recommended by the Leitch report.
To illustrate the extent of the challenge we face as an industry in the future, it’s useful to look at the findings of the Construction Skills Network, launched in 2006 by ConstructionSkills in collaboration with government, construction companies an clients, regional agencies, and education and training providers. It is the most comprehensive data analysis and consultation ever produced by the construction industry and predicts that overall, UK construction output growth is forecast to average 3% every year between now and 2010. This will require around 350,000 new construction workers nation-wide. And by construction workers, we don’t simply mean the construction managers and quantity surveyors who work on the exterior elements of our major building projects but your colleagues – the people with specialist skills make these projects worth being inside – who put the finishing touches to retail outlets, hotels, museums and offices across the whole country.
With many large infrastructure projects planned and under construction, there is a huge demand for us to improve our labour productivity and to up-skill our workforce.
Construction is the UK’s largest industry and a huge contributor to the nation’s economy. Major building programmes for schools, hospitals and housing rely on skilled craftspeople in your sector to complete their interiors on time and on budget, just as much as they rely on the architects and planners to get the projects off the ground in the first place.
As the Sector Skills Council for the construction industry, through our Sector Skills Agreement, we are supporting the construction industry in responding to a series of key challenges:
- qualifying the existing workforce – of which a key component is ensuring training for specialist sectors is provided and funded;
- recruiting sufficient new entrants with the right skills – and on the other side of the coin, is ensuring we can provide enough employer places for our new apprentices;
- improving the performance of individual firms and the industry as a whole;
- and finally, providing the infrastructure to support these priorities through research and ensuring fit for purpose qualifications.
The continued existence of the CITB-ConstructionSkills Levy and Grant system is essential for the ongoing investment in skills and training in our industry. Being able to support federations such as yourselves as well as companies directly, enables our efforts to respond to the industry’s challenges to reach even further.
I hope that NAS is beginning to see the fruits of our labours via the various initiatives we have in place to recruit people into all areas of the industry. We certainly hope that, over the next few years, we will see less and less talk about lack of adequate skills, as Richard referred to.
ConstructionSkills continues to work extremely closely with youngsters from all walks of life as well as their influencers, such as parents, teachers and careers advisers, to encourage them to consider construction as a viable career option – a job in which they can learn a craft they can be proud of. Campaigns such as Positive Image and schemes such as STEP into construction are starting to do just that and, in recent years, research has proved that they have resulted in a real upsurge of interest in careers in the industry.
We have also made efforts qualify the existing workforce and to support specialist sectors with the National Specialist Accredited Centre (NSAC). Established in 2002, NSAC provides an assessment centre service to those specialist sectors within the construction industry, which, due to their specialist nature and resultant low population, were unable to identify alternative provision from the more traditional commercial providers. Over 2800 candidates have registered during its first 2 years, making it one of the largest construction assessment centres in the country.
The partnership between our two organisations has made considerable progress in recent years. For example, CITB-ConstructionSkills works closely with the National Association of Shopfitters to ensure that Health and Safety training is at the forefront of the specialist skills sector.
Together with a dedicated project group established by NAS, we have introduced a three-day course which will take awareness of health and safety issues to the next level with a recognised qualification for those overseeing site operations. The course is accredited and certificated by CITB-ConstructionSkills and only delivered through CITB-ConstructionSkills approved training providers.
In addition, the project group is also developing and delivering a "Train the Trainers" course for specialist shopfitting instructors, as CITB-ConstructionSkills and the NAS look to future partnerships to increase safety awareness on-site.
CITB-ConstructionSkills has also recently worked with NAS and other partners including the British Standards Institute, the Health and Safety Executive and the Association of British Insurers to produce a new Publicly Available Specification document.
The document acts as a code of practice ensuring high quality management standards for shopfitting and covers procedures and recommendations for corporate governance, health and safety, training, innovation and value engineering and customer service.
Such links with partner organisations mean that NAS now has the weight behind it to ensure companies are operating to the standards of the PAS 82 and are therefore delivering work of a consistently high quality. It’s fantastic to see a specialist sector such as yours leading the way by imposing benchmarks for such high standards.
It is also important to highlight the benefits of your new Independent Training Group, which will replace SIGTA and be run under the auspices of the NAS. The training needs of your specialist sector, which meet both the requirements of businesses and the recruits they employ is essential if you are to move forward successfully as an industry. It is also an opportunity to pay tribute to Jim Coker, Chairman of SIGTA, who has worked closely with your sector for X years. Jim has done a fantastic job, and the Independent Training Group that will replace SIGTA will undoubtedly be grateful for the solid foundations that have already been made in ensuring that the training needs of industry has been of a consistently high quality.
Nevertheless, despite all the achievements I have highlighted, plenty of challenges still lie ahead if we are to meet the level of demand for new, work-ready and highly skilled recruits. I hope that this grant which I am presenting you with today will go someway to giving NAS the boost it needs and enable us to re-focus our resources on the people that matter most both today and in the future: our trainees.
[Presentation of cheque to take place]
