n By Hajera Blagg
“Funding through each local authority has its own set of criteria. Factors such as postcode, age, and whether someone lives in one area but works in another can all affect eligibility. As a result, workers now face more hurdles when trying to access support and opportunities.”
Ultimately, Trevor urges the government to involve all stakeholders – including trade unions – to work together to negotiate how funding for construction training can best be allocated. There also needs to be a far greater emphasis on advertising and communicating to workers and employers the training opportunities available to them.
Lovely new homes – where’s the funding?
It makes for great headlines, but our question is always the same – where are you going to magic up these candidates from? How are we going to ensure that the people who need the funding to train and upskill actually receive it?”
Trevor noted that such plans will fail to work because of how the construction industry itself operates.
“The vast majority of construction workers are ‘self-employed’, through payroll companies or other schemes,” Trevor explained. “None of these companies directly employ anyone anymore, and they don’t want to train workers because they don’t want to pay for it.”
Trevor notes that the government’s apprenticeship levy and the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) levy both primarily benefit those working for large contractors. As such, the majority of building workers, who are ‘self-employed’ under smaller firms, lose out.
Historically, labourers on-site wanting to upskill could access funding from local authorities to complete
construction qualifications such as NVQs. But this route for accessing funding stopped last year.
Trevor explained how it worked. A typical NVQ costs £1,200 pounds; with funding from local authorities this was reduced to £400. With this significant reduction in cost, it made the prospect of employers paying for these qualifications much more attractive.
But now with the stream of funding through local authorities gone, labourers who want to further their skills are left having to pay for it themselves.
“You’ve got an unending tap of workers who get their CSCS card, enter the industry and then leave because they can’t advance their careers – because it’s just too expensive,” Trevor said. “They go on to work at places like Tesco, because at Tesco, you can achieve career progression without having to pay for it.”
Trevor also added that accessing what funding is still available from local authorities has become that much more complex post-Brexit.
33 unite buildingWORKER Autumn 2025
He cites a communications campaign he’s working on with the CITB to encourage people from all walks of life to consider a career in construction.
“[As part of that, stakeholders] need to go into schools, into universities to encourage the construction candidates of the future,” he said. “A major outreach campaign needs to happen before anything else.”
Finally, Trevor asks that the government tackle a major root cause of the construction training problem – to end bogus self-employment in the industry once and for all.
“If the industry were as a rule PAYE, with only those who are genuinely self-employed classified in that way, then we wouldn’t have this problem. With bogus self-employment, the employment practices are so bad that there’s just no incentive to properly train people.”
Alamy
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