WE WANT TO MAKE A COMPLAINT

摘要

Let's hope Mark Farrar is as tough as he looks because he is facing one of the hardest jobs in construction. The new head of training body ConstructionSkills has to do in a recession what Peter Lobban, his highly paid predecessor, failed to do in a boom: get the industry to train enough recruits. In a poll conducted on Building's website over the summer, 74% of 233 respondents felt they didn't get value for money from the CSkills. Part of the reason is no doubt that last year it got only 8,500 people onto apprenticeships at a time when the industry needed 88,000 recruits a year (albeit not all of them through the apprenticeship route). Some would say that is not a great return on an outlay of ￡290m for the financial year 2007/08. Especially when 57% of that money came from the construction industry levy. Our readers may well have been further piqued by the fact that, at the same time, Lobban was pocketing a salary of ￡258,600. Even fellow public servant Gordon Brown only gets ￡187,000.