Construction Industry Training Board ‘to shed jobs’
We love North Norfolk. I drive past this college half a dozen times a year and get a warm feeling as an ex-Training and Enterprise employee as I pass. It seems a real shame to me that a rural based national college like this is set to close its doors. This article tells us:
The construction industry’s main training body could shed “hundreds of jobs”, union officials warn, amid plans to shut offices.
The Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) is planning to shut its offices and college at Bircham Newton, Norfolk, by the end of 2019.
The CITB, which is funded by a levy on building firms, will no longer carry out specialist in-house training.
The CITB would not comment on the extent of any job losses.
In future, the body will oversee training by external private sector providers.
The CITB said in future it would use levy money to “ensure a sustainable training and development market, only intervening to provide a service where it is unavailable on the market, or not to the quality level that is sought.”
The changes were criticised by the MP for north-west Norfolk, Sir Henry Bellingham as “ill-thought-out, very poorly costed” adding “world-class facilities” at Bircham could be lost.
He added: “It really does seem completely perverse that at a time when the industry needs more specialist skills and more innovative re-skilling, the CITB are thinking of completely pulling out of Bircham,”