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RTITB's financial collapse, though hardly unexpected, is a matter on which I would like to comment (CM 30 April-6 May).
If joint administrator Hunter Kelly has been reported correctly, the industry can expect real problems in salvaging anything from the RTITB.
The "charitable donations" to which he refers are, I imagine, that company's obligations to fund the road transport and garage industry's Standards Councils from RTITB assets. These assets were rightfully the property of the road transport industry under the levy/grant system.
Agreeing to fund these councils was one of the conditions agreed with the then Secretary of State and industry representatives for allowing the old RTITB to remain in existence, to retain industry money and become a training trading company with charitable status.
It was certainly no act of charity on the part of the RTITB to fund these councils; it was part of an unfortunate arrangement made as a result of the demise of the training board system.
As a founder but now retired director of the RHDTC—and one of the minority who opposed this system of funding and forecast its failure at that time— I take no satisfaction in being proved right.
We now need a public inquiry into the fiasco of the RTITB's conduct, and the industry needs to make arrangements to fund the RHDTC, without which we have no national road transport training organisation.
J Coates, Glenfield, Leicester