Enoch Powell on 'The Great Training Robbery'
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• With a Commons debate on the Industrial Training Levy (Road Transport Order) 1970 in prospect (CM December 25,1970), Mr Enoch Powell, with his usual impeccable timing, has jumped in to launch an all-out attack on training boards as a whole.
In a speech to the Institute of Marketing at Nottingham on Monday, he called for a clean sweep of the Industrial Training Act, introduced by the Conservatives in 1964, under which the Boards are established.
He said it was no wonder that the phrase the "Great Training Robbery" was going the rounds. The Act had ignited a prairy fire bureaucracy and profligate expenditure. It was a legislative nonsense conceived in the fashion of its time, the time when Britain's supposed deficiencies were to be cured by transferring more and more responsibility to government.
Mr Powell claimed that larger firms employed experts to wangle the maximum grant at the expense of other and usually smaller businesses by passing off anything and everything as "training".
The Government is currently reviewing the Training Board set up and is expected to be favourably inclined towards a debate taking place on the Road Transport Order— which has been requested by a Conservative MP, Mr Marcus Fox—as a useful way of testing Parliamentary opinion about training boards in general.
See: TA votes to end RTITB, page 26