LAST WEEK'S meeting of the Road Transport Industry Training Board
Page 20
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
(see p3) and its attendant deliberations on the future of the Livingston and High Ercall Motecs has assured one of the industry's surviving quangos of another period of headline fame.
From the earliest days of the present recession, when the Road Haulage Association and other compulsory customers of the board's services began to question its high costs and demand that its voice be paid more heed, it has had a rocky ride.
Problems still lie ahead, but its chairman, John Armstrong, heads a very different organisation than the RTITB of even four years ago.
Armstrong came to the RTITB a year ago after 22 years with Urwick Orr, the management consultancy company, where he had spells in charge of its international and its Northern English and Scottish business. Before that, he was exports managing director of Parkinson Cowan, specialising in metering equipment.
His private sector experience was not wasted at the RTITB, where it was already beginning to realise that the days of large staff complements, index-linked salaries and relatively lavish office accommodation were a luxury of an earlier age.
Between 1982 and 1984, allowing for inflation, staff-related costs have fallen by around 45 per cent, with a similar sized reduction — from 900 to 400 — in the number of Board employees.
It is still left with the near insurmountable problem of Capitol House, its tower block headquarters at Wembley, North London. Two floors have been vacated to reduce the rates bill, but the chances of selling the premises look far from rosy.
In the regions, offices have been closed and merged as best they can, with the Scottish regional manager, for instance, now camped on site at the Livingston Motec in West Lothian.
And the Motecs (Multi-Occupational Training and Education Centres) at High Ercall and Livingston are another throwback to a more sprendfree era with which the RTITB must still come to terms.
Someone once described High Ercall, built on a wartime airfield near Telford, Shropshire, as being in the middle of nowhere and on the top of a hill. By early last year, much of the transport industry thought that too and would have been happy to see it close.
Livingston, closer to "civilisation" but confined largely to the needs of Scotland, had already been through the threat of closure, but was kept alive by taking on Youth Training Scheme students.
Both centres are now much busier, thanks in part to YTS, but the crunch of their future had to be faced last week, as everything done by the Board must be justified financially and it was questioned whether both had a secure future.
Not that their activities overlap. They are too far apart to do so, and with High Ercall concentrating on management and sales and parts training, and Livingston emphasising the YTS and general young people's training, they have become involved in much more separate activities.
But Armstrong likes to look at the Motecs as much as part of the research and development work done by the RTITB and says that their role and costs tend to be misunderstood. "They are meant to be a means of training the trainers. Without the Motecs, we would have had to buy in those services from outside. Because of that, their deficit is not a loss, but an investment."
He says he is impressed by the way Motec management has reacted to the needs of the market, and has used his private sector experience to develop the idea that firms in scope are customers and not just statutory payers of levy.
Outside customers, like local police learning about crowd control, have already been won over to the High Ercall facilities, and Armstrong sees great potential in the own account sector.
That demands a new approach, as the large companies in that sector contrast markedly with the small units which dominate road haulage. But the haulage industry's needs are not forgotten, as everything done by the RTITB must be in line with the needs of small enterprises.
He sees group training associations as being an essential feature of the training effort for haulage, and has spent part of the last nine months getting closer to them to establish their needs.
It was vital that they should, as their numbers declined from around 120 to fewer than 70, and many have needed to diversify into other business activities to keep going, not least because their driver training activities have collapsed in the recession. some of their problems have still to be solved, Armstrong admits.
For the future, the title of the RTITB may appear rather irrelevant. Armstrong says that rather than serving the road transport industry, the board provides training services for six separate industries, and he is happy that the Government has accepted the plan to keep the organisation intact, but to run it in two distinct sectors, each with its own council, each of which can in theory at least set its own levy in line with the needs of its members.
One council covers the motor trade, meeting the needs of motor vehicle repairers, motor factors, leasing and rental, and bodybuilding; the other covers the needs of haulage and removals.
The main board remains responsible for carrying out the administration, levy collection, and implementing the decisions of the councils. The councils generate their own training programmes and develop their own levy proposals. In practice, a separate levy for haulage customers is unlikely to come before July next year, and it may be that the present 0.8 per cent of payroll levy is as low as the industry can go.
The retention of an overall administrative structure will, according to Armstrong, keep hauliers' bills down further than a separate board and it saves the industry the additional cost of redundancies borne by separating the present structure.
Priorities have been established for training in the foreseeable future, partly as a holding operation until the councils can establish longer term needs. There will be more emphasis on management training with more distance learning (correspondence courses), widening of operators' knowledge for certificate of professional competence examinations, and management development.
Diagnostic training is being developed for vehicle repairs staff, and skills testing will be expanded to be available in more regional locations.
Driver training is a problem as far fewer unskilled drivers are being recruited by the haulage industry when so many skilled drivers are looking for employment. Armstrong believes there could be scope for retraining drivers to work with heavier vehicles, and he wants to see what services could be sold to own-account customers, but it is not an area in which much expansion is likely.
For the future, Armstrong expects that his staff will spend more time consulting with the industry and establishinE training needs than providinc training services as such. He al. ready has officers calling or doorsteps to find out what corn. panies need.
Morale, he argues, rises m. staff realise that the board iE selling something that the in dustries need. "It is much mor€ stable for the Board wher people believe that a service commercially worth buying."