The use of training funds
Page 55
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
Janus comments
NEWS that the Road Transport Industry Training Board is spending £11m in its first year might be expected to gladden the hearts of operators. Instead there are widespread complaints which do not often find their way into print but should none the less be given careful consideration by the Board.
Resentment began when it was first announced that the initial levy would be 1.6 Der cent of the wages bill of each undertaking coming within the Board's jurisdiction. The typical operator whose staff were mainly or perhaps wholly drivers re'used to accept that their training would ost anything like this amount of money.
His conviction that the Board was aigging too deeply into his pocket was strengthened when lie learned that the rate pf levy would be reviewed and later that in :he second year it would be cut by half. His suspicion remained that the matter might not rest there.
From an impartial point of view the Board deserves credit for the speed with which it has pushed on with its plans and for the professional approach to the many problems facing it. In many cases the operator sees it differently. He finds one example after another of what he regards as lavish expenditure of his money on building projects and on the purchase of equipment.
Grants increased
Grants for management and supervisory training have been doubled and grants for craft and technician apprentice training have been increased by lOs a day. Operators who have taken the lead and already have their own training schemes are finding the benefit of these concessions and admit freely that as a result the schemes now probably show a substantial profit.
The less provident operator may not begrudge them the money but he can hardly feel pleased. If he is in a small way of
business and this is true of the great majority of operators—he has seldom found it practicable to run a training scheme. With a small staff fully stretched for most of the time he has also been reluctant to release men for regular courses during the working day.
Inevitably the Board has paid regard to the special difficulties of the small man. The MOTEC (Multi-Occupational Training and Education Centre) is one answer to the problem. Another is the offer of development grants of up to £1,500 as well as capital grants to groups of employers who are prepared to establish joint training schemes.
As a result some enthusiasm has been generated at least in certain sections of the road transport industry. With the passage of Lime the sharper edge of the criticisms will be blunted as has happened in other circumstances in the past. Operators will grow accustomed to paying the levy and will no doubt find some consolation in the fact that they can pass it on to their customers.
The complaints will not cease entirely. Many operators feel that the Board is distributing its grants over too wide a field. They believe among other things that a distinction should be made between the kind of training which will be of permanent benefit to the trainee and the instruction which is confined to learning the particular job that the man is doing.
Essential briefing
When an operator takes on new drivers he can hardly avoid telling them about the firm and its activities. He will introduce them to the people they will meet and ev'en to the vehicles they will drive. It may be a temptation to dress up this essential briefing with a few other items and present it as a training scheme for which a grant should be paid.
This would hardly be fulfilling the purposes of the Industrial Training Act under which the Board was set up. They include bringing about an improvement in the quality and efficiency of training and sharing the cost more evenly throughout the industry. Neither desirable aim will be achieved if the Board merely passes money back to operators for doing something very similar to what they have always done.
The problem will always remain of the less ingenious or more honest operator who does not present his case for a grant or fails to present it properly. Such training as he gives will continue while the levy which he has to pay may go to the operator in the next street whose training is no more comprehensive but who knows how to make a little seem a great deal.
When it comes to the point the criticism is prompted by the suspicion that the Board, in spending £1 lm in a year, has wished to demonstrate that this is the kind of money it needs if it is to carry out its duties properly. When the levy comes up for review the Board will be able to show nearly empty coffers and the Minister for Employment and Productivity will have to agree that at least the same rate as before will be required for the future.
Also in the minds of operators must be a feeling of guilt that the appointment of a statutory Board should ever have been necessary in the first place. To some extent it was inevitable and outside the control of the industry. The more boards that are set up the more the Act will be justified. In the end there are likely to be between 30 and 40 and the Minister would no doubt like to add to the number whenever iris reasonably possible.
Regrettably it was highly probable that road transport would come high on the list. With a few honourable exceptions operators have taken little interest at any rate in academic training and education. There has been a good deal of rough and ready instruction and many people who have made a career in road transport have achieved a high level of proficiency without having taken a single lesson in their lives.
This may account for the slight contempt sometimes expressed by operators for book learning and the student. Practical ex perience is considered the only true guide. There may be something in this but the result has been that there are far too few people in road transport who can produce the diplomas, degrees and other qualifica tions which rightly or wrongly are the criteria for the judgment of the outside world.
For the most part those bodies which claim to provide the qualifications have had little support. This uncomfortable fact has appeared to support allegations that operators are as indifferent to considerations of road safety as they are to improving their minds. The drivers who broke the law and the managers who apparently encouraged them to do so were regarded as victims of ignorance rather than of anything else.
If the Board is regarded as a burden this may be thought no more than the industry deserves. Had operators in general taken sufficient interest in the past there might already have been in existence a number of bodies which could have formed the nucleus of the statutory organization. The process of grafting the Board on to the industry would have been that much less painful.
The operator within the industry, particularly if he has not qualified for a grant, is inclined to regard the Board as an alien form of life if not as a parasite. Forgetting perhaps that the Act was passed under a Conservative administration his instinct is to condemn it as yet another example of the interference by the State in the life and freedom of the individual.
LA's permission Other events are shaping towards the same end. If and when the Transport Bill becomes law the operator will no longer be trusted even to choose his own depot managers. He must get the permission of the Licensing Authority and the transport manager with his official licence may come to feel that he is partly a Ministry man.
Road• safety is the invariable official explanation. To the practical operator it may seem far-fetched when it is applied to the proposal on transport managers. The real intention, he suspects, is to infiltrate officialdom into his business. The suspicion may colour his views on other proposals more clearly concerned with safety, such as the reintroduction of the heavy goods vehicle driver's licence, the provision of testing stations and even the formation of the Board.