Mark Farmer, a prominent figure in UK construction and CEO of Cast Consultancy, has delivered a stark warning about the future of Britain’s construction industry in his latest government-commissioned review of Industry Training Boards (“ITBs”). The review, published in January 2025, calls for a fundamental transformation of how the sector develops and maintains its workforce.
Farmer, who previously authored the seminal 2016 “Modernise or Die” report, has long been a critical voice in highlighting the construction industry’s structural challenges. His 2016 review warned of an “inexorable decline” unless the sector addressed its dysfunctional training model, lack of innovation and absent R&D culture. That report highlighted how the industry was losing more workers than it gained each year, with two-thirds of Britons rejecting construction as a career choice according to YouGov polling.
Seven years later, these challenges have only intensified. The sector still faces unprecedented workforce pressures, exacerbated by Brexit’s impact on migrant labour availability together with governmental changes to the UK’s skilled worker visa route and persistent difficulties in attracting young, diverse talent. The construction workforce has reached its lowest proportion of total UK employment in nearly a century, whilst labour costs have outpaced national wage growth by 40% despite declining productivity.
The Role of Industry Training Boards
Industry Training Boards were established by the Industrial Training Act of 1964 as a response to apparent market failure in workforce development across 20 sectors of the economy. Today, only construction and engineering construction retain these statutory bodies, which collect levies from employers to fund industry-wide training initiatives.
The 2023 review concludes that while these boards still serve a vital purpose, they require radical reform to address the sector’s mounting challenges. Farmer recommends merging the Construction Industry Training Board (“CITB”) and Engineering Construction Industry Training Board (“ECITB”) into a single body with a renewed focus on workforce planning and development.
Key Recommendations
The review sets out a bold new vision for transforming the current ITB model into what Farmer calls “a world class construction workforce planning and development system.” This includes:
- creating a unified digital skills passport system to track and verify worker competency;
- shifting focus from just new entrant training to whole workforce development;
- establishing more flexible career pathways with modular training options;
- improving strategic workforce planning to better match skills supply with demand; and
- using public procurement to drive improved skills and training outcomes.
Strategic Priorities
Farmer identifies three core strategic objectives for the reformed body:
- improving industry workforce competency and maintaining its currency;
- enhancing project-level productivity and quality assurance; and
- improving strategic workforce retention and utilisation.
The review emphasises that the construction sector’s challenges cannot be solved through traditional approaches to training and recruitment alone. Instead, it calls for a system-wide transformation that addresses both immediate skills gaps and long-term workforce resilience.
Financial Implications
The review recommends maintaining the statutory levy-grant system but modernising it to focus more on measurable outcomes. It suggests a minimum 5% efficiency saving target for operational expenditure and calls for greater transparency in how levy funds are spent.
Looking Ahead
Farmer’s review presents what he terms “one last attempt to turbo charge the impact of the current legislation through a wider system transformation.” In his view, the stakes are high – the sector’s ability to deliver critical national infrastructure, housing targets and economic growth depends on successfully implementing these reforms.
The review warns that failure to act decisively now risks allowing the industry to “slowly sleepwalk into a much bigger future problem.” With construction employment at historic lows and productivity declining, the sector faces a critical juncture in its evolution.
The government’s response to these recommendations will be crucial in determining whether the construction industry can break free from its cycle of skills shortages and productivity challenges to build a more resilient and capable workforce for the future.
TOP 10 RECOMMENDATIONS
Recommendation 1
The ITB model should be retained in terms of its basic statutory mandate but its strategic priorities, core capabilities and activity require wholesale transformation. This all needs to be focussed on addressing the fundamental workforce resilience challenges facing the construction and engineering construction industries.
Recommendation 2
The statutory levy-grant system should be retained but modernised and refocussed to drive measurable outcomes linked to the new priority industry challenges identified in recommendation 3 below. SMART KPIs should be developed aimed at maximising outcomes from levy spend with more balanced accountability between industry and government.
Recommendation 3
The Construction ITB and Engineering Construction ITB should be merged into a single rebranded body (the ‘new body’) tasked with improving workforce resiliency through a single combined strategy. It should take on the role of a workforce development agency, spanning training and improvement of both new and existing workers.
The first step of this process should be to establish an interim body under government and industry oversight to manage the transitional state towards operational merger.
This interim body should look to realise shared efficiencies through an agreed integration plan between the two ITBs but retain ring fenced levy funds in the short term whilst options for levy consolidation are explored.
The new body should have specialist, sub-sector specific implementation teams spanning construction and engineering construction, responding to a common overarching strategy to drive high level thinking whilst avoid losing market context, employer alignment and intelligence.
The new body is to be held accountable to both government and industry on a more balanced basis, measured on defined outcomes as set out in recommendation 2, all related to improving workforce resiliency. There should be clear consequences for inability to evidence improvements and a clear direction of travel within a reasonable time, including accelerated winding up before the expiry of the next ITB review cycle.
Recommendation 4
Three new core strategic objectives are established which guide all priorities and a reset strategic plan. These are to improve the industry’s:
- workforce competency and the ongoing maintenance of its currency;
- project level productivity and quality assurance in conjunction with other parallel regulatory reforms; and
- strategic level workforce retention and utilisation.
These strategic objectives should be shared across both constituent ITB parts of the new body. It is recognised that although there will be differences in relative importance, the overarching needs are common so a fully integrated approach to arriving a strategic plan must be adopted. The other recommendations in this review are tailored to assist in helping shape a new strategic plan and to set out likely activity.
Recommendation 5
A refocussed levy-grant system should have a revised strategic balance between individual employer apprenticeship grants and other non-apprenticeship support. It should deploy activity and funds more into programmatic activity and new pathway interventions with both new and existing workers that are scalable and impactful and span both the employed and self-employed workforce.
Recommendation 6
The review has found that there is a need for a much more strategic demand planning and linked work brokerage function which can enable skills and competency supply to be better matched to demand over time and geography. This includes the potential for transferable skills within industries, including across engineering construction and construction, to be better identified and exploited and for employers to be able to make more informed decision on investing in human capital.
Recommendation 7
Industry leaders need to continue to recognise the role their organisations and role models can play in assisting with the training effort as part of their social impact and the wider futureproofing of their own industry.
Recommendation 8
The ITBs and subsequently the new body should in conjunction with government and industry, urgently redefine its role in leading and/or supporting a refresh of existing construction and engineering construction occupational and qualification standards and associated pathways.
Recommendation 9
The policing of providers by ITBs and in some instances the direct provision by them of training in response to existing pathways has been found to be of variable effectiveness, especially in relation to CITB, as there is an overarching sense of it requiring improvement. Better levels of innovation and dynamic influence of providers has been observed happening by ECITB in connection with the geographic clusters of activity their markets better segment into.
Current teaching is further compromised by out-of-date curricula and standards and more importantly lack of currency of teachers relative to workplace expectations and new methods/regulations. This will all be further challenged by any move towards a change in pathways and related learning format with more modular and incremental training needs in a more fluid and flexible matrix system.
Recommendation 10
The ITBs and subsequently new body should play a central role in helping facilitate with other agencies an industry wide digital skills passport system. This should span the whole workforce, with accreditations, experience, qualifications, and resultant proven competencies registered and capable of being policed. It should look to maximise inter-operability of existing card schemes, seek validation/refresh of their existing competency requirements and build critical scale through a connected digital eco-system.
This platform should in turn link to the strategic workforce planning and brokerage tool identified in Recommendation 6 above.
This digital skills passport should be used to prove regulatory requirements and to assist what is hoped will be increased instances of client, funder or insurer led procurement and enforcement of requirements for minimum workforce wide competency.
