Local authorities defend training record

20 February 2008

Local authority employers have denied claims that they are not committed to providing training to produce the transport planners and engineers of the future.

Councils have been under pressure to take responsibility for training in order to increase the pool of transport planners and engineers, given that universities are only producing 137 transport planners annually.

Nigel Carruthers, head of talent and skills at the Improvement and Development Agency, told Surveyor: ‘The problem is getting councils to take action, and grow their own engineers.’

This required more long-term workforce planning, he said, and a return to the offering of bursaries and traineeships which were standard in local government until about 15 years ago.

‘Councils have to take a wider view. And some are starting to recognise this.’

Martin Richards, of the Transport Planning Society’s executive committee, has also questioned the commitment of local authority employers to training. Only four councils attended a TPS meeting on developing a graduate transport planning model training scheme to seek employers’ views on the content. Having a standardised template for training would help councils, he said.

Richards suspected council directors and heads of department ‘did not see this as relevant to them,’ because it would include technical tasks such as modelling. ‘They might say, “We don’t do modelling any more, consultants do that,” but we still need an intelligent client.’

But senior council officials Surveyor spoke to defended local government’s record.

Members of the London Technical Advisors Group were ‘ahead of the game’, according to LoTAG chair, Joe Weiss. Despite ‘savage grant cuts’, boroughs were working to provide London-wide training. The BETTER Partnership, established for London Councils, was co-ordinating the provision of on-the-job training, including the foundation skills all professional staff needed, he said. This was preferable ‘to a borough using residents’ council taxes to send somebody off to do an expensive MSc course, only for that individual to leave for a job with a consultant or Transport for London’, Weiss claimed.

Taking responsibility for training also overcame the ‘burden’ universities placed on boroughs during placements, he said. Cambridgeshire County Council is the first local authority to provide tailored, on-the-job training equivalent to Bachelor and Masters courses, meeting Institute of Civil Engineers requirements to become ICE chartered or incorporated.

Louise Collier, Cambridgeshire’s head of network management north, west and east, said it met employees’ individual training needs, ‘without us having to send them to university on day release’. The scheme met employees’ individual needs, and Cambridgeshire, as the employer, was ‘encouraging employee loyalty, and people working for us for three years as they train, rather than going off to university’.

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