The Construction Industry Training Board, or CITB have been given their last chance by the Federation of Master Builders, or FMB. Members of the FMB are divided in regards to their opinions on the future of the CITB. Some members would like to see the training board continue, while others feel that the organisation should be completely scrapped.

Despite the split decision about the training organisation’s future, it has been agreed upon by members of the Federation that the CITB does not work for smaller firms operating in the construction industry. The call has been made by the FMB for the CITB to carry out significant reforms in order to deliver quality training on a large scale in the smaller firms of the construction industry.

The FMB has made the decision to support the continuation of the levy. However, they have explicitly stated that this continuation of support is not an agreement with the status quo, and feel that the CITB is broken, and support is needed from the industry in order to make sure that in the future the levy works for everyone. It is thought that unless the changes are put into place there could be an impact on the construction skills crisis, which will continue to get worse. If a transformation of the CITB isn’t carried out and the skills crisis get worse, the Government will fail in their house building and infrastructure ambitions.

It is vital that, for the CITB to succeed, there needs to a review into how the organisation is structured. The CITB Board at the moment only contains one representative from SMEs in the construction industry. This needs to change to ensure more impact and lead to better changes to benefit the smaller companies in this industry.

The reforms need to spread further than the CITB according to the FMB with other changes suggested including making the grant scheme more simple, allowing SMEs to claim back CITB grants.