CITB looks to integrate migrant workers in UK

Initiative to ensure all workers from overseas are ‘qualified, competent and safe’

The Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) is drawing up an ‘integrated migrant worker package’ so that overseas workers will be prequalified in terms of skills and health and safety awareness before entering the country.One key feature will be a UK health and safety test to be offered in the operatives’ mother tongue and in the country of origin. Pilot tests are expected to be trialled in Poland this September.

The CITB is also looking at how foreign formal qualifications can be recognised and integrated into the domestic CSCS skill cards system. Again, a pilot mapping process involving four European Union member states and two basic trades is due for completion this summer.

The move comes amid claims that a fresh flood of migrant construction workers, mainly from Eastern Europe, will be required to meet the 2012 Olympic’s delivery programme and associated works. It has fuelled concern among some east London boroughs that the Olympics will not bring sufficient construction job opportunities to the local population.

"It may well be that we will need to bring in more migrant workers," one industry leader commented. "But we must have a balanced approach. The contractors who will be using this imported labour are the same ones who are failing to provide job placements for our own trainees to such an extent that some 50% of apprentice applicants are being turned away."

The CITB is understood to be seeking fresh forms of funding to finance the integration package.

That package is also likely to include site assessment routes to formal skills recognition for migrant workers where suitable homeland qualifications are not available. It may further provide advice on employment rights, rates of pay, and union membership, as well as social information on housing, banking, health and schooling.

CITB-ConstructionSkills migrant worker project manager Trevor Fish said: "It is our intention to ensure that all migrant workers in the UK are qualified, competent and safe. We have a range of initiatives to ensure that migrant workers and their qualifications are integrated with UK standards and practices."

[Contract Journal, 19 July 2006]