A consultation paper for next week’s Scottish Trades Union Congress states that almost all of the LECs’ training resources are geared to meeting Government guarantees to young people and to the unemployed without sufficient attention to quality. Restrictions on how funds are used should be lifted, the paper suggests.
Delegates will be asked to consider a statutory imposition on employers to provide access to training for all workers plus a levy initially set at 0.5 per cent of the payroll. LECs and other agencies would distribute the funds from the levy and would have the job of ensuring that statutory requirements were being enforced. At present, the STUC says, employers are unwilling to bear a share of the cost of workforce training.