Denham hatches ‘bureaucracy busting’ challenge

Skills secretary John Denham today announced plans to slash red tape for businesses planning to hire apprentices.

The facts:

Apprentices are acknowledged by businesses and academics as a great way to boost small business productivity while providing essential on the job training to young people.

Denham announced that “needless bureaucracy” currently getting in the way of employers hiring apprentices would be scrapped, including the requirement to store paperwork for six years, inspections and monthly reporting clauses.

The pledge follows consultations with employers and is aimed squarely at small and medium-sized businesses. But Denham said it would rely on cooperation from groups like the Learning and Skills Council and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, who deliver the government’s apprenticeship programme.

Specific proposals include scrapping paperwork in favour of electronic audits, erasing the requirement to keep documents for lengthy periods of time, introducing a simplified way of registering for an apprentice, the abolition of monthly reporting requirements, and health and safety requirements matching those for normal employees.

The bureaucracy-busting proposals will be drawn up over the summer and a plan for implementing them will be published at an unspecified later date.

They said:

"Employers tell us that if we are to meet our ambitious aims to expand the number of apprenticeships, we need to cut the red tape around the programme.

"There is no reason why firms should have to deal with multiple copies of time-consuming paperwork, provide the same information to several different agencies, be expected to invoice government more often than is necessary, or have to undergo complex inspection requirements when they already have perfectly adequate systems of their own.”

We say:

If it’s needless bureaucracy why has it been in place for so long? While we applaud John Denham’s efforts we’re flabbergasted that initiatives like this seem to take a lifetime to come around.

The task of implementing the suggested changes sounds like a complex one, especially because the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform needs cooperation from other bodies with no remit to reduce red tape for business. Watch this space.

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By News Desk  on   Aug 07,2008

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Keywords

apprentices    red tape    hiring    bureaucracy    small business    Denham    productivity   

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