Government backs UK food and drink manufacturers with £1.7 million skills injection

The UK food and drink manufacturing sector has won a vote of confidence from Government which has announced it is to inject almost £1.7million into a range of strategic skills projects designed to support competitiveness, growth and jobs.

The funds will cover around half the cost of the new skills programme – with food and drink businesses committing to provide the same amount again in cash, time and in-kind support on the basis of a milestone-based “investment plan” for skills in the sector.

The skills projects, backed by leading food and drink firms and put forward to funding decision-makers the UK Commission for Employment and Skills by sector skills council Improve, include:

• Tasty Graduates - A new UK Centre of Excellence in Food Production Engineering and a new food engineering University programme designed to provide a minimum of 40 graduate engineers a year and promote food engineering as both a discipline and a profession in its own right. The initiative will form part of the Food and Drink Federation’s Graduate Ambition programme to develop an industry specific degree qualification.

• Blueprint for Excellence - Production of an industry-wide “gold standard” for the professional standards and competencies expected of effective workers in specific food industry jobs

• Business Performance Benchmarks – Modeled on the DTI Benchmarking Index and allowing food and drink companies to understand and emulate the approach of best-in-class businesses in driving performance through training.

• Tasty Jobs - A pre-employment training programme designed to ensure 600 currently unemployed people are not just work-ready but specifically ready to work in the food and drink sector

“This is welcome validation of the economic importance of food and drink as the UK’s largest manufacturing industry,” Jack Matthews, chief executive of Improve, the skills council for the UK food and drink sector.

“At a time of necessary financial restraint, the case for taxpayer investment in food manufacturing skills as against investment in other sectors had to be strong and the payback to the economy and on-going commitment of employers evident.”

The new skills initiatives are designed to support an increase in gross value added in UK food processing by £148million by 2018 and fill almost 13,000 job vacancies expected to arise over the period while reducing reliance on migrant labour and increasing business investment in training by £8million.

Themes and areas of focus for the successful investment bids were proposed by a range of employer and employer-representative organisations working with Improve and the National Skills Academy for Food & Drink.

Justine Fosh, director of Improve’s National Skills Academy for Food & Drink which will have a key role in delivering many of the skills projects, continued: “We are here to support the industry by collaborating with businesses to solve the sector’s skills issues and as such, the proposals put forward were a very strong reflection of the needs of companies in the sector.

“Now that funding has been confirmed, we welcome approaches from food businesses and trade associations to get even more directly involved  - and to contact us if there are other areas of activity that they would like to see addressed by future rounds of government skills investment in the sector.

“There are already two other opportunities being launched by government where the possibility exists to secure further training and skills investment – but again, only if there is widespread support and active involvement from businesses. We’re keen to hear both the needs and ideas of individual companies and potentially bring together businesses with similar needs in support of the common cause.

The four projects approved by the UK Commission for Employment & Skills will commence in April 2012. They will be managed by Improve with delivery support from a range of partners including the National Skills Academy for Food & Drink, fellow sector skills councils and the Food and Drink Federation as well as food and drink businesses.