As companies in the UK grapple with increased costs resulting from the 2024 Autumn Budget, investment in training must continue. This is not just to benefit the bottom line but, crucially, to ensure best practice in safety, says Ross Moloney, CEO of the Lifting Equipment Engineers Association (LEEA).
LEEA members in the UK are assessing how the 2024 Autumn Budget delivered on 30th October 2024 will impact on their strategic plans. The first budget of the new UK Government raised taxes by some £40bn in total. The biggest part of that tax take comes in the form of National Insurance Contributions paid by employers rising from 13.8% to 15% from April 2025, with the earnings threshold being reduced from £9,100 to £5,000. Also at this time, the minimum wage will increase by 6.7% to £12.21.
The CBI (Confederation of British Industry) points out that smaller employers will be shielded from some of the impact with the Employment Allowance increasing from £5,000 to £10,500, but adds that the tax hike will be tough for many firms, being due regardless of profitability and could hamper business growth.
LEEA’s UK members are already expressing concerns at the additional costs imposed by the budget on their businesses, with some calculating increased payouts of up to £30,000 annually. Companies will be carefully examining their own budgets for potential savings to offset these increased costs.
When it comes to making difficult decisions on where to make cuts, training too often tops the list. LEEA feels strongly that reallocating investment away from this essential part of our industry would be bad news.
Can you afford not to train?
The Lifting Industry is essential for the smooth running of the UK economy yet skills shortages remain a major impediment. To continue growing successfully requires a sustained supply of skills – and the right kind of skills. Our industry continually innovates and moves forward with improvements to practices through investment in technology and new techniques. Appropriate training will maximise the return on this investment.
But even more critical for the inherently hazardous Lifting Industry, is that training nurtures best practice when it comes to working in safety. It is estimated that over 90% of all accidents result from human error, with the major contributors being carelessness, ignorance and incompetence. So the question is: can you afford not to train?
Evolving training to benefit LEEA members
We would encourage you to look at LEEA’s unique and continually developing training offer. It provides a genuine choice of training delivery channels, either digital or in-person, to suit priorities and make it easier and more cost effective for more people to train.
In addition to English, most of LEEA’s suite of training courses are available in Bahasa, Simplified Chinese, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, French and Spanish, and we continue to develop other languages to meet the needs of our global membership.
‘End User Guidance’ and ‘Introduction to Lifting Equipment’ are courses introduced to provide our members and industry stakeholders with specific underpinning information, supporting their Continuing Professional Development (CPD). We are working on our new ‘Academy 3’ curriculum and training course design, with the Foundation Certificate supporting LEEA’s vision of a lifting industry with zero accidents, zero injuries and zero fatalities.
Our members will continue to be supported by a LEEA Academy that is tailored to their needs, flexible in its learning modes and readily accessible. For more details on LEEA training, visit leeaint.com.
Budget measures for education
Elsewhere in the budget, measures that may indirectly benefit training through assisting the UK educational system include £950m for skills capital to help college estates and £300m for the further education sector next year. There is also a commitment to delivering Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE), with a revised launch date of January 2027. By creating a single funding system to replace higher education student finance loans and Advanced Learner Loans, LLE is designed to expand access to high-quality, flexible education and training for adults throughout their working lives.
Investment of £40m is committed towards reforming the Apprenticeship Levy into a more flexible Growth & Skills Levy, designed to enable businesses to use funds for a wider variety of accredited training programmes.
LEEA, of course, supports the Lifting Equipment Technician apprenticeship, which provides a natural gateway for further CPD options, such as advanced LEEA training. Although the apprenticeship is specific to England, it is based around a standard that is intended to be of global applicability, and LEEA is currently working on making similar opportunities available in Scotland.
Creating expertise
Our budget message to members is that training is a safe investment. It boosts productivity to mitigate the low availability and increasing cost of labour and creates expertise, which can then add enormous value to members’ customers and support supply chains throughout industry.
But, even more importantly, training is vital for working in safety. Overcoming gravity and bad practice to achieve a safer industry is a perpetual battle that we think can be won. But it needs the support of training, and this must be prominent in the mind of companies looking at how to deal with additional costs. We encourage our members to see how LEEA training works.
