The amazing five-week apprenticeship (for cowboys)

They spring up everywhere: from national newspapers to local pamphlets – flashy advertisements boasting that they will give you the plumbing, plastering or electrical skills that will earn you thousands a year. For the increasing number of people facing redundancy, these adverts and their promises have never looked so attractive.

Imran Ahmed was one of these people. He answered an advert in the Manchester Evening News in May 2007. Under the bold headline “Learn to be a plumber”, a company called The Plumbing Business told applicants they could train to be self-employed plumbers, running their own business within five weeks of starting the course and earning “up to £40k PA”. “I was looking for a career change,” says Ahmed. “It seemed perfect.”

Ahmed was told to pay £5,000 up front and was assured he would make the money back within a few weeks. But he says that from the moment he turned up on his first day, the course was a shambles. “No work schedule was given to anyone and there was no fixed start time. The things we learned could have been done in my back garden.”

Ahmed complained that the training was inadequate to the owner of the training business, Ernie Curley, who explained that because the company was new, there were a few “teething problems”. The course finished a week earlier than originally promised, and it was only after several weeks of pestering that the class was finally awarded certificates. “These turned out to be a worthless piece of paper, which is not recognised anywhere,” says Ahmed. It was a far cry from the City & Guilds 6129 technical certificate that Ahmed says he had been promised. “I went to countless interviews and was laughed out of the room when I produced the certificate as proof of my qualification.”

Angry and frustrated, Ahmed contacted a lawyer and set about mounting a case against The Plumbing Business on behalf of his classmates. But the case never came to trial, because it was preceded by a tragedy. Just over a year ago, Ray Bonner, Ahmed’s fellow classmate and friend, who had been working with him on preparing the case, committed suicide. Ahmed says Bonner attributed the “stress and misery” in his life to lack of work. The Plumbing Business has since closed down. When contacted by Building, Curley said he would not comment on the complaints that students had made about their course.

As unemployment continues to rise, more and more people are falling victim to crash courses that charge inflated sums in return for very little. And it’s not just the trainees themselves who suffer. Experts are warning that these courses, which are particularly prevalent in the plumbing and electrical sectors, are creating the next generation of cowboy tradesmen, and also worsening skills shortages, as they are turning out poorly equipped workers who might otherwise have received proper training.

A widespread problem

The plumbing and electrical sectors are the most prone to cowboy courses because they have the least regulation over training provision. Keith Marshall, chief executive of SummitSkills, the skills council for the building services sector, says: “There’s no legal definition of a plumber or an electrician. The industry is not regulated; you do not need a licence to practice.”

SummitSkills estimates that there are about 20,000 practising plumbers who have no recognised qualification. Meanwhile, about 155,000 out of 250,000 electricians do not hold an Electrotechnical Certification Scheme card – a document that, although not mandatory, is recommended as a way of proving you are fully trained.

Crash courses are only adding to the problem – as can be seen by the growing number of people contacting industry bodies, complaining that they are unable to find work after completing the schemes. “Individuals often contact me saying companies won’t take them on because they don’t have the experience,” says Chris Sneath, chairman of the Plumbing and Heating Industry Alliance and a campaigner against rogue trainers. “They need the practical knowledge as well as the technical.”

Meanwhile, one firm, Pimlico Plumbers, says the number of people calling up looking for work who say they’ve been on these courses has risen dramatically. About 50 of the 200 calls they receive a week from people looking for work are from those who have been down the fast-track route. Sneath says there are two types of “unscrupulous” training providers. The first are legitimate centres that misrepresent the training that they give. The most common way of doing this is to take a selection of one or two-day refresher or taster courses, provided by a body such as City & Guilds, and package them up as an intensive course suitable for beginners lasting anything from two days to 12 weeks. The other is what Sneath calls “a genuine rogue trainer”. He describes this type of firm as “an unscrupulous organisation which purports to train people, without any guarantee of competence at the end of the course”.

Both types relieve people of thousands of pounds, Sneath says, on the promise that they will become qualified tradespeople.

But this is simply not possible on the courses on offer. For plumbers, an NVQ2 usually takes about two years, and is typically followed by an NVQ3. For electricians, an NVQ3, usually a three-year course, is the minimum industry qualification.

It’s not as if crash courses are even cheap. Short courses can cost thousands of pounds. To find out exactly what promises are being made for this money, Building called three training providers advertising crash courses in newspapers and online, posing as a potential applicant. We were told by all three firms we contacted – RF Training, The Plumbing Academy, and Tradeskills4U – that we would be qualified to start up a business on our own after just a few weeks. We were also informed by RF Training and The Plumbing Academy that we would not have trouble getting a job using our qualification. RF Training, a firm advertising online, told us that for £4,999, we could undertake a six-week intensive professional plumbing course, and start our own business at the end, or get a job with a firm that would happily accept our certificates.

When contacted later, Mick Fitzgerald, managing director of RF Training, said: “Although I understand there are certain organisations out there that I criticise openly, such as those that offer a home-study course, all of our training is centre-led.” When questioned as to whether he thought people could be fully qualified after six weeks and could set up their own business, he replied: “People that come through the RF Training route – absolutely … There’s a lack of a real apprenticeship programme across the country – we’re supplying that need.”

It’s impossible to do three years in six weeks. We won’t entertain people from these courses. I had one guy call who’d never even held a spanner

Charlie Mullins, Pimlico Plumbers

It is easy to understand how someone desperate for work might be tempted to do a crash course. But Charlie Mullins, founder of Pimlico Plumbers, which employs 175 people, insists his firm would never take on anyone who had gone on a fast-track course. “It is impossible to do three years in six weeks. We won’t even entertain people from these courses. I had one guy call who told me he’d never even held a spanner,” he says. “No good company will employ them.”

Another training provider, The Plumbing Academy, told us we could do a 12-week course for about £5,000. We were told this would enable us to work as a self-employed plumber, but that if we wished to work for a company “sometimes they like you to be NVQ2 qualified”. When later questioned about the course, Steven Edwards, chief executive of The Plumbing Academy, said: “The entry qualification for the plumbing trade is a technical certificate 6129, and that is what our students would get within that time, working to the highest possible standards.” He added that it “clearly laid out” on the company’s website that students would need an NVQ to allow them to progress.

But the website advert actually tells students that its intensive plumbing courses are for “individuals who are looking to change career and have little if any real practical skills or technical knowledge about plumbing … You could start your new career as a skilled domestic plumber in under 12 weeks,” it adds, with no mention of an NVQ2.

Responding to this, Edwards said: “You can enter the trade after 12 weeks and you’d be able to put bathroom suites in and things like that.” He did add that courses were never sold over the phone, and students were encouraged to come in and look around before signing up. “We wouldn’t have a long-term business model if we were turning out cowboys … I’m prepared to say that they can work to a standard as good as anyone.”

But Mullins strongly disputes this. “Doing a course like this doesn’t make you a good plumber, same as doing a crash driving course doesn’t make you a good driver.”

Crossed wires

Meanwhile, when Building tried to become an electrician, Tradeskills4U recommended we embark on a 17-day Electrical Multi Course because we were new to the industry. This would cost us £2,200 and would give us a package of four separate courses for our money, assessed through three multiple choice exams that we could retake if we failed. “This course was set up for people that are completely new to the industry,” we were told. “You don’t need anything else to work in the domestic sector.”

In a later response to criticism of these types of courses, managing director Carl Bennett said: “Tradeskills4U provides training to mature students – we’re not a fast-track training company – we provide training courses that exactly match local colleges, except we do them better, we are better resourced, have better trainers, better facilities and we have a positive professional approach to teaching.”

He added that the “so-called long college course, the City & Guilds 2330 of three years duration, is not that at all. It’s-one-day-a-week aimed at 16-18 year olds. They’ve a five-hour day with a portion of that time spent recapping teaching from the previous week. Essentially the college course is 510 hours, Tradeskills4U’s City & Guilds 2330 course is 640 hours. Whose service is best? I think ours is.”

Bennett admitted there were less reputable training companies but insisted his firm was “one of the good guys in the electrical training industry”. He added: “Our training was recently described as ‘Platinum standard’ by EAL [an awarding body for engineering NVQs].”

Danger of death

If those who complete these courses struggle to find work with companies, the fear is they will try to recoup their money by setting up on their own. “They simply become the cowboy builders of tomorrow,” says Sneath.

Many say they are tarnishing the industry’s reputation through poor workmanship, but there is a more worrying concern: plumbing systems are increasingly sophisticated. “Things are getting much more dangerous,” says Sneath. “The thought that poorly trained plumbers could be working on systems that mix with electricity is extremely worrying.” Mullins agrees: “If plumbers are working on boilers, they could be putting people’s lives at risk. You can’t just train them for six weeks and then tell them they are qualified to go into people’s homes.”

Meanwhile, Iain Macdonald, head of education and training at the Electrical Contractors’ Association, warns that fast-track courses are worsening the skills shortage in the electrical sector. “For every person that takes this route, we are losing someone that could have been properly trained and skilled. They are depriving the industry of these skills because we can’t use them. It is immensely frustrating.”

Sneath has been campaigning to outlaw these centres for many years. He hopes a code of practice will be introduced for legitimate training organisations. But Mullins isn’t optimistic. “It will take a disaster for something to change,” he says. “A poorly trained plumber will try and fix something in someone’s home, and it will go horribly wrong. It will take deaths for people to notice this problem. And by then of course, it will be too late.”