Tec cash `spent on red tape'

Much of the pounds 1.4bn of taxpayers' money spent on training the unemployed goes on paperwork and the system for delivering skills has fallen short of expectations, according to an all-party Commons committee, writes Barrie Clement.

Employer-led Training and Enterprise Councils (Tecs) now preside over a structure spending more than pounds 500m on bureaucracy, according to Labour members of the committee.

The committee agreed that an insufficient proportion of Tec funds was being spent on the jobless. While a limited amount of money was siphoned off by Tecs on administration, a far higher proportion was spent by training providers who were forced to cope with a proliferation of auditing systems.

An employment committee report on the work of Tecs yesterday argued that they had made a "modest" contribution to improving the training of the jobless, but the impact had "not been as dramatic as was hoped".