TECs and the local politics of training

Abstract

Abstract This paper describes the British government's Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) initiative, drawing out some of the political and economic implications of its introduction and speculating upon its future development. Through the TEC initiative, close to £3 billion of public funds and over 5000 civil service jobs have been transferred from the public to the private sphere, as the government hands over ‘ownership’ of the training and enterprise system to employers. TECs, as private companies charged with the responsibility for the delivery of publicly-funded employment programmes, are characterized as ‘post-corporatist’ political structures—state-capital coalitions in which the labour movement has been purposefully marginalized. This is a strategy not without risk for the Conservative government, because in the employer-dominated TECs it has created a powerful and to a certain extent unpredictable political lobby. The paper argues that the potential political volatility of TECs is rooted in part in their susceptibility to local political influences.