CIPD accused of incompetence in Telegraph

Jackie '405k per year' Orme comes under more pressure as the charge of unprofessionalism and incompetence appear in The Daily Telegraph (thanks to Garry Platt for the link). The Chief Executive of LSIS (Learning and Skills Improvement Service) wrote a stinging rebuke to the CIPD’s “wildly inaccurate” report on Government spending on skills organisations. As he listed the report's many errors, he put the knife in stating surprise that the CIPD could be “so unprofessional as to not check their facts” and suffering from “a lack of professional competence”. This follows on from another complaint from NIACE along the same lines.

Here’s the letter in full:

21 July 2010

Dear Sir

Quangos and the facts

At a time of economic stringency it is clearly important that all parts of the public sector are appropriately scrutinised for the contribution that they make to society and for their value for money. Your coverage of the report from the CIPD yesterday gave credence to the popularly held view that considerable sums of money could be saved without detriment to the services offered by four of the government so called “quangos” – namely LSIS, LSN, LLUK and NIACE.

Unfortunately the section of the CIPD report that relates to LSIS – which incidentally is not a quango but a sector led body – is wildly inaccurate. We do not fund LSN as is stated and there is no mention of the £80m cut that has been made this year in our funding. Neither is the fact that we use the sector itself to support improvement by providing staff development, materials and consultancy in areas of government priority. We also deliver the majority of our funding back to the front line and assist institutions that have failed their inspection. In the latter case we are proud to report a 95% success rate of satisfactory or better provision being identified when those same institutions are re-inspected. It is unfortunate that an organisation such as the CIPD that purports to support professional development can be both so inaccurate and dismissive of this activity. It’s a pity too that they can be so unprofessional as to not check their facts or find out how an organisation really works or what it does before rushing into print. I’m sure many of their existing members will be very disappointed in what is clearly a lack of professional competence.

Yours faithfully Dr David Collins CBE

Chief Executive

Learning and Skills Improvement Service