A rail industry skills bootcamps provider suspended from recruiting new learners two months ago has gone bust.
Redstone Training called in administrators earlier this week after Liverpool City Region Combined Authority and the West Midlands Combined Authority terminated their railway skills bootcamps contracts worth a combined £3 million.
In January, Network Rail had asked rail regulator the National Skills Academy for Rail (NSAR) to investigate a number of rule-breaching allegations brought against the company.
Managing director of Redstone Training, Matthew Brooks, blamed the NSAR probe and subsequent suspension of skills bootcamps payments for the company collapsing into administration.
He told FE Week the combined authorities were “very happy” with their bootcamps provision last year and claimed they had not provided any evidence of Redstone’s wrongdoing.
Brooks said WMCA did a full audit of its provision in October, which went “extremely well” and offered Redstone £300,000 on top of its £1.65 million contract. Similarly with LCRCA, Brooks said officials came in “as and when” to do in-person audits as the company had a training centre in Liverpool.
“We finished 2024 with a happy combined authority,” he said. “They said they don’t envisage their funding allocation for the next wave of funding to be that different, and therefore to keep going.”
A whistleblower complaint that triggered the NSAR probe, and combined authority suspensions, was the start of the company’s downfall, the boss said.
Brooks claimed he still doesn’t know what the allegations are because Network Rail “are not allowed to share” them.
When asked to respond to claims that the allegations related to ineligible milestones two and three data, which involves job interviews and work-related outcomes for participants, Brooks said: “As we sit here today, two and a half months on, not one combined authority has come back to me and said, ‘you’ve done this wrong’. This isn’t right. We’ve had zero clawback.”
“Our process followed the rules,” he said, adding that the company had “only been paid based on evidence that has been checked, verified and approved”.
“Bootcamps have been built in order to stop rogue training providers who, over the years, draw down large amounts of money and shut the business and bugger off to the Caribbean,” Brooks said.
He told the combined authorities that withholding payments was “cutting our arms off”, and he claimed he had lost thousands of pounds by taking out a personal loan to pay the February payroll.
“That’s the type of guy I am. I’m not one of these cowboys who just treat people like dirt. That’s not me at all, and that’s not the business,” he said.
Redstone continued to deliver bootcamps for learners for another month despite no payments coming in until the company could no longer pay staff or suppliers.
“The problem is we’re a small business, and the minute you turn off our cash flow, there’s only so long we can continue. So we got to the end of February, and I didn’t know what March looked like,” he told FE Week.
He voluntarily appointed administrators from Begbies Traynor Group to help collect funds to pay off what the business owed.
Around 24 staff have reportedly been laid off. One former worker said they hadn’t been paid correctly in January or February.
Redstone Training was incorporated in 2017 and delivered a range of courses for budding rail workers.
The company came into scope for Ofsted inspection when it moved into the skills bootcamps market and was found to be making “significant progress” in two of three areas in an early monitoring report published last July. There were, however, only 24 learners on programmes at the time of the inspection.
LCRCA confirmed Redstone had 183 learners enrolled on wave-five rail bootcamps, “most of whom had completed prior to the NSAR registration withdrawal” and the rest have been transferred. WMCA said it had 115 learners enrolled with Redstone Training.
A LCRCA spokesperson said: “We have now terminated all contracts with Redstone. All financial matters will be dealt with through the administrator and therefore we will not comment further at this time.”
Responding to whether he would set up another rail training company, Brooks said “no”.
“There’s been so much nonsense posted around me and the business over the last few weeks, and it’s all absolute nonsense,” he added.
WMCA and NSAR declined to comment.
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