A health and safety training group that failed to protect its qualifications against fraud has been fined by Ofqual.
The exams regulator issued the British Safety Council (BSC) with a £5,000 penalty after a string of failings around construction health and safety qualifications dating back to 2018.
Ofqual said the BSC committed “long running, repeated and systemic failures” when investigating malpractice around qualifications it knew were vulnerable to abuse.
Its probe into the BSC’s controls followed warnings from the Metropolitan Police and Construction Industry Training Board of widespread “centre-level certificate fraud” in 2018 that included 333 BSC level 1 health and safety in a construction environment certificates.
The regulator found the BSC, a registered charity, had failed to retain a workforce of “appropriate size or competence”, only conducted “around half” the centre monitoring visits it should have, did not check enough assessments to detect fraud or malpractice, and failed to keep detailed records of learners it awarded qualifications from 2017 to 2020.
The BSC also issued certificates despite “unresolved concerns” about suspicious pass rates, “anomalies” in assessments, evidence of falsified invigilation records and a failure to collect basic information about learners.
The charity failed to complete internal investigations into at least seven centres instead of following “obvious and reasonable lines of enquiry” or carrying out a “rigorous” inquiry into whether fraud or malpractice had taken place, as required by Ofqual.
The health and safety qualification, withdrawn in 2020, was key to obtaining a construction skills certification scheme (CSCS) card.
Construction was the deadliest sector in the UK last year with 51 fatal accidents including falls, people being struck by moving vehicles, or getting trapped by collapsing or overturning objects.
CSCS cards have long been targeted by fraudsters and centre malpractice due to skills shortages in the building trade.
Some test centres have been known to rig health and safety exams to guarantee passes by coaching learners or completing tests for them. Since 2020, around 10,000 health and safety and environment test results have been revoked by the Construction Industry Training Board.
In 2020, the BSC told Ofqual it planned to withdraw 12 qualifications, including the health and safety certificate, due to the level of risk from “surrounding alleged criminal activity” involving CSCS cards.
The cost of increased compliance checks after issues emerged meant the BSC was “in deficit” on the level 1 qualification.
The BSC, which has a £10 million annual turnover, admitted breaching rules and put forward several mitigation arguments, including that its failures were “not intentional” and its employees were not “complicit in the suspected malpractice”.
A BSC spokesperson told FE Week the charity has “accepted” Ofqual’s findings, but declined to comment when asked which centre were implicated in malpractice.
The charity, founded in 1957 and which claims to be “dedicated to making sure no one is injured or made ill through their work”, earned about £1.6 million from regulated qualifications and assessments before it began to withdraw from the market.
Ofqual accepted there was no evidence the failures were “primarily motivated” by a desire to save money, although the regulator noted “savings will have been made” and the BSC dropped the qualifications due to the increased cost of compliance.
When asked why it took seven years to publish the findings, an Ofqual spokesperson said: “A full and thorough investigation was required, which takes time, and the work coincided with Covid disruption which delayed investigation work.”
Other recent Ofqual fines for centre malpractice linked to construction safety cards have taken similar lengths of time to conclude.
Late last year – five years after issues occurred – the regulator publicly rebuked the Scottish government-owned Scottish Qualifications Authority for failing to “rigorously” investigate malpractice at seven training providers in England between 2017 and 2019.
Ofqual carried out two investigations into the BSC. The first concluded in 2019 and resulted in the BSC signing an undertaking to “remedy the issues” and commission an external audit of its new measures.
However, a second investigation was opened after the charity revealed it had failed to flag seven additional serious issues with centres that occurred during the same period as the first investigation.
The BSC blamed the failure to notify Ofqual on the “serious and sudden illness” of staff members responsible for reporting issues, although they had returned to work by the time the charity signed the undertaking.
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