A report on BBC Newsnight this week (21 October) has exposed how people who cannot even speak English can pay to obtain CSCS cards that are supposed to show they have successfully completed safety training.
Undercover filming showed a test centre giving the answers to candidates. The Director reasds out the correct answers and even candidates to get an answer wrong so it does not look as if they had cheated. "What I don't want is everyone making the same mistake," he says.
Construction kills and injures more of its employees each year than any other industry. In the past five years 221 workers have died. Some of the deaths have been reported on this website.
Ever since CSCS cards were introduced in 1995 there have been forged cards in circulation, although the number of these has fallen since a microchip was introduced to them in 2010. Since then there appears to have been a growing business in cash for legitimate CSCS cards at testing centres.
A BBC Freedom of Information request to the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB), which admnisters the CSCS Card scheme, revealed an increasing number of CSCS fraud reports – 96 in 2012, 264 in 2013, 311 last year.
Mark French, head of safety at the billion pound construction company Willmott Dixon, told the BBC: "As an industry, we've set our stall on the CSCS card being the minimum benchmark to accept workers on to our sites. If these people aren't competent workers, we'll end up with guys prepared to take risks. It's going to take a long time for us to get over this as an industry. We'll probably never identify the true number working with cards that aren't bona fide."
It is said that 14% of construction workers in the UK are from abroad – that's around 228,000 people. One Romanian labourer, speaking anonymously, told the BBC it was common knowledge among his colleagues that CSCS qualifications could be bought.
Carl Rhymer of the CITB said the organisation was aware of the problem and had doubled its spend on fraud investigations. Five testing centres were being shut down and eight others were under investigation. Plans to have CCTV installed in all 544 test centres to monitor activities were being accelerated.
CSCS says it is confident the vast majority of cards are issued as a result of a legitimate qualification.
Natural Stone Specialist's training correspondent, Mark Priestman, says of the expose that "blaming CSCS for this is like blaming the passport office for issuing a passport to someone who used a driving licence as their form of identification after having bribed the examiner in order to pass the driving test. CSCS aren't actually the awarders of the qualifications in question.
"It's just a shame that the validity of the 99% of legitmate cardholders out there are now unfairly considered suspect until this blows over."