Food firms urged to work together for slice of government cash

The opportunity for food businesses to make a united bid for a slice of a new £150 million (€184m) government training handout represents a defining moment for the sector, according to Justine Fosh, chief executive of the National Skills Academy for Food & Drink.

Competition from other industries for the cash, including retail, will no doubt be intense. And that’s why Fosh says she’s desperate to get the Employer Ownership of Skills (EOS) funds into the hands of food and drink manufacturing firms.

“With public funds so stretched it would be wrong to assume this level of direct support to businesses for productivity and growth-related skill upgrades will come round again as a matter of course,” she says. “As an industry, we need to act together if food manufacturing is to gain a lion’s share in 2013. It’s in everyone’s interest to get behind a solid partnership bid that involves the widest possible cross-section of food and drink businesses.”

The second release of Employer Ownership of Skills funds follows a smaller scale piloting of the new approach to Government training support earlier this year, during which the Academy aided a partnership of leading dairy businesses in successfully winning a £5 million (€6m) bid.

“Working together with the Academy and Dairy UK, the consortium was able to demonstrate not only a food manufacturing priority and sizeable investment return but crucially, a better return than competing bids from non-food business sectors,” explains Fosh.

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