Much work to do on safety and CPD - Tom Bradshaw

Our ambition is to make sure that others see the agricultural and horticultural sectors as a career of choice, attracting the brightest talent and retaining those already driving the industry forward. As the industry and its technologies evolve, we must ensure we are prepared for the future. To achieve these aims, we’ve got to invest in the people who work in these sectors. Historically, this hasn’t always happened – and when it has, it’s tended to be the larger businesses who have provided their staff with CPD training. But we need to ensure that this type of training is available to everyone – from small to large-scale businesses.

Making CPD accessible to everyone

Many farms struggle to prioritise the time to invest in training. TIAH is therefore looking to make a programme available that doesn’t take too much time for people to engage with but still makes a significant difference to them and their business. We hope this will make CPD much more accessible to everyone – including smaller businesses.

For example, I expect that we will develop a lot of online training in the future. I’m BASIS trained, and the online classroom for BASIS works well because you can fit your CPD learning around your schedule. This way, it can have a low time requirement and be flexible in its approach.

Arguably, there's also an opportunity for farmers and growers to receive some recognition for investing in CPD – whether that recognition is in the form of an enhanced grant scheme or recognition from rural insurers, for example. If there's a way of creating those partnerships to help incentivise farm businesses, that would be helpful.

Key CPD areas to focus on

One of the initial areas that the farming industry needs to focus on is improving our health and safety (H&S) record. We need to try and make the workplace safer, improve H&S knowledge – be aware of how most accidents are caused, and reduce the risk. Having a regular H&S training scheme would therefore be beneficial to the industry.

And, with the removal of the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS), there will be a real focus on the business element of farming and making that accessible for all businesses. We know how much the BPS contributes to profitability and so, crucially, we now need to help farm businesses prepare for the change so that we can enable them to thrive in the future. We need to put more power at people’s fingertips so they can make the right decisions for themselves, their businesses, and their families.

Tom Bradshaw wrote this blog while he was a board member of TIAH and as vice-president of the NFU. Everyone at TIAH would like to congratulate Tom on becoming president of the NFU, and wish him every success as he leaves his position on the TIAH board to focus on his new role.