The National Access and Scaffolding Confederation (NASC) has been granted Prescribed Organisation status by the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB), giving the trade body a formal role in the levy consensus process that helps determine how training funding is allocated across the construction sector.
The designation means NASC will now have a recognised voice when decisions are made about how levy funds are directed to support skills development and training within the industry.
CITB’s levy system collects contributions from construction employers to fund training initiatives and workforce development across the sector. The consensus process allows representative bodies to give feedback on how the levy should operate and how funding priorities are set.
Clive Dickin, Group CEO of NASC and CISRS, said the recognition strengthens the organisation’s ability to represent scaffolding companies in discussions about training investment.
“We are delighted to announce that NASC has been recognised as a CITB Prescribed Organisation, a formal acknowledgement of our standing as the principal trade body for the scaffolding and access sector,” he said.
“This status means that NASC now has an official role in the CITB levy consensus process, giving our members a recognised and collective voice on how training funding is directed across the construction industry.”
Dickin added that the new status reflects NASC’s broader influence across the sector.
“For our members, this is further evidence that NASC’s influence extends well beyond guidance and auditing. We are at the table where decisions that shape the future of skills and training in this industry are made.”
The recognition comes at a time when the construction industry is facing growing pressure to expand its workforce and increase training capacity to meet future demand.
NASC represents contractors involved in scaffolding and access across the UK and works closely with CISRS, the industry’s training and card scheme, which oversees scaffolding qualifications and competence standards.
By gaining Prescribed Organisation status, NASC will now participate formally in discussions that influence how CITB levy funding is structured and how training support is distributed across construction trades.
Still, the model comes with its share of volatility. “The hardest times are the lulls in work,” he admits. “When I’ve had to let good lads go. Then the work comes back and there’s no way to get them back. That affects me. A lot of the lads are good friends. The business is at the mercy of the market. You just have to ride the waves.”
Since then, AK has competed internationally, including at the Scaffold Builders Competition in Las Vegas. The commercial return so far has been indirect. “There’s been no direct financial benefit yet, but doors have opened. It was about reputation and pride. As a small Manchester agency, representing the UK and Europe was a privilege.”
International competition reinforced one belief. “The reputation UK scaffolders have for health and safety is at the pinnacle,” he says. “It can make us slower at times, but I won’t jeopardise standards for speed. We practise until we can compete at that level without lowering our standards.”
His ambition for ScaffChamp 2026 is clear. “To bring more focus onto the competition and the trade, and to end the stigma scaffolders receive. Representing the UK is a huge privilege. I want to do us proud and bring some silverware home.”
The stakes were higher than just protecting systems. “We would be more open to cyberattacks, but we also risked becoming an irrelevance in the future,” he adds. “The world is moving faster all the time and the need for information in a world of AI has never been so critical.”
The technical delivery has been led by NASC technical manager Mark Collinson. He describes the previous landscape not as broken, but as inefficient. “It’s not that we didn’t have systems in place, it was the manual steps in between those systems that were time-consuming and frustrating, a download here or an upload there,” Collinson explains. “And every one of these manual steps was an opportunity for error.”
As NASC and CISRS grew, those inefficiencies multiplied. The larger the organisations became, the more time-consuming the manual steps and the greater the opportunities for error.
The new platform establishes what Collinson describes as a “single source of truth”—CISRS card details, NASC membership status, ePortal subscriptions and CPD records stored centrally with no conflicts between datasets. That consistency is not just administrative. It is what enables more advanced technology to work reliably.
At a practical level, they address familiar site issues, forgotten cards, damaged plastic, delays when training records change.
“People rarely forget their phones in the modern world, and it is a lot more difficult to counterfeit digital cards,” says Collinson. Physical cards are susceptible to damage and can quickly become illegible; five years in a scaffolder’s pocket is tough on plastic. Digital cards also benefit from device-level security such as biometrics, with updates made instantaneously when qualifications change.
More broadly, digital cards represent a move towards verified digital identity on site. Training, competence and access are linked in real time rather than relying on static checks. That alignment brings scaffolding closer to verification systems already common elsewhere in construction.
Artificial intelligence features heavily in construction marketing. Dickin is cautious about the rhetoric. “AI can be hyped, we’ve all heard the Terminator-style rhetoric, Sarah Connor should be worried and so on,” he says. “But AI is about accessibility.”
The real opportunity, he argues, lies in helping people find the right information at the right time, a trainee locating guidance within TG20 or TG30, a yard worker checking a critical safety note such as SG30 on a phone, a client asking better questions about risk. That requires structured, searchable data. Without it, AI is little more than a novelty.
