Whatever emerges from two separate investigations into last year’s privatisation of City & Guilds, the transfer to new owners is a done deal. The qualifications arm of the 148-year-old vocational education charity – with a royal charter granted by Queen Victoria – is now the property of a Greek-owned business, PeopleCert, with plans to cut costs and replace UK jobs with cheaper staff abroad. One of the biggest, best-regarded non-profits in England’s further education (FE) sector has thus been turned into an international brand that shares the name of the charity that sold it – now rebadged as the City & Guilds Foundation.
Ministers appear not to have been paying attention when this momentous decision was taken by trustees (neither City & Guilds nor the other awarding bodies were mentioned by name in last year’s skills white paper). The sell-off was not debated in parliament. But the deal is belatedly under the spotlight after the Guardian revealed that senior City & Guilds staff, including the chief executive, Kirstie Donnelly, and the chief financial officer, Abid Ismail, received huge bonuses (£1.7m and £1.2m) when the deal went through.
