Every spring a letter arrives from a body called CITB, and it says you owe them money. Accounts pay it the way they pay the insurance renewal — on time, with a sigh, and without anyone asking what it actually buys. The same month, in the same office, someone books two lads onto a telehandler course and pays the training provider full price. Nobody connects the two events.
They are the same event.
The tax you forgot you pay
CITB is the Construction Industry Training Board, a training body set up by statute in the 1960s to keep skills flowing into the industry. It is funded by a levy on construction employers, and the levy is not a subscription you can cancel. It works like a small payroll tax: the rates are set by an order that goes through Parliament every few years, and if you’re a registered construction employer above a certain size, you pay.
The sums are simple enough. You pay 0.35 per cent of what your payroll staff earn, and 1.25 per cent of what you pay your net CIS subcontractors. CIS — the Construction Industry Scheme — is HMRC’s system for taxing subcontractors: when you pay a subbie, you normally deduct tax at source and pass it to HMRC, unless HMRC has given that subbie gross payment status, meaning they’re paid in full and settle their own tax. The levy only touches the net-paid ones. Small firms are out of it altogether — a wage bill under £150,000 pays nothing, and up to £499,999 pays half.
A mid-market firm is not out of it. Run £2 million of payroll and £1.5 million of net subcontractor payments through those rates and the bill lands around £25,000. Every year. Most MDs I ask can quote their insurance premium to the pound. Very few can quote their levy.
The money that’s meant to come back
Here is the half of the arrangement everyone forgets. The levy exists to fund training, and CITB pays grants back to employers who do it — money towards apprenticeships, qualifications, and plant tickets, the certificates that let someone operate a digger or a telehandler. You paid in; you’re entitled to draw out. CITB says grant money usually arrives within four to six weeks of a claim being approved.
But notice the asymmetry. The levy collects itself — the assessment arrives, accounts pay it, done. The grant does not claim itself. To get money back you must be registered, have your returns up to date, know which courses qualify, apply, and show evidence. One direction is automatic. The other is paperwork — and in any firm where nobody owns that paperwork, the money flows one way.
January made it harder
From 8 January 2026, CITB pulled most short courses out of its grants scheme. Short-course money now runs through something called an Employer Network — a local group of firms with a CITB adviser attached, where you agree funded training before you book it, out of a budget that is set annually and is not guaranteed. When it’s gone, it’s gone. CITB will put in up to half the cost of eligible courses, health and safety training is funded at 30 per cent of the average market rate, and first aid gets nothing at all now. Apprenticeships, qualifications from Level 2 to 6, plant and scaffolding courses still attract grants the old way.
Strip out the scheme names and the change is this: the money moved from firms that fill in forms afterwards to firms that plan ahead. If training in your firm happens the usual way — a ticket is about to lapse, so the office books the nearest course on the Tuesday before — you now pay full price. The firm up the road with a training plan and an adviser’s number pays half.
Why you never see the money
Ask yourself where training lives in your business. I’ll guess: a card in a wallet, a certificate that’s a PDF in the inbox of someone who left last year, an invoice coded to “sundries”, and a spreadsheet with a tab called Training, last touched in the autumn. Three questions. What did we spend on training last year? What did we claim back? What could we have claimed? If nobody in the building can answer all three inside an hour, the grant money was never really available to you. You just didn’t know it.
The levy return itself — the form you must send CITB every year, even when you owe nothing — is the same problem wearing a different hat. It wants your total payroll, and it wants your subcontractor figures, which come straight off the CIS300s — the monthly returns you already file with HMRC listing what you paid each subbie. New for 2026, it also asks what you paid labour agencies and umbrella companies, dug out of the purchase ledger — research only, no effect on your bill, but compulsory all the same. A firm with clean records does the whole return in an hour. A firm without spends days on archaeology. And if you don’t file at all, CITB estimates your levy for you — an estimate that may be higher than the truth — and unfiled returns block your grants entirely.
A register, not a platform
The fix is the same shape I keep describing on this blog. A register. One screen: every operative, every ticket and its expiry, every course booked, what it cost, which funding route it went through — grant, network, or your own pocket — and whether the claim has been made and paid. Feed it the payroll and CIS totals you already produce for HMRC and your levy return figures fall out of the bottom as a by-product. That is weeks of work for someone who builds software properly, not a ten-module platform with a training add-on.
Some readers shouldn’t bother. If your wage bill is under £150,000 you’re exempt anyway — send the return, pay nothing, move on. If you train three people a year, a spreadsheet is fine; just put someone’s name on it. And if you already sit in an Employer Network with a live training plan and an office manager who claims everything on time, you have solved this — don’t let anyone sell you software for a problem you don’t have.
But if the levy line in your accounts is real money going out every spring, and nobody can point to the line where any of it came back, that’s the kind of thing I look for when I audit a firm’s admin. It’s usually an hour’s conversation to find out. Get in touch.