This is nowhere more starkly witnessed than in the Punch and Judy debate about National Insurance. It seems to me that this difference of opinion goes much further than simply an argument about tax. The recent support for a freeze in National Insurance has been backed by some of Britain’s biggest employers opposed to a ‘tax on jobs’. While I agree that all taxation on employment needs to be carefully considered – especially in these fragile financial times – there is an undercurrent to the current argument which should worry all of us in training and development.

The tax on jobs argument is a thin veneer for something oft repeated in different guises. Essentially the argument goes that wages in other countries – especially in developing economies and the former communist states in Europe – are much lower than in the UK. Therefore, the only way UKplc can compete with India, China, Poland and Slovakia is to cut our costs, and the biggest cost of all is employment. Anything which may reduce our ability to be a low cost producer, beating the emerging economies on price is necessarily a Bad Thing. Really? Is this the vision we need to reduce the deficit and return our economy to growth? 

Of course one of the costs of employing people is training them to do what needs to be done now and developing them for a future world which will need increasingly complex skills and more of them.

Surely a focus on a high skill economy would be a better global competitive strategy. And developing those high skills amongst the UK workforce will increase overall employment costs – and not by the proposed 1% of NIC increases, but by significantly more if we are to do the job properly. My experience is certainly that the employers who pay their people best tend to do more and better training. I don’t see a lot of innovative development at the minimum wage end of the employment market.

And strike me down, but maybe ring fencing some of our tax revenues for education and health so that we have the foundations for a capable workforce may be one of the ways of supporting a growing, high skill economy.

Trainers and people developers should be concerned that any argument which treats expenditure on people as a cost rather than an investment, represents the kind of thinking which ensures that training is one of the first casualties of so called efficiency drives when times are hard. 

I don’t know whether raising National Insurance is the right step, either economically or politically. What I do know is that the sight of business leaders clamouring to denounce any increase in employment costs on the grounds that it makes us uncompetitive is distinctly unedifying and potentially dangerous to our industry.