Lantra, the Sector Skills Council for environmental and land-based industries, announce recently that gardeners/landscape gardeners and groundsmen and greenkeepers are finally being recognised as separate occupational areas by the Office for National Statistics, thanks to feedback from industry.

 

Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) codes are used to classify workers into occupational categories in order to collect a variety of data. Up until now, many environmental and land-based sector job roles have been grouped together in one SOC code, including gardeners and groundsmen, which are currently categorised together making it difficult for the different skills needs of the job roles to be clearly identified.

 

Following feedback from industry, Lantra recommended, via the SOC 2010 Revision consultation, that the proposed SOC code of 'Gardeners and Grounds Keepers'

should actually be divided into two categories to reflect the different job roles. The first category would be gardeners/landscape gardeners and the second groundsmen and greenkeepers. In a positive move, the Office of National Statistics has now confirmed that this change will be implemented.

 

David Winn, Industry Partnership Manager for horticulture, landscaping and sports turf at Lantra, commented; "It is important that these very different professions are given separate SOC codes. Much official data is based on the codes and so by ensuring that they reflect the industry more closely we will be able to use this information more effectively to steer government policy, funding and training provision. The more data Lantra can access from official sources to combine with our own research, the stronger our evidence base is to identify skills issues, understand training requirements and call for action to meet these needs."

 

Neil Huck, Technical Director of BALI and Senior Contracts Manager for Ground Control, said: "We are really pleased with this result. The gardener/landscape gardener and groundsmen and greenkeeper professions are finally being recognised nationally which means the industry can take advantage of a whole range of national data. This can only benefit the industry as it will help improve our understanding of what skills are being used but also what is missing and so what we need to do to secure our future. To gain an understanding of how many people are employed in our sector would be immensely useful as it is constantly being understated at present."