ECA chief operating officer Andrew Eldred and head of external affairs Jane Dawson said the government-funded courses could push potential electricians away and deepen the skills gap.

ECA has met with construction minister Sarah Jones to raise the issue and discuss how the money could better be used.

The college courses are meant to lead to apprenticeships. However, Eldred said fewer than one in ten of the 23,000 people a year who enrol on the courses progress to apprenticeships.

“In every part of the country, pretty much, the numbers on the classroom-based courses far outweigh the numbers starting the apprenticeships,” he said.

Nationally, the classroom-based enrolments to apprenticeship ratio start at about 3:1, but it rises to about 8:1 in London and 6:1 in Birmingham.

According to Eldred, around 8% of the course graduates progress into apprenticeships nationally. Eldred put the low apprenticeship numbers down to the courses being “mis-sold” as a direct route into becoming an electrician.

“If you go on any college website, they will present it as: ‘This is your route to progressing into becoming an electrician’. So, to a significant degree, I think there is scope to say this is being mis-sold,” he said.

He added that both the course funders and the students were being mis-sold.

Eldred estimated that taxpayers funded the classroom-based electrical courses with £70m in 2022/23. “How is that spending justified?” he said.

He added that mis-selling the courses also drove people away from doing an electrician apprenticeship, as they did not want to spend more time studying.

“Quite a lot of people end up disappointed – they had a higher expectation of what’s going to happen next,” he added.

He called for the money spent on the college courses to go towards other parts of the training industry, such as the apprenticeship standard. For example, the money could be used to pay tutors and assessors on the course closer to an electrician’s rate of pay.

The money could also be used for other training routes, such as Adult National Vocational Qualifications (NVQ), most of which are self-funded.

In August, research by ECA revealed that the industry needs 12,000 newly qualified electricians every year to meet increasing demand in England.