TEU president Tom Ryan holds the viewpoint that due to recent moves by the Plumbing, Gasfitting, Drainlaying & Roofing Industry Training Organization (ITO), quality of trades education, and ultimately the safety of the public, are under threat.

In recent times, ITO has been stressing on polytechnics to decrease the length of study for plumbing theory from 22 weeks to 11 weeks.

Dr Ryan said: "When plumbing lecturers have insisted on maintaining standards, the ITO has threatened to shift programmes and students from highly regarded public providers, such as Unitec, to a private provider set up by an ITO proxy. This threatens the quality of education received by our next generation of plumbers."

Dr Ryan further explained that student-plumbers spend time learning about crucial safety issues, such as hot water systems under the current system and later this learning is repeated and reflected upon. Under the ITO's new scheme, they will look at each segment of skills once only. Halving their learning time is not safe for these trainee trades people, and it's not safe for the rest of the people as well.

It is said: "The ITO does not even have NZQA approval for this proposal. Its job should be to ensure education and safety standards, but instead it is setting up its own private provider to compete against a public polytechnic with a first-class track record in the field. The ITO also is offering current Unitec plumbing students $2000 to swap from the higher quality course to their shorter one."

It has been noted by Tom Ryan that during 1990s, the similar corruption of established standards in trade's education appeared in New Zealand. This led to major shortages of properly trained tradespeople in the country and in Australia, and de-recognition of recent New Zealand trades' qualifications.