Britain can’t build without a trades revolution
Both parties must address the woeful shortage of skilled labour or their promises of 300,000 homes a year are empty
In the coming general election campaign, 300,000 will be one of the magic numbers, constantly on the lips of candidates throughout the land: 300,000 is the number of new homes a year that everyone agrees needs to be built, to keep up with population growth and young people being able to find somewhere to live. It is the government’s target, although they have actually managed about 200,000 a year. In particular, 300,000 is the number Sir Keir Starmer is sworn to make reality by “bulldozing” through regulations and mandating new building on the green belt.
Yet the truth is that no one in the near future is going to be building 300,000 homes a year. Even if the green belt was declared to be a giant New Town, and Nimbyism was made illegal, and anyone who thought of putting up a house was instantly given planning permission, it is very unlikely that such a number could be reached. Regulations could be bulldozed, councils mandated to hit targets, developers forced to get on with it, and still there would not be 300,000 new homes per year. At present it is a fantasy.
This is because we do not have in this country the electricians, plumbers, bricklayers, plasterers, tilers, scaffolders, bathroom fitters and roofers who would be needed to build 300,000 homes every year. Their skills cannot just be conjured up, but need training and apprenticeships that can take years. They are the very skills that will also be in demand to retrofit existing homes with heat pumps, change cladding that should never have been installed, and work on big infrastructure projects such as HS2. And they are skills that we — we as a society, including industry and schools, as well as ministers of all parties — have not been producing in sufficient numbers for a long time.
Brexit has not helped: the number of construction workers from EU countries has fallen sharply. Last year the government had to put a wide range of building skills on the shortage occupation list to allow in more migrants with relevant expertise. Ministers have been busy trying to fill the obvious gaps in the nation’s skills, pushing forward with Institutes of Technology, announcing skills bootcamps and a local skills improvement fund, all of which are very good initiatives. They have tried for years to improve apprenticeships, with mixed results. But moving the dial on construction skills, and moving it quickly, will still prove very difficult despite all these efforts.
One reason it is so difficult is the great scale of the problem. The Construction Industry Training Board forecasts that an extra 225,000 workers will be needed by 2027. Kingfisher has estimated that the UK will lose £98 billion of output due to a shortage of tradespeople. An analysis of OECD data by the think tank Onward suggests that building and construction is the sector in which we have the biggest skills shortfall, with mechanical and engineering skills not far behind. By contrast we have a surplus of skills in clerical work, sales, accounting and human resources. The number of new, trained building workers would need to be many tens of thousands each year, particularly as one in five of the current workforce is over fifty.
Another reason is cultural. We have for decades celebrated a university education and looked down on practical but vital skills. In the Kingfisher survey, only 13 per cent of 16 to 25-year-olds said they had been encouraged at school to consider trade career options, even though 42 per cent of them would have liked more information on such roles before deciding on their career. Young women in particular are unlikely to be given encouragement or relevant information. Deep-seated attitudes in careers advice and teaching will need changing.
A further and crucial obstacle is the way in which a very small business actually works. Many people in this industry are sole traders. Training an apprentice for two years is a cost and commitment that may extend further than an order book, and for the apprentice means lower pay, for a time, than alternative jobs. To have some hope of filling the huge gap in future skills, government policies would need to change the incentives at this micro level.
Yet if policies could be drawn together of sufficient scale, reaching deeply into the nation’s culture and changing the calculations of sole traders, the prize is huge. Unlike many European countries where populations have begun to fall, Britain still has an expanding population, bringing investment in housing, energy and infrastructure if we can supply the skills. Those acquiring the right skills will have a job for life: however impressive artificial intelligence programmes become they will struggle to install the electrical wires in your bathroom, guarantee they are safe and connect the right wires to the fuse box. Such jobs will be better paid than the national average. They will generally be a source of pride and satisfaction — part of the answer to a YouGov finding in 2015 that 37 per cent of British adults said their jobs were meaningless.
We really ought to be able to crack this problem. Rishi Sunak talks passionately about skills and was doing so on Monday. The many fresh efforts by ministers need drawing together in a major national drive to equip the country for housebuilding and energy transition. The Labour Party no doubt has similar good intentions, but as it finalises its manifesto it will need to focus heavily on this issue if promises about houses are to have any credibility.
There is no shortage of ideas for what to do. More apprenticeships could be fully funded or allowed tax credits. A one-stop advice service could help tradespeople through bureaucratic complications. Schools could give much greater prominence to tradespeople, particularly to female role models. There could be a new national online platform for work experience, a social media campaign to highlight lifelong skills, virtual reality educational technology to inspire young people to be part of building things for the future, and a new employment brokering service for construction and trades.
All these and other proposals have been made by think tanks, employers’ organisations or MPs.
Everybody in Britain knows it can be difficult to find an electrician or plumber. In one survey, a fifth of respondents said they had postponed a project in their home because they could not find people to do it. It is one of the factors holding our economy back. Voters would welcome some big and serious answers in the party manifestos. And in the endless interviews and debates to come, no candidate should be allowed to claim they will build 300,000 homes a year without explaining where they will find the skills to do it.
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