Labour party conference: builders of the future
Researcher
Labour have set themselves the ambitious target of building 1.5 million homes by the end of the parliament. To achieve this multiple barriers need to overcome, not least the perennial question of planning reform and NIMBY anti-housing opposition. But perhaps most pertinent is the construction sector’s skills shortage, with estimates suggesting that that there will be a need for more than 250,000 extra construction workers by 2028. We cannot build homes without skilled construction workers.
Minister for Industry Sarah Jones joined us for a private roundtable to explore how Labour plans to fill the construction sector’s skills gap.
Three key points stood out…
1) There is an urgent need for apprenticeship reform. Apprenticeship numbers have been falling, the Apprenticeship Levy has been underspent and construction firms have born the double cost from both the Apprenticeship Levy and the CITB levy. Attendees were cautiously optimistic about Skills England but the specifics on how it will link into the construction sector needs to be spelled out. Consideration also needs to be given to how to ensure that there are enough teachers and training is sufficient. To build homes to the environmental standard required to reach Net Zero there needs to not only be more workers but more skilled workers.
2) Improving training will not be enough if people are not attracted to construction as a career. Attendees argued that they and government need to be a better job of emphasising the positives of the industry, for example the pay and how exciting the work can be. This starts in schools. All too often a career in construction is framed as an option of last resort – rather than treated as a valid, positive career choice – and there is a serious lack of understanding about how one would start an apprenticeship compared to how one would start university.
3) Underpinning the two previous points is how to expand diversity in the construction industry. Less than ten per cent of construction workers are from ethnic minority backgrounds and less than one in five are women. Without addressing this reliance on a limited pool of people skills shortages will remain. The answer to this, linking into the previous point, could be as simple as actually advertising construction as a career choice. Many construction workers join the industry via ‘word of mouth’. If you are a young woman from an ethnic minority background chances are that you do not know someone already in construction and thus will not consider it as a career path. This urgently needs to change.