Construction Skills: “If We Build It, They Will Come”.

Anyone attending the launch of the University of the Built Environment (formerly the University College of Estate Management) a couple of weeks ago would have been struck by the sheer enthusiasm of the academics, employers and supporters gathered there. It was a great event, celebrating the tremendous work of the university in delivering the high level skills needed by the Construction Industry. With the target of building 1.5 million new houses a key plank of the government’s agenda, specialist institutions like UBE are now crucial to success, and it’s no surprise that their Vice Chancellor, Ashley Wheaton, is part of the new Construction Skills Mission Board. It’s a sign of the importance the government attaches to this initiative that not only Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner attended the first meeting of  the CSMB, but also Skills Minister Jacqui Smith, Work & Pensions Minister Liz Kendall and Industry Minster Sarah Jones.

City & Guilds have just issued a report, “Foundations for the Future”, which explores the skills challenge that will need to be met if we’re to have any chance of hitting the government’s ambitious house building target. It also serves as a salutary reminder of the scale of the skills challenge we face in many industry sectors. Skills ecosystems are elaborate and intricate things. Within Construction there are several distinct sub-sectors - house building, commercial property, civil engineering, refurbishment and maintenance  – all needing skilled workers from bricklayers, carpenters and site supervisors through to professional planners, surveyors and architects.

The report sets out the daunting task ahead. City & Guilds’ recent surveys have found that 54% of employers are not confident that the house building targets will be met, with 76% struggling to recruit skilled workers. Skills shortages are also hobbling the effort to train new talent, with a chronically high vacancy rate within Construction teaching. Despite the enormous political effort going in, and the £600m or more of additional funding being devoted to expanding Construction training, there is a real risk of falling some way short of the government’s ambitions.

The problem has deep roots. From the beginning of this century the UK’s Construction workforce became increasingly dependent on migrant labour, mostly from countries new to the EU. Between 2001 and 2020 the number of migrant workers in the industry more than doubled, from 5% to nearly 11%. In London, they represented 46% of those employed, and across the country as recently as 2022, 36% of those in professional and technical roles and 37% of those in managerial roles were non-UK born individuals. Since Brexit, it’s proved impossible to replace the shrinking number of recruits from overseas with home-grown talent, leading to the present crisis.

Given the familiar anti-immigration mantra of “they’re taking our jobs!” the departure of foreign workers should theoretically have opened the door to an influx of local recruits, but this simply didn’t happen. In retrospect this is not surprising. As the education system pivoted towards a more and more academic curriculum, the sort of subjects that might have supported previous generations of young people into learning practical skills -  woodwork, metalwork, technical drawing – disappeared from the timetable while at the same time careers advice focused increasingly on getting to university to the exclusion of everything else. Like many others working in FE Colleges at this time, I experienced at first hand the fact that most schools considered Construction apprenticeships only suitable for their lowest-performing and most demotivated pupils. The Construction industry, it seems, has been seen by too many as the place for the under-achieving and disaffected. The City & Guilds report rightly identifies the negative perception of the Construction industry in the school sector as a major barrier to meeting the skills challenge.

Construction is not the only industry to have experienced this combination of problems: the situation is similar in Hospitality, Adult Care, Food Production, and several other vital sectors. Across large swathes of our economic landscape, we face the task of rebuilding a national skills training system that has been hollowed out over decades by a combination of government policy and short-term economic logic. Why would employers invest in training when they have ready access to a European labour market filled with highly motivated workers prepared to accept lower wages and poorer working conditions than their British counterparts? Why would schools put any effort into promoting careers which don’t require university degrees when their performance is judged primarily on their exam results and the numbers of pupils progressing to higher education? Why would individuals want careers in industry sectors seen as having low status, low wages and arduous working conditions?

The headline message of the City & Guilds report is clear: to achieve the government’s target is going to require sustained effort and a lot more funding. The report makes sixteen recommendations, all of them sensible and well-focused, to which I would add one further suggestion; given the high cost of training new recruits from scratch, it would be worth looking in more depth at the potential for re-skilling workers from other related industries – such as manufacturing – and systematically up-skilling existing workers in the sector through new mechanisms such as the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, when it launches next year.

Solving the Construction skills crisis will be a test case for tackling the full spectrum of the UK’s training needs. We need to rebuild a national skills training ecosystem that has been neglected for decades, and trust that, as in the film “Field of Dreams”, “if we build it, they will come.”