Shortage of Construction Workers Poses Huge Threat to Hitting House-Building Targets

It’s all very well for the Government to set ambitious house-building targets – as long as there are sufficient construction workers to actually build them.

According to a report by Randstad Construction, Property & Engineering, hitting the Government’s target of building one million new homes by 2020 means creating one million more construction jobs within five years. If your maths is as good as ours, you’ll know that equates to one new worker per house, which begs the question: where are all these workers going to come from?

Making headway with the house-building drive has already been met with complaints from the construction industry due to a lack of skilled staff. When the financial crisis hit the UK a few years ago, thousands of top tradesmen had to find alternative work and many of them moved abroad.

Fast forward a few years and those top tradesmen haven’t returned, leaving skills gaps in their wake. The situation doesn’t appear to be getting any better; even the Federation of Master Builders (FMB) have said that the skills shortage is becoming more acute rather than improving.

If skills are already in short supply, it’s difficult to see how the Government can be confident that all of these new workers will be found and trained to a high enough standard to fulfil the desired build quota, especially because apprenticeships are falling short of requirements.

The Randstad Construction, Property & Engineering report highlighted a need for an additional 100,000 carpenters, 89,000 plumbers, and 27,000 bricklayers. Those are not paltry numbers. It also calculated that there were currently just under one million workers in the house building trades and professions working towards completing 148,000 new homes in 2015.

Randstad’s managing director, Owen Goodhead, commented: “Doubling the rate of house building will mean at least doubling the workforce involved. The housing crisis is a skills crisis too. That means a practical challenge for workers as much as it is a conceptual issue for politicians.

“Employers will need to prepare as carefully as planning departments, and we need to lay the foundations of a skilled workforce as much as we need foundations in concrete.”

Brian Berry, the FMB’s chief executive, said: “It’s vital that we change the perception of what a career in construction entails, so that we can start to attract more young people into our industry and redress the loss of skilled people we experienced during the economic downturn.

“At the same time we need to boost the number of construction apprentices. Micro companies employing fewer than ten employees train around 50% of all construction apprentices which means the Government needs to create a business environment that allows such companies to thrive.”

For more information about how this shortage could affect your plans as a landlord, get in touch with us here at LegalforLandlords on 0333 577 9050.