Labour wants 1.5 million homes - but where are the builders?
17 February 2025, 15:01 | Updated: 17 February 2025, 15:23
The housing crisis touches every part of society. It’s caused by myriad challenges with no simple solutions or easy answers - as Angela Rayner is finding out.
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The construction industry has a crucial role in providing more people with safe, affordable homes. And, more broadly, to create the buildings and infrastructure in which we live our lives.
The government has ambitions to build 1.5m homes in the next five years, as well as dozens of infrastructure projects: the scaling up of nuclear power, refurbishing schools and hospitals, removing unsafe cladding and fixing roads and potholes. But so far, in all of their announcements, they haven’t sufficiently tackled the biggest issue facing the industry - recruitment.
It’s not to say that there is no merit in what Labour has suggested: making apprenticeships more flexible is something the industry has been calling for. The loosening of restrictions on planning and pushing back against NIMBYs all serve to make it easier to put stakes in the ground. But the question becomes: once projects are greenlit, who’s actually going to build them?
82% of construction businesses face recruitment issues. Over the next decade, the industry needs 937,000 new recruits, known as “the missing million”. Moving ahead with these construction projects without adequate recruitment leads to employee burnout and dangerous working conditions.
So what would I propose as a solution? In my role as Group CEO of the Considerate Constructors Scheme, I speak to a broad spectrum of people working across the industry. They all tell me the same thing: Once someone is interested in working in construction and starts an apprenticeship, they stay in the industry, having seen how fulfilling and lucrative a career path it is. The issue is getting people to take that first step.
A CCS survey found that the perception of construction is the most pressing recruitment challenge. Outsiders view it as hard, manual, low-skilled, low-paid labour. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Construction is one of the UK’s most diverse industries, blending creativity, technical expertise, and teamwork. Its reputation as just digging holes and lifting heavy things is unwarranted when, in reality, architects rub shoulders with manual labourers, electricians with social value managers, and civil engineers.
If the government wants to achieve the biggest building programme since the post-war period, it needs solutions to match its ambition. Financial incentives, educational outreach and public information campaigns are needed to recruit the next generation of builders to shape the country’s future.
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Amit Oberoi is the Group CEO of the Considerate Constructors Scheme.
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