David Barnes, head of policy and public affairs at the Chartered Institute of Building, examines the government’s drive to tackle construction’s skills shortages
Over the past year, voices across the construction sector have increasingly urged the government to take meaningful action to address the construction skills gap. In recent
months, it seems this feedback has finally been taken on board.
The UK government has made a wave of recent announcements aimed at tackling the chronic shortage of skilled workers in construction. These announcements mark one of the most concerted attempts in years to address this challenge, so it is a suitable time to take stock and evaluate what the government’s plans are for construction skills.
A monumental challenge
At the centre of this drive is the newly launched Construction Skills Mission Board, co-chaired by the Construction Leadership Council’s Mark Reynolds and deputy prime minister Angela Rayner. The board’s creation marks a renewed emphasis on industry-led skills development at scale – a welcome move that suggests the government is looking to work more closely with industry to boost construction capacity.
The new board has set a monumental objective of recruiting 100,000 additional workers in the industry a year by the end of this parliament.
While the specifics of how this target will be achieved are yet to be determined, the board has set out to focus on five areas: providing confidence for employers to invest;
creating new entry pathways; improving training access; simplifying funding; and ensuring career reliability.
The board has its work cut out with the range of complex challenges it will need to effectively address to grow the workforce, such as low retention of construction trainees.
However, if pulled off successfully, addressing these five areas could transform the way we approach construction skills nationally.
The board will work in tandem with the new body Skills England, which recently published an assessment of the construction skills base.
In its focused assessment, Skills England has set three priority areas where it envisions it can help improve the construction skills base: modularised apprenticeship provision; a better offering of CSCS cards to those leaving further education; and allowing the new Skills & Growth Levy to be used more flexibly to fund training.
These changes will not be sufficient alone to transform the construction skills pipeline, but they can play a role if the Construction Skills Mission Board goes further in delivering
a comprehensive plan to tackle the complex barriers to growing the skilled construction workforce.
Promoting construction careers
The government has also announced it will be focusing on promoting construction careers as a part of its broader mission to get unemployed people into work. This will involve improving advice related to construction careers delivered by job centres and funding a number of work experience placements for those looking to get into work.
These are positive steps, but to ensure a more sustainable pipeline, similar efforts must be made to engage young people at school age. Our recent report, Attitudes Towards Construction Careers, found construction sector roles did not feature in careers advice for almost half of young people while they were in education.
With a generally low awareness of young people on the breadth of construction careers available, there is a clear opportunity to better promote construction careers to younger generations who are making key decisions about their future.
A welcome aspect of this drive to get people back into work is that the government has said it will take into account professional and managerial roles in construction.
Professional roles are vital to delivering construction projects at all scales, and more of a focus on this aspect of the construction workforce will be necessary. CITB’s recently published Construction Workforce Outlook 2025-29 reports that while there is a gap in skilled tradespeople, there is a greater gap across professional, managerial and office-based roles in construction.
Nonetheless, building up a skilled workforce in these areas will take time. Even with efforts to train people in these fields, the industry will be flooded with inexperienced
workers that do not hold the sufficient skills, knowledge, experience or behaviours to deliver more complex or larger projects. This is an issue left unaddressed in recent announcements, and the government must carefully consider a lack of experience in its efforts to rapidly grow the workforce – especially in an era with greater emphasis on industry competence.
Unless you are a senior Labour politician, you are unlikely to agree that the target of 1.5m homes this parliament can be achieved. However, these genuine efforts to tackle the construction skills challenge head-on will hopefully support this rate of housebuilding in the longer term.
Crucially, recent announcements demonstrate a greater openness at the highest levels of government to engage with the realities of the construction industry and its capacity to deliver the government’s building plans. There is a growing recognition that policy must be coordinated and responsive to industry if we are to “get Britain building” at the scale demanded.
Though only time will tell on the effectiveness of these interventions, it is exciting to see the government get started on this long-overdue transformation of the construction skills landscape.
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