What’s going on? The government seems to have woken up to the reality that it needs to listen to the construction industry. Last month it gathered more than 50 chief executives from across construction and planning to discuss how to unblock barriers to growth. It then appointed Mace-executive-turned-MP Mike Reader as its business champion for construction.
One message from the sector – on skills – was finally delivered in February. As the title indicates, Mark Farmer’s 2023 Industry Training Board (ITB) Review was somewhat overdue. But it makes essential reading. Farmer’s wide-ranging conclusions are as much a follow-up to his 2016 report Modernise or Die as a bureaucratic organisational analysis. One of Farmer’s crucial points is that the skills crisis faced by the industry is often misunderstood.
It has become an oft-repeated mantra that the construction industry struggles to attract talent. But Farmer believes things are more complicated, pointing at data showing that almost a third of post-16 construction trainees never find sustained work within the sector.
“The argument that the sectors cannot attract enough new talent is partially undermined by a conclusion that we have a potentially captive pool of young people who are at least initially near to our industry but who we are in part failing for whatever reason to bring into employment,” he says.
Employers, he concludes, are failing to offer work experience or employment partly due to the burden on other workers who are needed to train and mentor the new recruits. In an industry built on paring costs to the bone, this unrecognised (and unfunded by grants) drag on productivity provides a disincentive for firms to recruit freshly qualified talent.
Mace boss Mark Reynolds picked up the ‘absorption’ theme in a BBC radio interview. His message to government was unambiguous. The construction industry can find the people to deliver the government’s growth agenda. But, he said, it is only realistic to take them onto the payroll if firms are given workload certainty via a robust pipeline of projects.
It’s a skills crisis, then, but not as we’ve known it. Reynolds’ thrust might remind older hands of the days when government policy actively aimed to provide stability of work to the industry.
That world, of course, was swept away during the 1980s. But, if it’s truly listening, maybe ministers will realise that targeting greater certainty for the industry to invest is a win-win. Not just for the sector, but for itself and for the country.
