Labour’s homebuilding plans at risk from skills shortage, industry says

My grandad was a bricklayer and taught young apprentices as part of Margaret Thatchers controversial Youth Training Scheme.

I think there are two problems that need to be solved here

– Zero council housing is being built. Historically , when we were building *enough houses*, about half of the houses built were built by councils. [link](https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/10989/why-did-local-authorities-in-england-and-wales-stop-building-homes)

– As the article says there aren’t enough people working in the building trade *and many of those that do are greedy* – There’s no other meaningful explanation for the astronomical rise in house prices

The answer – Set out to build 250,000 council houses a year, as a YTS type programme of work, with young apprentices who work solely for the council.

There were warnings of a skills gap about twelve years ago. How long does it take to fill a skills gap? About seven years, if I remember. Great stuff.

Honestly I would love labour to go with a big reform movement on this and tackle multiple points at once.

Create a government owned building and training company.

Set up a large trades school (or several as needed) with on site living spaces which are free and advertise it as a national job that anyone can apply to (dont just go for 16 year olds either, allow people from poor backgrounds even in their 30s to retrain into the field if fit and able). Hell we got a bunch of unused military bases etc still owned by the government right? Convert those.

Invest in new building design development and “cookie cutter” prefab tech to have a few designs suitable for much of the country. Include as a baseline schools, pharmacies, corner shop designs! Dont just add to the local town size without the stuff thats needed with it.

Create several sub divisions of the company for regional building organisation.

When the apprentices get through the trade school, they are contracted to work for the state company for X years or must pay Y amount (to repay the state for training and a non compete, stops private sector poaching freely trained workers).

Having a prefab system if posible would mean that housing is done more centrally and easier/quicker to put up new houses, modular designs means that much of the work can be simplified too and reduce general cost.

Reform land buyouts so that ultra rich cant just charge out the nose for land and sell it off tiny bits at a time. However within this change the law around types of land being considered viable land for housing as well, for example the UK is facing a pilot training issue in the near future too which has gotten worse since aerodromes got redesignated for land use in housing, dont add to other systems failures.

Build mostly council housing, charging councils where possible only the cost of building the property and do not allow those properties to be sold off later. If a council is too poor to pay for them, it is subsidised by the state. Have something like 20-40% of the houses be on the open market for sale at a reasonable price factored into local income with a “locals first” policy, if a property fails to sell to locals for say, a year, it opens to non locals. High value property zones can then help to pay for the lower value property zones.

Disadvantage – long startup time, risk of a tory government coming in and shutting it down. Cost initially to install the system.

Advantage – increase in trade trained workers, steady supply of council housing, steady supply of “local first” housing, steady supply of builders/trade workers for private sector when their contracts are up to go on to build more higher end property/commercial/self employed routes.

People who would do very well as builders, plumbers, carpenters or electricians now have degrees in humanities or business instead and deliver pizza for a living.

Really feel like we should be plugging the skills gap by getting people trained up to utilise emerging 3D printing construction techniques, as recently seen in The Netherlands. Would be a way to future proof the sector as well as get more homes built faster

And who’s fault is that. Who didn’t train anyone and relied on cheap eu labour.
This a problem of their own making.