Rayner’s housing plan at risk as construction sector warns UK does not have workers to build 1.5 million homes
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/house-building-targets-rayner-construction-workers-b2695971.html
Posted by insomnimax_99
Rayner’s housing plan at risk as construction sector warns UK does not have workers to build 1.5 million homes
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/house-building-targets-rayner-construction-workers-b2695971.html
Posted by insomnimax_99
48 Comments
want citizenship? come build your own home get an apprenticeship; problem solved – no idea why i’m not in government
Let me guess, the people paying the builders wages want more visas?
Sorry Polish, you were actually ok, polite and professional builders…come back please.
We can’t do it as there aren’t enough people trained and it will take years to train them, so, we need to bring in more people from abroad. Limiting the training opportunities in trades for people born in the UK.
5 years later, we still don’t have enough people trained and as the population has grown by millions due to immigration, we need to build even more houses, so, we need to bring more people in.
Rinse and repeat
In other news people are fired, unemployment is rising and jobs are being offshored to India.
Well, not builder jobs, of course.
Imagine if we had ties to a continent full of people who specialised in construction work, who could come over to the UK freely and work without any problems.
Might be time to push hard on more apprenticeships. Real investment in the British people.
Would be a great time to implement a scheme to encourage people to transition into building, given that I suspect a lot of office jobs will be cut in the next 4 to 5 years, but considering how poor at training we are generally I don’t think this will ever happen.
This is a great opportunity to push for more equity and diversity 😉
Everyone knew that how come the brains trust never
Who cares. Start building what you can and with what you have got and start training on those sites.
The results will far out match what has been done before. We have turned into a country of problem finders instead of problem solvers. We all know how fun it is to work with problem finders I am sure.
If only there was some sort of Labour market nearby where workers could easily come over to fill the gap
Hahaha the far right arent going to like the fact that we need Immigration to build houses. Maybe they should lend a hand and get off the dole.
Not enough trained people because we didn’t invest or saw no future in training people for this kinda work. Same in nursing and medical field. For now we will need to bring people in with the skills we need but we also must lay out plans to train people here to make up the shortfall in the long run.
We are taking in 1 million people per year from Africa, Middle east and south Asia. How do we not have enough productive workers?
There’s plenty of builders for large projects they’re just building apartments that are marketed in Asia.
This is the market of choice for big UK developers.
Read as:
We want to build the houses but don’t want to pay British workers a fair wage AND we don’t want to fork out to train young British kids useful skills.
Funny thing is, our Labour government under Ardern’s leadership made exactly the same error. It is surprising how little the leading Anglophone democracies, native speakers and readers all, somehow miss these vital lessons in policy-making. The NACT1 coalition in NZ is doing the same now with disguised PFIs for highways, behind the scenes privatisation of the health services, resource management disposals and overseas sales of national assets – all of which have either failed or succeeded only minority in other places like here, Australia and Canada. I say funny, but it’s not really, is it, when you discover your doctor’s surgery is part of a group owned by an American VC fund and is waiting until there is “no other way, but to put prices up” to protect their investments. Or as in the UK, people wake up one day to find the buy-to-let scheme offered by the local housing association is being bought up by the same US overseas outfit with absolutely no interest or plausible reasons other than protecting their investments, totally against the interests of the UK consumer. As in NZ, our governments have almost no idea what assets of national interest are owned by overseas entities, and have little or no idea of how to control or return these assets, like water and power companies, to the very pressing interests of the consumers, who by the way, are their constituents. Amazing, really.
Maybe it’s time to look at apprenticeships again, but make it a scheme where they pay a basic living wage (not slave wages) during the training period.
Offer them as a scheme from the job centre and it kills 2 birds with one stone!
We need to build millions of homes because so many people live here. We can’t build them because there aren’t enough people living here so we need to allow thousands more migrants to come here. They’ll need somewhere to live so we’ll need to build more houses but there aren’t enough people to build them so we’ll need more people…
Who could gave ever have seen this coming when construction and trade work was seen as something to push the bad lads towards. As we know only no hopers and stupid people go in to trade work while everyone with ambition and drive goes to uni and does a degree in something they’ll never use again
1.5 millions houses to build. Talk is cheap. But I still want to see where it’s going. So far it’s only 1 word. Talk is cheap
I know it’s a bit late but around about 2012 there was a raft of stories about an impending skills gap in pretty much every industry and how it takes about seven years to fill such a gap and, well, it’s nearly 14 years later and we never did a thing about it.
There’s a fuck load of young unemployed. Train them up.
Years ago, lots of people went to secondary modern schools because they weren’t academic for grammar schools but they were offered a direct route to vocational training at their local tech from which local building businesses recruited their apprentices. This meant the country had a steady supply of properly trained, and paid, tradesmen (they were back then, fact). The industry paid a levy to contribute to the cost. Thatcher came along and upended all that by removing the levies and privatising the colleges, a process which Blair continued.
This could be recreated but getting business to sign up and pay, building the colleges and properly managing the scheme will take years, more than a parliamentary term certainly.
Lots of British people who are supposed to be in workforce don’t work and would rather get benefits – Maybe they should look into that
We have to start somewhere.
The Tories promised house building in 2014, so they had many years to get started. They never started.
So it will take another 5 years to get going. Let’s stay now.
We also have an army of community members on standby to defend against eh… *checks paper*… HISTORIC HERITAGE!
Jokes aside I remember my town wanted to build flood defences to stop the town from flooding when there was heavy rain.
It was blocked because it would look ugly and our historic car park was at risk of losing a couple of spaces and its historic heritage passed on down by our ancestors.
Then there was a flood that drowned out a few houses, businesses, and pubs. People are okay with that lol. But not flood defences.
And the institute for apprenticeships brought in the end assessment which drove achievement rates down to less than 50% over 5 years. This week they announced they’re getting rid of it. A bit late
We got people for days. They just don’t want to train them for the policy to change in a couple years time
Train more people and pay good wages problem solved
> *”we need more immigrants to build houses for all the immigrants we need more of to build houses for all the immigrants we need more of to build the houses for all…”*
As a reminder, net migration is forecast to be responsible for *at least* 92% of our population growth by 2036. Although last year, UK deaths actually exceeded UK births, and net migration was the *sole* driver of population growth. This hadn’t been predicted by forecasts.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68139947.amp
But some people will tell you, with a straight face, that our housing shortage has nothing to do with immigration.
We need funding and subsidy in Learning, Locations and Supply.
1. A funded directed and targeted push to get people trained in construction skills. Learning. End result =1-10+ years of an industry that has the skills to build things.
2. Tax breaks on developing on brownfield sites, everything from Zero VAT builds to land clearance subsidy etc. Location. End result = The developers eat up awkward sites and don’t push greenfield development.
3. Subsidy on products throughout the supply chain with reduced VAT. Supply. End result = A more varied and adaptable supply chain.
Problem is the government want to allow large levels of immigration, throw Tax and VAT everywhere, not invest in training and then complain building is slow and there’s no people with skills or a supply chain that can absorb buying all those materials at full VAT rates. Yes some private sector people will earn good money and become rich – good, the benefits of that are homes.
Employers have historically not contributed to funding skills training in the UK, when compared to other European countries. This is just one of the many consequences of relying on foreign skilled workers and waiting for the government to fill the gaps.
Employers want skilled workers just as long as their not the ones to pay for it or work for it.
Turning the UK concrete.
We need to protect the Green belt –
– Build upwards in urban areas
– Ban overseas investors from holding properties not renting them
How about setting up some kind of….I don’t know….apprenticeship scheme, where you take young people and train them up for a smaller wager while they still live comfortably with parents or otherwise, then….get this…..after a few years you have fully skilled workers ready to build more houses, get well paid for their work and have a generation of brick layers, plumbers, electricians etc. Sound good.
The typical bullshit apathy.
Train people and offer career prospects and economic opportunity? Fuck that, let’s just never build anything! That’ll do the trick.
As a committed tech optimist, this is exactly the kind of problem that just will not exist in about 20 years
My cousins from Bangladesh can build the houses, if you give them the indefinite leave to remain after 5 years
I remember predicting this, another benefit of Brexit.
Let me tell you a secret about construction.
The construction industry hates building houses. There is an efficiency point where you maximise profit by just about building enough houses that you get as much money, while not diminishing demand.
Satisfying the markets need will never be the constructions industries goal, they want to starve it and drive prices up. I’ve worked on sites where we’ve put in all the infrastructure, drainage, parking etc. and then just pulled off. Prices aren’t looking too lot, we’ll just cancel this and come back to it in ten years.
Or jobs where we’ve put in a single strip of concrete to maintain planning permission, then back to sitting on the land for a decade to drive prices up.
No houses because we have 10 million migrants but theres not enough migrants to build more houses so import more migrants to build houses but theres not enough houses so we import more migrants to build houses but theres not enough houses so we import more migrants to build houses but theres not enough houses so we import more migrants to build houses but theres not enough houses so we import more migrants to build houses but theres not enough houses so we import more migrants to build houses but theres not enough houses so we import more migrants to build houses but theres not enough houses so we import more migrants to build houses but theres not enough houses so we import more migrants to build houses but theres not enough houses…
[Our green and pleasant land](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F9lskybvau6na1.jpg)
Music to my ears as a builder. Means my wages stay high.
Not being funny but how many of you commenting are tradies who actually know how hard it is to find a plumbers mate or even a labourer who shows up on time and isn’t completely useless?
It’s a great time for Starner to send young men off to die in Ukraine /s
Let’s ramp up apprenticeships, make them easier for companies to do.
And I think would be might see is construction workers getting pulled on to these new build that normally work in the residential market, because the money will be upped to bring them in, and suddenly the cost of residential construction work goes up
I wonder what happened to all those brilliant Polish contractors?
So industry body is saying there isn’t enough workers to build 1.5M over 5 years/300k per year up from roughly 0.9m over 5 years/190k per year (although covid figures may have supressed that). What do they think that a possible number of houses per year is possible at the moment? 200k/250k seems feasible if planning is cutback (maybe a trim of regulations) How long do they think it would take to train up an additional 50% employees (assuming we don’t want to go down the immigration route)? 4 years should be enough for some sectors so the year 2028-2029 we could surge ahead in number of properties completed.
Really the government should’ve consulted industry before promising such figures unless there’s something major that’s actually blocking them at present