Labour’s 1.5m new homes pledge at risk as UK short of 25,000 bricklayers
Labour’s 1.5m new homes pledge at risk as UK short of 25,000 bricklayers
Posted by JayR_97
Labour’s 1.5m new homes pledge at risk as UK short of 25,000 bricklayers
Labour’s 1.5m new homes pledge at risk as UK short of 25,000 bricklayers
Posted by JayR_97
48 Comments
Have they considered switching to flats which are far more efficient in terms of labour to units produced?
And the rest. Seems we’re short of plumbers, electricians, roofers, you name it.
Perhaps if we didn’t open the flood gates to cheap labour from the EU, and then stopped attracting future British generations into construction we wouldn’t be in this position. Thinking we could rely on cheap labour forever was always going to be disastrous.
Hmm.
Now, if only we had a Labour govt in power, we could begin moving towards forcing companies to train folks at home before importing foreign skill base. That way, we could help folks make a decent living again *and* fill shortages without worrying solely about being able to siphon money off for private entities…
Oh… wait. We do.
Well, good.
Maybe we should start publishing stories on that then, and stop pushing negativity like it’s crack, eh?
Do we really need 1.5m new homes that start at £270,000. It’s often the poorer people in society that are struggling to find houses, you know the ones that can’t afford to buy new builds. Maybe renovate all the boarded up terraced streets and make them council owned again, less brickies needed
Stop the bs then and make it attractive for young British lads to get into bricklaying and construction. Strong apprenticeships programmes, good rates of pay etc put your money where your mouth is and stop talking
Trades should be taught in schools, it should be an option that kids can pick.
Give them 5K tax free once they’ve qualified and been in the job for a year.
If only we had a group of young, motivated people who could train to work in these jobs. Imagine if some, or most, of those people had even travelled thousands of miles to get here and would actually do good work and fill the void, instead of being used as political footballs.
Once Morrisons goes in to administration, we could build multiple tower block flats at their store’s location
Given the quality of some homes built by the likes of Persimmon I’m surprised they even use actual brickies!
Just build modular homes (Ilke etc) that don’t require bricklayers?
You don’t need bricklayers to build houses in the 21st century 😀.
Time to train some up then. We know what number we need time to do a get britain building campaign, encourage people to take up the trade.
Ill come back to plastering for…£35 an hour any takers?
All those tradies currently picking and choosing jobs and charging insane rates are *desperate* to train a raft of cheap labour.
If we hadn’t pushed the higher education scam in the 00s maybe we’d have more.
I did two years at a Shoreditch college to be a plumber. In fact I did it twice because the first years the teacher didn’t show up.
The next time they had us signing off on practical work that we didn’t do.
Turns out that something like 5% of people who successfully complete the 4 year course go on to work in plumbing.
Then they say we have to bring in workers.
The absolute disrespect of showing up every morning to have your time wasted.
But this is also not Labour’s fault. It was the Tories that gutted apprenticeships and told Eastern European tradies to go home/stopped them coming over here. The Tories are why we will never reach housebuilding targets because they never wanted us to do so.
Train our own citizens? Or import a load of shoddy builders and tradesmen from third world countries? Ooh I wonder which one they’ll go for lol
People don’t seem to grasp the fact that working any trade is physically demanding and generally the rates of pay are crap. What’s appealing about crawling through dirty lofts, breathing in shit your whole life, getting cold and wet on site, wrecking your back and knees etc etc.
Until pay improves there will always be a shortage.
what if we *didn’t* build the same shite ugly brick semi-detached houses that we’ve been building for the last 15 years?
there are many other methods to building.., some of which even come with the advantage of not creating car-dependent deserts!
Turn the problem into an opportunity. There’s so much work to be done in this country that the incentives for working in trades in terms of prosperity and regular work can lead to a boom in people going into it. There was a push when I was growing up of higher education being the golden ticket and I went to university too. Encouraged by my dad (plumber) and grandfather (handyman) who also made sure I’d had at least enough of a DIY skillset that if I wanted to retrain I could have some confidence and if not at least I should know enough to handle things myself. But I’m no expert. Not licensed. I’m not going to tell an electrician how to do his job. And I commend those who do because it’s tough work but incredibly rewarding.
There is no chance they are building that many homes. In fact the home building market has already collapsed.
Labour might as well have promised to build 15 million houses because they had about as much chance of delivering on that as they do on the 1.5 million pledge.
Sounds like an easy way to create jobs, no? Win win?
This thinking is all backwards.
We don’t need bricklayers. We live in a temperate climate with 0 natural disasters.
What we need is new tech like 3d printed housing, and timber frame prefabs that can fix the issue in a timely manner, at a low cost, and without training a bunch of people just in time to be made redundant.
Of course there’s not enough builders, that’s entirely the point. If you’re not building houses you don’t have bunch of house builders just sitting around. If you create demand and start trying to build houses, the house builders will come.
Maybe a silly question, but why not focus on affordable, sustainable and safe modular housing – without the need for brick layers?
Plenty of young people want to work in construction. The problem is there is no route in for them. They go to college for a starter course then get told to apply for apprenticeships but there aren’t enough
It’s a disgrace
When people see the comparison between cushy office jobs with “chill rooms” climate control, coffee machines, cleanliness or dirty cold back busting finger breaking building sites where you are treated like shit and paid averagely I’m not surprised there’s a shortage.
In the last 2 years there was over 1.2 million arrived to the UK. And none were tradies?..
Tends to happen when there’s no apprenticeships for the last 15yrs
they need to cut the school-uni pipeline. Trades are screaming and degrees are saturated.
We got the beams, we got the foundation, we got the columns, we got the walls. But we not got the Builders!
So we’ll have to shut the new homes off.
Praise the lord!
Silly question probably, but why are so many houses made from brick in the UK? In North America hardly any are made from brick. If we need a lot of houses now, and we’re short of bricklayers, why can’t we adapt the building methods?
Is this the result of Tony Blair’s policy to have more children go to university? And also the result of looking down on people who don’t go to university?
And if we import people, won’t they just add to the housing crisis?
Whoever would have thought ? I have had three sons and two grandsons who all wanted to get into the building trade. The trouble they all had getting apprenticeships and then jobs is ridiculous. There is no easy route from college to work, no incentive for builders to take on and train youngsters.
Probably should have done a feasibility study before proclaiming this…
Well, if you can have fake doctors “PAs” in GP practices, why not have fake bricklayers? How would we call them?
It’s almost like they all left and went back to Europe for some reason….
>Apprentices receiving only four hours of practical training per week
So what are they doing the other 30 odd hours?
Which means they’ll be put up like shit and fall down as fast as
I’m 60 now, but there was a time when the government paid small and large companies to take on younger people on an apprenticeship. That’s how they started out and got good training. Yes, some firms took advantage and used them for cheap labour, but they must have a way of checking on them.
Stop the big developers building and selling apartments in advance to Chinese investors, balance out Right to Buy and build decent property marketed to U.K. residents and you have a chance of managing this. There plenty of builders about believe me.
The other side of the problem is all leading parties will just Import more foreign nationals to be builders who will necessitate more housing and they’ll still be behind on infrastructure. More is not the answer, a properly managed housing solution is.
Good time to be a brickie then. This is what prices are for.
I’d be open to training as a brick layer if I could work with a group of people that don’t make offensive jokes, tease too much and could be guaranteed that I wouldn’t be required to drive a vehicle.
Don’t worry! Prince William is on it.. he said he was gonna end homelessness forever
Can we try some more modern and efficient construction methods?