Opinion piece by Mark Southgate, Chief Executive, MOBIE

Crisis, crisis, crisis!  We have housing, climate and biodiversity crises and the built environment has a labour crisis!  One on its own is difficult, all at the same time is a monumental challenge!

It won’t have escaped your notice that we are in the midst of a General Election. Housing features prominently in debates and Party manifestos.  This is welcome!  There is no longer an argument about whether we need to build more homes, just about how many we should build, with Labour committed to delivering 1.5 million homes over the course of the next Parliament, the Conservatives 1.6 million and the Liberal Democrats 380,000 per annum, or 1.9 million over a 5-year term.  The attention on housing is welcome, but one big question to answer is where is the workforce to build them coming from?  

If we are to deliver the new homes that we need, and to retrofit 27 million existing homes, to meet the environmental standards that we expect, then we are going to need a lot more workers with the right skills! To attract more young people, we need to tell a more compelling, modern, joined-up story about our industry.

However, we have a problem in the built environment. We do not have enough workers to build the homes and communities that we need, and this is compounded by the construction industry having an image problem.

Our industry is getting older. Mark Farmer’s report on the UK Construction Labour Model, ‘Modernize or Die’ (2016, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/construction-labour-market-in-the-uk-farmer-review) highlighted that “The real ticking ‘time bomb’ is the industry’s workforce size and demographic. Based purely on existing workforce age and current levels of new entrant attraction, we could see a 20-25% decline in the available labour force within a decade”.  This picture has not improved since he wrote his report. The most recent CITB Construction Skills Network report identifies that we need 251,500 additional workers, 50,300 per year, between now and 2028 to meet the expected levels of work in the industry. 

Young people are either not aware of the built environment or if they are aware of it, the construction industry has a negative image.   A poll by YouGov of 2000 members of the public for Deconstruction [link – https://www.thisisdeconstruction.com/] in 2023 found that 69% of adults would not contemplate working in the construction sector and even more worryingly, 77% of 18-24 year old full time students think the same.  52% perceive the sector to be dirty, 70% strenuous and 25% unsafe. 

Deconstruction founder Ryan Jones said “if we want to encourage new young people to enter the sector, we need to move past the hi-vis and hard-hat image that is the prevailing perception of the industry… In the sector we all know that there is so much more to construction with digital innovation, new technology, and many examples of high-quality engineering and building design improving the environment we live in.  We have to tell that story to a new generation and we have to tell it now”.  Spot on!   

Many of us who work in the built environment love our work and we take pride in the positive impact that we collectively have on people’s lives.  But, the sad fact is that our industry is invisible to many young people.  How can an industry that employs nearly 9% of the UK workforce and whose impact is literally visible in our daily lives be so little understood?  It is not good enough, it is time for change! 

Fishing in the same talent pool will not increase our labour force.  We need to attract a new cohort to our industry.  To do that we need to tell a better story – a compelling story about the positive impact that we have and how our industry is changing and modernising. 

The good news is that when we do bring it to the attention of young people, many are attracted by the work that we do.  MOBIE runs design challenges and workshops to introduce young people to the built environment and its role in delivering high quality homes, great places and sustainable communities.  We have a growing number of challenge entrants with no built environment background who go on to study a built environment discipline at college or university or join the industry because they like what they see.  They appreciate the positive impact that we have on people’s lives and our role in mitigating and adapting to climate change (nearly 40% of carbon emissions come from the built environment).  It is not that young people don’t want to work in our industry, rather they don’t know about the built environment and the range of jobs available. 

There is great talent out there just waiting to be engaged.  If we can engage them, they will be inspired.   Our most recent Design Future London design challenge with the Mayor of London engaged with hundreds of young Londoners who came up with an amazing range of design interventions to solve a problem in their local area using built environment solutions [https://storymaps.arcgis.com/collections/ec5b5490da0845bf836c3b74a81ee572].    

Many in the industry do engage with young people, but it is often piecemeal, there is no common narrative and the engagement is not always sustained.  We need a common built environment narrative that promotes our growing digital competencies, new technologies and approaches and sustainable building, alongside more ‘traditional’ elements of construction.  We need to simplify the range of roles and disciplines to make them more understandable and we need to clearly show routes to those roles. 

Most importantly, the scale of the challenge means that we must work together to find the workers that we need – there is no time for rivalries between different built environment professions nor different companies.  This demands a collective effort.  It’s all hands to the pump!

Now that the need to build more housing is finally receiving the political attention it deserves, we cannot afford for the aspirations of the various parties to build more homes to fail due to insufficient workers.  It’s time for industry to step up to the plate, to act collectively to ensure that young people know about our amazing sector and to provide them with the skills they will need to shape our future built environment.  MOBIE is ready to play its part, are you?

Ultimately, MOBIE wants young people to be part of a generational shift that helps us deliver our future homes and built environment – high quality, green, adaptable homes that promote wellbeing and are amazing spaces to live in.