Skills to Build

Britain needs more builders – and fast.

To build 1.5 million homes, upgrade the existing housing stock, and begin work on a new generation of national infrastructure, the construction industry will need to recruit hundreds of thousands of new entrants. Building 1.5 million new homes alone, a manifesto commitment, will require an additional 161,000 workers – rising to over 239,000 once factoring in wider projected demand by 2030. Some forecasters put the true figure at one million.

This scale of recruitment is unprecedented and will be a monumental challenge for the construction industry. Skills shortages already cripple the sector, and thousands of workers are on the cusp of retiring. Yet, our nation’s future economic growth depends on it.

Analysis by the CSJ shows that the proportion of workers aged 65 and over in construction has tripled since 2008, with over one in three workers now over the age of 50, compared to just over one in four at the time of the 2008 financial crisis. By 2050, the average age of a construction worker is projected to hit 46.4. An older generation is keeping Britain building.

As the workforce has aged, younger entrants have dwindled in number. There are two fifths fewer 16–24-year-olds working in construction than there were in 2008, a fall of over 150,000. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, there are over 30,000 fewer 16–24-year-olds in the industry
As the workforce has aged, it has also contracted sharply. Construction employment has fallen to its lowest proportion of total UK employment in over 100 years, since the decades preceding and following the Great Depression. There are over half a million fewer construction workers today than at the time of the global financial crisis in 2008, and over a quarter of a million fewer than before the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit. The workforce has concurrently aged and diminished in size, a phenomenon described as a “destructive ‘hollowing out’” that has led to declining structural resilience.