Sir Keir Starmer pledged to bring back house building targets and make Labour the party of housebuilding should they win the next General Election. In December 2022, Rishi Sunak was forced to drop compulsory housebuilding targets due to a backlash from backbench MPs and Tory activists – stating the manifesto promise to build 300,000 homes a year in England by the mid-2020s is now advisory, not mandatory. Sequential Governments have repeatedly failed to hit their homebuilding targets, with a report from Make UK Modular saying that the traditional housebuilding sector needs to recruit 137,000 more workers just to hit the target by 2030.
However, whether it be battling against record material and labour prices, an historically small workforce, regulations that stifle the ability for builders to work, as well as being in the grips of a mental health crisis the construction industry is facing significant obstacles. Clive Holland, broadcaster on Fix Radio – the UK’s only national radio station for builders – explains what the UK must do to meet homebuilding targets, with a point of view from the trades.
Despite the UK avoiding a recession, as confirmed in the most recent Budget, the construction industry is still significantly hampered by a crippling skills deficit and record prices for materials. The latest Construction Skills Network report cites that the UK needs an extra 225,000 workers by 2027 to keep up with construction demand, the equivalent of 45,000 per year. Overwhelming work schedules, material shortages and new directives such as ULEZ have left hundreds of thousands of small businesses – equalling 27% of SMEs in the trade – on the verge of breaking point and collapse, a study from Fix Radio found.
Analysis of data from EU member states, the central EU database, Eurostat and the UK department for Business, Energy and Industry show that the cost of materials and labour for construction have increased more in the UK than the EU since Brexit. The data shows that the cost of construction materials including cement, timber and steel increased by 60% between 2015 and 2022. At the same time, the cost of labour in the UK went up by 30%. In the same time period, the cost of materials only increased by 35% in EU countries, despite similar pressures including supply chain issues.
Clive Holland, presenter at Fix Radio – the UK’s only national radio station dedicated to tradespeople – provides his insight on the current state of the construction industry:
“The government target of 300,000 houses to be built per year, even before COVID was extremely unrealistic for a couple of reasons. After Brexit, a lot of our support teams went back to their own countries, we didn’t have enough people in our industry, we’re already short of trades people as it is. Everybody except for emergency services, and the building industry, believe it or not, and trade associated trades, virtually stopped working during COVID, you know, 80% of the population were furloughed, and so on. So it was always going to be a tricky one, to try and get anywhere near that demand of 300,000 houses built.
“Now you’re in a situation where a lot of house builders have mothballed a lot of their sites because they can’t sell them due to rising interest rates. Lots of sites generally around the country would have been flooded with people buying off plan without even looking at the house.”
