DEBATING WHAT CONSTRUCTION NEEDS

Speaking at the Labour Party Conference, Sarah Jones MP, whose official role is minister of state for industry and decarbonisation and has a brief that includes construction, infrastructure and green jobs, said:

“My role is to hear what industry needs and advocate for that in policy discussions with colleagues”.

This industry will be particularly important to a government that has put construction at the centre of its growth agenda. It has started working towards an industrial strategy to help provide industry with greater certainty and has already taken actions to ease planning restrictions on green energy and set out plans to reform and resource planning systems more widely as it seeks to increase house building to 1.5M homes over five years.”

However, Jones was at pains to point out that such significant ambitions did not mean that the government was unaware of the challenges faced.

“If we don’t nail the skills issue, we will struggle,” she said, before setting out some of the longer term thinking that government hopes will help with this and other challenges.

“The industrial strategy will provide a backbone – offering certainty and the shape of ambition for investors. We want to put local authorities on longer term funding cycles too. This should provide longer term funding visibility and pipeline visibility so that companies can invest and invest in skills.”

Jones also pointed out that some of the skills challenge can be tackled by helping more people see just how good careers in the sector can be. Reflecting on her time helping to deliver the Olympics in 2012, she said: “We need a message of hope. During the Olympic delivery we did surveys and the world thought we were better than we thought we were. We need to remember that the UK is really good at delivering.”

Much of the industry relies on immigration for skills, though the minister warned this could not be treated as a singular solution. “Skills and immigration are two sides of one issue that need bringing together,” Jones said. We can’t have ever increasing immigration instead of having a strategic plan for skills.” She then suggested what might be needed was something akin to the workforce planning done by the NHS.

Wider discussion and debate

The new government’s focus on longer term planning has generated some optimism for construction and infrastructure sectors, several of which had come together at the Labour Party conference to share a common voice.

When the floor was opened up to other voices from the sector, Association for Consultancy and Engineering chief executive Kate Jennings said: “We have all seen good things in the manifesto but there is no silver bullet. We need to see long term planning not just as a matter of investment in projects. It’s a productivity matter that allows companies to invest in technology and skills to improve how we deliver.

Civil engineer and All Party Parliamentary Group of Net Zero member Mike Reader MP partly agreed, though he courted controversy by saying he is “tired of talking about skills”.

Prior to his election in July 2024, Reader was an operations director at Mace and he noted that skills shortages had been a subject for years and that construction and engineering are not alone in this – citing the food and drinks sector as another example. “We need more skills and never quite get them,” he said. “So, do we continue to need more people or do we adopt more modern methods of construction and technologies to modernise delivery and reduce the number of people we need?”

While Reader has extensive experience of the industry, he hoped that it wouldn’t just be him who can help address construction in parliament. He said he had colleagues at Mace who found it frustrating to “explain the industry to a new construction minister every six months” and said that a more stable government should help improve understanding, especially with construction being so central to its agenda.

Construction Products Association deputy chief executive Jeff May said that offsite manufacturing is part of the solution, but he pointed out the need for certainty there too.  “Offsite manufacturing is manufacturing, and manufacturing investors need to see a long pipeline that their product will be used for,” he said. “Without that, they cannot invest either.”

Construction Engineering Contractors Association (Ceca) deputy CEO Marie-Claude Hemming stressed that while talk of longer-term planning was positive, this didn’t just mean setting out plans and projects, but that “it means sticking to them as well”.

“The impact of cancelling projects can be terrible for the industry but it can be even worse for communities who come to terms with disruption in return for better outcomes when it’s finished,” Hemming continued. “The cancellation of the Euston part of HS2 foe example means a community went through all that to end up with nothing but a mess.”

Federation of Master Builders chief executive Brian Berry also suggested that government would need to look deeper than its initial plans for long term pipelines if they are to ramp up development and get things right.

“The new government plans to build 1.5M homes in five years, but the UK hasn’t built 300,000 homes a year in a very long time,” he said. “It will have to avoid the temptation to look only at the big home builders offering some big numbers. It needs to look to the many smaller local homebuilders too, to meet that target. And on planning reform, planning is a big challenge but that is also about resourcing planning departments properly.”

Builders Merchants Federation chief executive John Newcomb suggested that bringing very different parts of the industry together will be important to making the right case to a new government.

“The industry has had a really tough time recently and our members have had to mothball factories as orders of some materials have fallen,” he said. “But we are seeing an unprecedented coming together of different parts of the industry and we must keep doing that to offer whatever help the government needs so we can deliver on the ground.”

Source: New Civil Engineer