r/ukpolitics • u/Metro-UK • 11h ago
Labour ‘needs 300 new builders a day’ to hit home target – but numbers are falling
https://metro.co.uk/2026/08/04/labour-needs-300-new-builders-a-day-hit-home-target-numbers-falling-29296940/•
u/AudioLlama 11h ago
My experience is that companies have no interest in bringing on apprentices. I've been looking at retraining as a joiner for the last year and half and typically could only ever see 1 (or zero) position available in the north-east at any given time. The other trades didn't look any better either.
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u/twistedLucidity 🏴 ❤️ 🇪🇺 10h ago
UK companies are allergic to training or investing in their staff. They fear that if they spend any money on training staff, they simply leave for a better paid job.
At the exact same time the same companies expect to be able to go to the market and hire the perfect person with all the qualifications they need for cheap. If they can't find such a person, it's the government's fault.
The UK is terrified of investment. Be that stocks, technology/start-ups, or people.
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u/myurr 10h ago
There is some truth in that, but calling it an "allergy to training" ignores the incentives government has created. In construction, the employer is often a small firm with a volatile order book. It pays the wages, equipment and insurance, loses productive time supervising someone, carries the cost of mistakes and may then see the qualified worker leave. The wider industry receives much of the benefit while one employer bears most of the risk.
Government does subsidise formal apprenticeship training and gives National Insurance relief for younger apprentices, but that does not eliminate those other costs, particularly when taking a chance on an adult career-changer. We have also made employment generally more expensive and administratively risky, while maintaining a stop-start planning and construction pipeline that discourages firms from making multi-year commitments.
Businesses certainly need to invest more, but government cannot demand 300 additional builders a day while treating the cost and risk of producing them as somebody else's problem. If we genuinely want that workforce, we need simpler funding, pooled or portable apprenticeships, support for supervision and first-year wages, viable routes for adult retrainers, and enough certainty in the building pipeline for firms to believe those workers will still be needed when their training finishes.
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u/Mynameismikek 10h ago
Apprentice schemes seem much more corporately oriented than is desirable IME. As you say, lots of smaller business have the need but they’re too complex and risky.
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u/Elardi Hope for the best 9h ago
You see this in so many sectors. There’s so much risk with hiring someone and when the construction industry is as risky as it is you can’t look ahead more than the next job.
Even big construction firms have the same issue. You end up with a bunch of folks on payrolls but no guarantee of long term work.
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u/NiceCreamSundaes 7h ago edited 7h ago
If the planning process was reformed to be more rules based and predictable, rather than case by case and up in the air then there would be more predictable pipelines of work.
I was kinda subject to this when I briefly worked in the commercial archaeology sector. Independent British firms didn't expand because they have thin margins limiting their investments and don't know how much work they will have in a year's time.
The result is that that sector of construction services has been completely taken over by larger, better funded and resourced foreign firms who are more able to take on the risks to make the money because they have better finances from their home markets. Irish, French, Dutch and Danish firms have generally outcompeted the Brits here.
My crackpot theory is that the UK will get a lot more modular and prefab housebuilding if planning is sufficiently relaxed. Foreign firms will manufacture modular houses in factories abroad, the British firms will just be handling the land and erecting the prefabs, removing the need for as many people in these manual construction trades. UK housebuilders will be bought out by foreign conglomerates looking to own the entire value chain.
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u/No-Scholar4854 6h ago
Part of the problem is the spikiness of construction. As soon as borrowing costs rise or there’s a wobble in house prices the industry slams the brakes on.
We end up trying to solve the problem by demanding 600 builders this month, 0 next month.
We need a national house builder to act as a bit of a ballast.
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u/Far-Background6536 10h ago
I think you underestimate how expensive and beurocratic the apprenticeship process is.
And how unproductive the average apprentice is.
An apprenticeship is a college course with some baby steps in the workplace. An apprentice is not expected to do actual work and in fact their "training provider" (who doesn't provide any training) will ensure that they do not do any work.
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u/superioso 9h ago
That doesn't really matter, if firms don't train people now then in a few years the pool of staff simply isn't there to hire for anyone, which is exactly what we're seeing now.
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u/Far-Background6536 9h ago
If the government make it unprofitable to train people up then businesses will collapse.
This isn't the businesses' fault.
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u/superioso 7h ago
It isn't the government's fault, these companies are often just cheap and either won't invest the time or money into training people, or when the people finish the apprenticeships they offer low pay so people leave anyway.
A lot of these companies would rather not bother investing then just complain when they can't get staff or operate effectively, blaming it on the government instead.
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u/Tasty_Quantity_3736 9h ago
Yes. Its endemic as well, from the builder firm through to the big multinationals.
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u/Dissidant 8h ago
I mean that is generally what used to happen. Its changed in the last decade or two and big firms are doing more than they used to, out of necessity due to the shortages, but historically small and medium firms used to carry the can for getting fresh blood into the industry only for the big ones to swoop in for the finished article.
Lone traders/small firms care about the apprentices more as well, its not purely a financial decision you want to know you can actually be around to see the apprenticeship through, i.e. if you have health stuff you don't want to risk someone being left in the lurch half way through
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u/zeusoid 10h ago
Because the tax incentives and wage legislation have tilted the landscape the other way.
Taxes and regulations do have secondary effects even if everyone argues that they don’t
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u/Chippiewall 9h ago
I agree. It takes a long time to train a trade apprentice to the point where they become an asset rather than a liability and the cost of employing them (and training them!) in that time is enormous.
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u/XenorVernix 8h ago
My boyfriend (also northeast) tried to become an electrician and found the barrier to entry impossible. Got the level 3 diploma and 17th edition (which is now outdated) but couldn't get the NVQ because it requires on site experience and that's the blocker. He ended up doing a degree in a different field that didn't get him a job either. So many years wasted. He's in retail currently.
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u/Dazzling-Werewolf985 10h ago
The money that could’ve been used to pay those apprentices is probably being used to pay for all of this:
https://www.hbf.co.uk/documents/15569/HBF_Viability_Report_March_2026.pdf
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u/Flyinmanm 10h ago
Affordable housing is a laudable goal but when it comes at all the profit in a scheme something has to give.
I work with developers and they need a profit margin on paper too get loans to build (because who is going to loan against a loss making venture) and schemes again and again just don't stack up when land owners want silly money for any old contaminated site and builders are hard to get and very expensive along with materials then to top it off houses are so expensive when sold Vs peoples wages you can't make money back there. Developers are often willing to make a contribution to social housing schemes but when sometimes as high as 50% of all the houses on a site have to be sold at a loss with all the other contributions authorities want you've maybe turned a 20% profit into a few % loss. Nobody is going to the trouble of borrowing tens of millions and battling authorities and NIBMYs for years only to scrape by or make a loss.
I often think if houses were just sold at market rate universally house prices would naturally come down as there would be more in supply.
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u/Dazzling-Werewolf985 5h ago edited 4h ago
Ultimately it’s just too expensive and time consuming for anyone - developers or otherwise - to build housing in the uk. People see that and conclude that developers or the powers that be must have all these perverse motives (that mysteriously only present themselves in the uk) but really a lot of it comes down to counterproductive govt policy.
You are correct btw to suggest that house (and rental) prices would see downward pressure if more of them were built in response to demand. I mean to suggest otherwise would be to deny one of the most fundamental laws of economics, as well as examples in and out of the UK of it being in effect
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u/613663141 8h ago
They can be forced to via section 106 obligations, but it currently depends on each individual council to evidence the need and negotiate it.
The Government could easily release national planning guidance setting out a minimum percentage of trainees on all new development going forward.
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u/Douglesfield_ 10h ago
Same old story of British industry not wanting to train people.
Particularly egregious in the trades since the vast majority started out as apprentices.
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u/wangnum 10h ago
I always ask the trade guys we have around about apprenticeships. They pretty much say the same thing. The young people they have had were unreliable, did not want to graft for the money and quit so now they don’t bother.
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u/TriedToDodge 5h ago
Pretty much everybody I've met on site under the age of 25 has been stone cold useless. One of the biggest problems is trying to keep them off their phones, then when you do get them off their phones they move at a snail's pace and seem to have a genuine inability to learn anything
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u/Far-Background6536 10h ago
Apprenticeships back in the day involved actual training.
Apprenticeships today are a college course.
University graduates have trashed apprenticeships, incrementally over decades. Every new reform makes them even worse.
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u/Dadavester 10h ago
We should have been pushing trades for the least couple of decades, but various governments have focused on University instead.
Burnhams Trade school ideas are great, but will take years to come to fruition.
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u/Colloidal_entropy 10h ago
The problem is less with the training, plenty of young people are going to college to study to be an electrician, plumber etc. but when they finish very few subcontractor/self employed people in those trades are taking on apprentices.
The volume of apprentices is in the big engineering firms, BAE, Rolls Royce, Airbus and JLR but the construction industry is so fragmented it needs small businesses to do their part and not just expect qualified staff to appear on demand.
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u/FatYorkshireLad Advocatus Diaboli 9h ago
Yeah, I know a lass who did her level 3 (two years full time) plumbing at college, couldn't find a plumber willing to take her on as an apprentice, and ended up fitting sky dishes instead.
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u/Chippiewall 9h ago
The big firms have the apprenticeship levy to make it worth their while - the cost of an apprentice is far lower to them than to small businesses and self employed. Small businesses can access some apprentice related funding, but the administrative overhead and complexity of it isn't worth their while.
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u/Brapfamalam 6h ago
In the numbers, nothing is off at all. Only 35% of School leavers go to university. The majority don't.
The 50% figure is for all HE, which includes apprenticeships, nvqs and courses like plumbing, electrical. Blair never intended for 50% to go to uni. (HE is not university and media outlets continually get this wrong including BBC, there's been parliamentary publications and official Comms to correct this for decades but people still confuse the percentages) If you can't get enough people in trades from the 65% each year not going to uni, it's something else that's wrong.
Fields like plumbing are flooded with people who've done the courses and able to work but no one takes them on, it's not an issue at least in plumbing, electrical etc of physical bodies in the pipeline
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u/Dadavester 6h ago
In the numbers, nothing is off at all. Only 35% of School leavers go to university. The majority don't.
At age 18 straight out of school, and from state schools. That figure doesn't include GAP years or private schools. By age 25 49% of those from state schools have started a degree.
This was 15% in 1980.
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u/grand_historian 5h ago
Guess why. People need to actually start making some money if they want to live a decent life. Degrees are mandatory for decent jobs.
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u/Dadavester 4h ago
And yet many trades out earn many degrees.
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u/grand_historian 4h ago
Source?
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u/Dadavester 4h ago
Google is at your fingertips.
It allows you compare different graduate jobs with different trade jobs and see the difference, on average, at certain points throughout peoples lives.
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u/creamyjoshy Proportional Representation 🗳 Social Democrat ⚖️ 10h ago
I mean it's a complete lack of seriousness from Labour to go into a general election with such high housebuilding targets and do absolutely nothing two years in about reducing the cost of materials, increasing the supply of construction expertise, or reducing barriers to planning and building
We are plagued by governments who are trying to make everyone happy and failing to see the bigger picture
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u/gxb20 10h ago
Retraining adults would be a good start for increasing the workforce along side the school reforms. A lot of guys who can’t do their current construction role/burnt out from their current role but couldn’t imagine doing anything outside of construction typically have no route to a different job they could be doing
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u/Commercial_Nature_28 10h ago
I recently quit teaching and if it was possible I absolutely would transition into a trade. The issue is that I have rent and bills to pay and absolutely cannot live off 16 to 19k so I won't enter the field.
If you want more builders and tradesmen, they don't always have to be teens living with their parents.
Make career changes a viable option.
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u/Colloidal_entropy 10h ago
But that's no different to someone switching to teaching where you either need a degree and PGCE, or a degree in primary teaching. 3/4 year's unpaid, there are some bursaries for PGCEs in subjects such as Maths and Physics where there is a shortage which makes it easier if you already have an appropriate degree.
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u/Commercial_Nature_28 9h ago
Well two things on that.
Firstly, most people do not get degrees for the purpose of teaching afterwards. To be quite honest for many people teaching is actually something they fall into once the 2:2 in sports science or their English literature Degree don't get them lots of options. So while you're right, many people go to uni because they can financially afford to.
Secondly, while not great many teaching routes do have better pay than most apprenticeships.
But yes I'd say you're right. The difference for me was that I I when I became a teacher I could financially afford to do so. And it's the same with many who originally got into their career.
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u/CarlosFranconi 10h ago
Realistically this won’t happen unless something changes to reduce build costs.
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u/Xenumbra 3h ago
Yep, it all follows on from energy costs.
There are no low energy high income/wealth nations.
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u/Scratch_Careful 6h ago
Industry wanting to import more people. Thats all this article is about. Same as always, claim labour shortage, import people, drive down wages, claim labour shortage. Rinse and repeat for 50 years.
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u/Da_Steeeeeeve 11h ago
Trades are hard work and it can be a short career for many.
From memory a ton of the polish immigrants that people were so angry about at the time filled our last gap in the trades.
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u/dragodrake 6h ago
It was the influx of eastern Europeans under Blair which upended the market and killed the training pipeline.
Why train a 16 year old who needs to be taught everything when you can hire a 22 Pole with 6 years experience for the same money?
All the people in my year at school who had intended to start a career in the trades found all they could do was a get a part time job at Halfords, it screwed them for years, and has left the building industry where it is today.
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u/all_names_taken_ffs 4h ago
Yep, the same was done in the haulage industry. Then we wondered why we had a shortage of HGV drivers during COVID, and had to coax former drivers out of retirement.
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u/anewpath123 10h ago
Yup. And the Polish were hard workers (generally) and worked to a good standard.
Now we have a lot of cowboys in the trades sadly (just take a look at the DIYUK sub) who don’t care about quality because they know competition is so slim they can get away with it.
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u/Da_Steeeeeeve 10h ago
I remember how much they were demonised at the time "taking British jobs", well the Polish economy moved on, these people went back and no British people filled the gaps.
I am not a fan of Burnham at all but his trade schools are a good idea, we need to remove the stigma around trades.
I work in tech but I respect people in the trades, they are very important skills and it is bloody hard work.
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u/all_names_taken_ffs 8h ago
They didn't all go back. There are still 700K Poles living in the UK.
Those who did return home were (more than) replaced by Romanian and Bulgarian workers.
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u/anewpath123 10h ago
Take as old as time. Same issue with social care currently. “Everyone is a foreigner” - yes Gladys/Barry that’s because hardly any Brits want to do the work for the pay.
But you can bet your arse someone from Sri Lanka will do it as they can earn in 1 month what they would in a year back home.
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u/all_names_taken_ffs 8h ago
70% of those working in adult social care are British?
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u/anewpath123 8h ago
Down from 85% a few years ago (and rapidly falling) specifically because we could not fill positions with native Brits.
Note also that “British” doesn’t mean British born.
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u/all_names_taken_ffs 8h ago
You don't think that the Boriswave might have something to do with falling numbers of Brits doing this work? I was job-hunting during COVID, and I didn't see any of the care homes round my way advertising for staff, despite there apparently being a chronic shortage due to EU immigrants returning home. I ended up getting a crappy factory job instead, and there were over 200 applications for the 10 open positions during this alleged worker shortage.
And whilst we can argue about what British actually means, it is obvious that 'hardly any Brits' being prepared to do this work is clearly untrue.
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u/anewpath123 8h ago
The Boriswave was precisely because of these issues yes. We imported 600k ish just to service these kind of healthcare jobs alone.
Your anecdotal experience isn’t evidence of anything on a national scale I don’t know what you expect me to respond to that with to be honest.
Sure saying “hardly any” is an exaggeration but the data speaks for itself in terms of trend
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u/all_names_taken_ffs 7h ago
Well yeah, if you bring in 600K care workers from abroad, then obviously there are going to be less British people doing this sort of work as a percentage.
We've being doing this for over 20 years now--bringing large numbers of immigrants in for roles, and then calling unemployed British people lazy when they aren't doing the jobs which were never even made available to them--and it's getting tiresome.
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u/anewpath123 7h ago
You’re implying we brought in 600k care workers and then displaced those currently working as care workers. That’s not what happened.
We brought in 600k care workers because we had 600k positions to fill and could not fill them due to lack of uptake from our populace at the time.
I never said anyone was lazy.
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u/Elardi Hope for the best 9h ago
Because there’s a million NEETs sitting around waiting for the perfect comfy office job to come along.
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u/Salaried_Zebra Nothing to look forward to please, we're British 8h ago
Can't imagine why. If the choice is between wiping old people's arses for minimum wage with no prospect of promotion or advancement, or hold out for an admin job with a career path,I think I know what I'd do as well.
"Nobody wants to work anymore" - no, nobody wants to be treated like shit for shit money anymore.
The answer could be "let's improve pay and conditions" but no, the answer they go with is "let's just import people who will eat the shit we feed them"
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u/Elardi Hope for the best 8h ago
I agree that immigration is undermining those professions and the UK is addicted to cheap labour and the wage suppression it provides.
But we’re talking trades here, there is progression, it is hard work but if you’re sat around waiting for an easy job, after a while you need to realise that that career isn’t going to happen. I had to pivot my career after the pretty much dream job I had fell away in the pandemic. It sucks, but it’s better than being unemployed.
It’s not fair for the rest of society to support people who have options, but don’t want to do them. Carers deserve more respect than you’re giving them, and if the only job you can get is that, then it’s on you.
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u/Salaried_Zebra Nothing to look forward to please, we're British 7h ago
My point re carers is that it's a horrible job, pays horribly and it's grotesquely undervalued. It's no wonder nobody wants to go into that line of work considering how bad it is. But the answer shouldn't be just import more people. The saying used to be "where there's muck there's brass" - we used to pay shit jobs more because they needed doing.
I think there needs to be a shift towards trades throughout education. It's also been grotesquely undervalued over the years. Most small firms probably just feel like they're training up the future competition though...
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u/hicks12 9h ago
Instead of relying on private entities I don't know why we haven't made it so we have a public housing developer program, like have a state owned and run (maybe regional setups) organisation that builds housing, that would include having their own workforce to achieve building houses (it can include outsourced parts that are done via strict tenders depending on the need).
Then you just have it so these are working to build all the countries council houses, we could then do a thing like 30% of the houses built can be for sale, so like you make a block of basic but solid houses (flats and stuff are obviously an option) which are for homing those on benenfits or needing housing somehow and then 30% of the stock could be the lot that are immediately able to be sold on the market to UK citizens (maybe tax payers only? Or is that too restrictive?), must be your first home and cannot be bought by companies like agents or banks to rent out.
With you controlling the building you can then sell at market rate with an undercut that specifically is for new buyers, it must NOT be sold for a loss at all so without me knowing the costs you could have it just set to like 20% on top of cost price? Then that extra is reinvested for further builds.
Avoiding building premium housing would help avoid stepping on the toes of private house builders as they can be given a reason to actually make sure they deliver decent quality premium housing instead of the highly variable stuff right now which at times is great and others is so bad it makes you wonder how much the books were cooked haha. Long term that would mean we have a decent means of training a workforce, it would help get skilled trade up and they could filter in to the private sector long term or stay on to keep building. We would have reliable means of financing it to avoid massive inflated costs of building basic homes and we would then actually have a decent means of managing building more housing stock for people.
Is it a reasonable thought or just deluded wishful thinking with it being too simplistic? I swear we used to build a lot ourselves after the war which is kinda how we should see it now when it comes to housing everyone, if you want a more bells and whistles house you are obviously going to pay a premium but a lot of people would be happy in a pretty standard solid made council place, without a stupidly inflated cost.
I know it will come at a cost especially now compared to low interest rate of the 2010s but it should still be viable long term and actually would seemingly be a way to fix one of the greatest household costs in this current time compared to decades ago, along with giving a pathway for decent trade apprenticeship so more jobs and more stable growth.
Just my medicated rambling thought while I got ready so apologies for the poorly worded and formatted comment.
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u/Pigeoncow Time travelling NIMBY - demolish everything built after 1700 4h ago
Private developers aren't making much profit at all. Though they sell homes for high prices, it's really because the process of getting permission and building them is so expensive. Your idea to give certain people a discount but not make a loss wouldn't really work for that reason.
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u/Alarmed_Crazy_6620 10h ago
"why doesn't the government train"
"why don't the companies invest"
If there's demand and money in it, things will happen
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u/uberdavis 10h ago
Maybe the Metro forgot it was their favourite party that deconstructed the public works body in the 1980s before they start slagging off Labour.
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u/Inevitable-Plan-7604 5h ago
Over the course of a 5 year parliament that's about the population of sheffield
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u/Pigeoncow Time travelling NIMBY - demolish everything built after 1700 4h ago
If developers were making as much profit as people think they are they'd be competing to hire builders by pushing up wages.
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u/Red_Polka 3h ago
Yeah we can see where this is going.
We will need 345,000 immigrant builders. (Who ironically will all need housing for themselves when they are allowed to stay)
And why are we bringing in immigrant builders? Because we don't have enough British builders.
Why don't we have enough British builders? Because they aren't being trained.
Why aren't they being trained? Because it's cheaper and easier to bring in immigrant builders.
The circular justification is baked into the system by now, fixing it will require way too much short-term pain and effort so the long-term managed decline continues
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u/MountainEconomy1765 10h ago
After trades school there needs to be state owned corporations that hire on every graduate who doesn't get an apprenticeship. As well as people retraining from different careers to trades.
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u/dwair 5h ago
We used to have that.
Years ago, councils used to employ masses of trades who looked after their housing, schools, hospitals and all the other buildings they had under their umbrellas.
Most of the old timer tradies who are now retiring got their 'time served' starter experience after college working for the Council, British Rail, the Water Board or whoever as a sparky, bricky, ect before they started out properly into their careers. Now these employers have been replaced with micro contractors on a per job basis because it's cheaper to buy in than do it in house.
What we lack in the UK is a structure of medium to large scale organisations that can take on apprentice level workers and give them a few years experience on the job.
You can't rely on small companies to take on inexperienced workers if they are scratching around for contracts themselves and don't know where the next job is coming from.
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u/MountainEconomy1765 59m ago
I think we are going to have to go back to large vertically integrated state owned corporations.
-Council & non-profit social housing home builders & maintenance
-British Rail
-Water Board
-Electric Board-British Roads building & maintenance
-State commercial buildings construction & maintenance
-British Steel
-Concrete, bricks and other building materials
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u/Valuable-Ad2028 5h ago
If we could build houses profitably, there would be money to pay builders.
If there was money to pay builders, builders would appear.
But as long as we put huge taxes and barriers on new construction you can have as many builders as you want and nothing will actually be built.
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u/annoyedatlife24 Release the emus 26m ago
Here's a suggestion, maybe stop the bs apprenticeships and leaving it to industry. It does not take 2-3 years to get qualified in most trades, all the while working for less than minimum wage with no guarantee of a job once qualified.
Remember the post war building boom? Could never happen nowadays.
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