People will be key to Labour's bold plans for the industry

This article was originally published in the September 2024 edition of Building Magazine.

Labour's first month in Government has been marked by bold and ambitious plans, and while the change they promised is widely welcome, there will be challenges in converting ambition into outcomes.

The UK construction workforce has fallen to a smidge over two million people, the lowest level of staffing since the late 1990s. At this level of limited talent resource, the UK is building about 200,000 new homes per year, which is some 66% of Labour’s target of 300,000 new homes. Notably and in addition to this, is their commitment to green energy. To meet the existing energy grid net zero target by 2035, about 15GW of new generation capacity needs to be deployed every year between now and 2035. The UK has never built more than about 7GW per year, and Labour has now set its sights on a 2030 target for net zero.

So, are Labour’s new policy targets achievable? There is no simple quick fix to the challenge, and we need to look (and work) beyond the attention-grabbing policy headlines.

One of the more significant moves by our new government is establishing Skills England, Labour’s new flagship post-16 training framework to ‘transform opportunity and drive growth’. This is a sensible first step to a coordinated industrial strategy. However, its reach should go beyond young people. While targeting school-leavers is important, with over nine million adults in the UK economically inactive for many reasons, this policy is only playing around the edges.

Extending the Skills England plan beyond younger people to encompass millions of UK adults, many of whom are already qualified and experienced, is an opportunity to work towards re-mobilising that workforce. This is a more challenging demographic as it will require a longer-term strategy that can’t be captured by a headline grabbing policy or be solved by a ‘one size fits all’ approach.

There are many factors why people have exited the workforce including long-term sickness, early retirement, caring duties, injury, childcare, limited access to workplaces and so on. To make a positive impact, Labour needs to develop a cross-departmental solution that involves the Department for Education, and also the Department of Health, Department of Work and Pensions, and Department for Transport to enable people to return to economic activity.