This shortage could vastly undermine efforts to build the homes Britain needs
Tony Ward is chief executive of Clayton Euro Risk
This week, I was pleased to see evidence of tentative signs of a pick-up in house building. The National House Building Council (NHBC), with which builders must register a house before starting work, said that the number of new homes being registered to be built continued to outperform last year’s levels. For the rolling quarter of May–July, new homes registered increased by 14% to 43,684 from 38,365 last year. This was the highest figure for this period since 2007.
This, however, is still a drop in the housing ocean.
Official figures from the Department for Communities and Local Government showed that housing starts fell by 14% to 33,280 in the second quarter. There were 136,320 starts for the year to June down 1% on the year before and well below the 240,000 homes the industry says is needed each year to begin to address the housing crisis. Apparently we will be playing catch up with levels of supply for some time to come.
On top of this – and this really worries me – is that there is a dearth of skills in the building sector, particularly among brickies and plasterers. Recruitment agency Manpower reports that this shortage has resulted in some commanding salaries of £1,000 a week while Bovis Homes suggested that its building costs had increased by about 7% this year as a result of tradesman pushing up their rates.
Since 2008, which saw many building firms go the wall, the construction workforce has shrunk from 2.5m to 2.2m. Property consultants suggest that increasing annual housebuilding to the numbers required would require an extra 120,000 or so people in the industry. However, the number of bricklayers and masons working in Britain has fallen from 100,000 to 70,000, according to the Office of National Statistics. Unsurprisingly, this shortage could vastly undermine efforts to build the homes Britain needs.
This issue needs to be addressed.
