Labour’s plan to build 1.5m homes in this Parliament cannot be brought to fruition because of severe skills shortages, an aging workforce and Brexit, the head of Britain’s biggest house building company has said.
The government on Thursday outlined how to achieve this goal. The proposals in the revised national policy on construction (NPPF) include detailed targets for each authority’s plans and new rules that will make building in green-belt land worse off.
Barratt Redrow chief executive David Thomas was asked by the BBC if there were enough workers to build the homes outside the promised homes. Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner said: “The short answer is no.”
He added that the government should “revolutionise the trade, turn, prepare, turn the methods of production” to be brought to its target.
“The targets are challenging. I think we have to recognize that this is a national crisis,” Thomas said.
The Builders Federation (HBF) echoed Thomas’s sentiments.
The HBF told the BBC UK that there is “not enough talent pipeline” building to meet the target of employment, recruitment constraints with poor perception and lack of training in schools, not enough recruits, and the cost of taking on apprentices.
The industry body said the sector had not “attracted” enough recruits in recent years, saying a quarter of the traders were over 50 years old.
Concerns from within the construction industry have dampened hopes for the prime minister’s construction targets, after he said on December 5 that the government would push through “absolutely”.
Starmer said he wanted to “have the right balance of nature and the environment”, but that “man wanting to have a home” should be the top priority.
As well as the job of building 1.5m homes, the Labor government intends to discuss 150 major infrastructure projects in this Parliament.
The updated NPPF commits to a “brownfield first” strategy, with unused sites that have already been prioritized in the past being developed for new buildings.
The default answer when a developer seeks to build on Brownfields sites will be yes, but the government says there are not enough of these sites for the number of homes needed.
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Councils will be asked to review the boundaries of the green belt, identifying the lower quality “grey belt” that could be built on.
The framework first defines the gray belt as green-belt land that “does not contribute significantly to green belt uses”. These boundaries include urban boundaries, keeping neighboring cities converging on each other, preserving the special character of historic towns.
Protecting the countryside from abuse and helping in urban regeneration is no longer contained as a green belt.
“We haven’t had enough houses built for years. That means people and families don’t have the security they want,” Starmer said during a visit to a construction site in Cambridge.
“We decided to break through, to do what is necessary.”
More specific guidance on how local authorities can assess their green-belt land is due in January.
The government has announced £100,000 of additional funding for councils, along with 300 additional councilors, to speed up the decision-making process.