A shortage of skilled labour in the construction sector must be addressed in order for the Government to meet its housebuilding targets, experts have warned. 

Speaking at the Westminster Social Policy Forum’s seminar on housing strategy today, Sheffield Hallam University principal research fellow Jonathan Webb, said there is an “acute shortage” of workers in certain professions as well as issues with skills and productivity.

He said: “The Government’s ambition to build 1.5m homes in the next five years, with the current workforce[…] will raise eyebrows for a lot of people who know a fair bit about this sector.

“We really need to look at the workforce and how we are going to develop that and grow that so it’s actually capable of building the homes that we need.”

It was a view shared by Dr Emmanuel Itodo Daniel, a senior lecturer in construction management at the University of Wolverhampton, who also called for “more targeted intervention to tackle the skilled labour shortage.”

Webb said that looking back at the post-war years up until the 1980s when housebuilding levels were much higher, the planning legislation was not so different to today, so he cautions against seeing planning obstacles as the main reason for governments missing housing targets.

He said: “The private housebuilding sector used to be a lot better at building the homes we needed.

He said that we used to be better at skills training in the construction workforce.

“Nurturing that again and making sure that it’s prioritised is also something that we can learn from history.”