Snapshot of _Britain can’t build without a trades revolution | Both parties must address the woeful shortage of skilled labour or their promises of 300,000 homes a year are empty_ :
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This is the elephant in the room with the whole skills shortage and “degrees aren’t preparing young adults for the workforce” discourse. Was Michael Gove not responsible for free schools and academisation over comprehensives? The same schools ran by middle to upper class, CEO-style headteachers and SLT staff who prioritised the highest A-Level grades and admissions into Russell Group universities over ALL ELSE. I went to one of these schools back in the late 2010s, if you wanted to do a degree apprenticeship or even go to a non Russell group university because it had a year in industry placement or taught the course in a way you preferred - the idea was quickly shot down. The Tories are absolutely responsible for many young people and their parents now believing in traditional higher education over apprenticeships, A Levels over BTEC, Russell Group over non Russell Group, academic over vocational, etc. They’re gaslighting people nationally and it’s so ludicrous.
To be fair, that’s been going on for decades. When I was doing my GCSE’s around 2003, you were basically told to go onto do A levels or there is nothing else. And there wasn’t really. The whole education system of the last 30 years has been geared up to getting students to university, and sod the rest. We now have millions of people with degrees which mean nothing, or at least there aren’t the jobs out there for those degrees.
There has actually been a positive move towards apprenticeship and apprenticeship degrees in the last 5 years or so. IMO, they are shit and many companies take the apprentices on as a tax break, rather than a workforce for the future. But there are more choices than when I left school, it was either uni or work.
>We now have millions of people with degrees which mean nothing, or at least there aren’t the jobs out there for those degrees.
Do we?
Any source on this
> The Tories are absolutely responsible for many young people and their parents now believing in traditional higher education over apprenticeships
They can't win
Don’t want to come across as a whataboutism, as they’re two separate issues.
But it’s an issue that’s been brewing for well over 14 years, yes the Tories have underfunded education in all forms. But Labours push under Blair to prioritise university over all other forms of further education has a lot to answer for in terms of creating shortages in blue collar professions.
Both parties need an extraordinary change in tact.
The other problem is that people use being a tradie as a threat to kids at school - "if you don't study hard and do well, you'll end up being a brickie or a plumber! You won't have a proper job!" So now we have a situation where graduates in rented accommodation they can barely afford working office jobs for just above minimum wage look down on plumbers who earn hundreds of pounds an hour just for showing up and own their own homes.
This snobbery is dreadful!! (Edit: not saying you’re being a snob; but agreeing with you that the idea of someone is a tradie is a most classist most snobby idea… that said, I recognise it comes from a good intention of wanting to promote social mobility.)
And it’s the same snobbery that drives the idea behind Blair’s goal of 50% of the country going to uni. What for? Are 50% of jobs graduate jobs? Is there no other way of learning that’s considered worthwhile? Seriously!
It’s a type of snobbery that’s so widespread and so widely… accepted! Like someone who becomes a skilled craftsperson or tradesperson is a failure?? Nah you can gfys if that’s what you think, Tony n Dave.
Of course anyone should be able to go to uni—just like anyone should be able to pursue a career in manual skills/trades. But the idea that a 3-year degree certificate topped off with a thesis on the “Pedagogy of PVC Pipes” to be a plumber is insanity—some parts of tertiary education have become a racket! (Not saying I don’t value trades/craft education; just saying that putting the academic model on that type of skill doesn’t fit!!)
it was the worst thing Blair did.
Those insane 50% goals also meant the price had to be passed on, the country could never afford free tuition for that many people
I was 100% one of these snobs. Until I realized that my part-time support job at an ISP paid me more per hour than my university fine art lecturers were earning per hour. Then the message was slammed home when our post-university career support was a 2-hour lecture on how to scam local councils for grants, led by a woman who spent most of the time kvetching because her latest installation piece had been demolished after a kid hurt themselves on it.
Sadly not a new phenomenon, and tied closely to the deeply embedded class system.
It's interesting to read D. K. Brown's history of British naval architecture. In *The Grand Fleet*, he remarks that, while naval Draughtsmen had effectively attained a degree-level qualification after four years' intensive training, "there was a class distinction. The ability of draughtsmen was undervalued." This was before and during the First World War.
I've never heard trades disparaged except to directly address a fuckwit/cowboy trader, or to rip on BTECs ran by clueless tutors (BTEC college). It was usually cleaning toilets that was the example of a shit job.
They were shit upon from a great height at my school - the sense was that you shouldn't be limiting yourself to being a tradie when you could use education to get a better future. This thought process that later resulted in the 50%+ going to university goal under new labour.
to be fair i know enough tradies and while they make more than me, would i fuck trade my office job for theirs, those dudes work hard every day. and i cant be fucked with that. i also dont want to be 55 and still crawling under floors and trying to get some miserable bastard to pay me on time.
Plumbers and the like are still underpaid relative to your average office worker, especially after the devaluation of degrees. The physical stress is a lot more than sitting on a desk all day and many modern office jobs don't require particularly more thinking than a good plumber uses.
If you are under 30, you won't know this yet, but spending years sitting at a desk five days a week will ruin your health. You end up with atrophied glutes and incredibly tight hip flexors, which destroy your posture and cause back issues. This is even more true if you work from home using a cheapo chair you grabbed from Amazon for £200 and don't even have to walk to the station or bus stop anymore. If you drive, it's even worse because you'll spend hours sitting, then walk to your car where you will sit, and then when you get home, you'll sit down again - likely for the rest of the evening. The only point of the day where you spend a considerable period not sitting down is when you are sleeping.
After a thirty year office career I looked OK thanks to sports but I still had a heart attack and needed a big operation. It's dreadful for your health to sit in the same place for years.
thing is, you hear of tradesmen dropping dead on the job just as often, its almost like its a total lottery, sure you can make your odds better but its a total gamble.
not that the guy you replied to is wrong, iv spent my childhood and teenage years sitting in shit school chairs all day, then slightly better uni chairs and now decent office chairs.
its coming for us all.
> cheapo chair you grabbed from Amazon __*for £200*__
The chairs at the office are much nicer (circa £600 new), but surely you can get a decent chair for less than £200?
Eeeehhhh I mean they did prioritise uni but the main cut and thrust was "further education" which included college for trades apprenticeships. Kids who would have just dropped or been kicked out of high school were being funneled into trades intro courses in colleges (which was hell for the colleges). While I agree that the stigma they created probably did a lot of damage I'm not so sure it's that black and white, certainly not in the same way the tories caretaking has been.
> Blair to prioritise university over all other forms of further education has a lot to answer for in terms of creating shortages in blue collar professions.
Blair's target was 50% of young people into higher eduction - why because the workplace required it. That target included vocational qualifications like BTECs, HNDs, and NVQ's for plumbers, vehicle mechanics, electricians and even theatre technicians like me.
If you want to be an electrical, water, or automotive engineer you're going to need a straight to degree or a qualification with a path to a degree.
If like my nephew you want to work in high voltage engineering then you're going to need an electrical engineering degree, apprenticeship which comes with a masters equivalent, and a range of City & Guilds Courses.
The whole point being:-
- 1) job portability - the need to prove your skills to move between employers where you train on the job. Otherwise, you're trapped.
- 2) The path to further training to improve or diversify your employment prospects rather than having to start all over again. To move from electrician to electrical project manager or engineer, for example - if you have the degree, you can bolt on the right C&G course to switch tracks.
- 3) The need for continuing professional development. You need to update your skills to current standards regularly, there needs to be a pathway for that.
TL;DR: There are no blue collar professions any more.
Well given they also drove through hard Brexit which got rid of half of the Eastern European tradesmen as well I’d say they are wearing it.
14 years later you could have kids who hadn’t even started school already qualified in a trade. But it’s Labour’s fault.
FE died before even Thatcher, but she did bury it. Like most things in this country it was mismanaged by both parties for decades post WW2.
Almost all of the major HE and FE reforms beyond that took place in the 80s and early 90s and set the country on a path with too many universities that dont really have any business being one and shifted the focus away from FE.
Blair did....nothing......good or bad...
It was under the Coalition and later that university places surged once student places were no longer limited
I disagree! This is the he problem! A 12-week course in finance for SMEs would be great!!!! But a 3-year degree? Folks have better things to do with their time
> Folks have better things to do with their time
Why? 18 year olds today have a 50 year career ahead of them. Spending 3 of those years on a degree is not an issue. The degree is not the thing that's preventing people from joining the trades.
> Spending 3 of those years on a degree is not an issue. The degree is not the thing that's preventing people from joining the trades.
It is, although you could argue that it's indirect. If you invest 3 years of your time into getting a business degree, meaning you spend a large amount of time on business-specific stuff rather than mere accounting or budgeting, you are coming away with a chunk of outstanding student debt and a range of contacts that are good for a white-collar business career but are generally useless for a trade career. After doing so, you would then need to go into the apprenticeship you would have done at 18 anyway, meaning you're now behind everyone else *and* you have outstanding finance, *and* the support you might have had at 18 (like living with family) is possibly no longer there and all of that acts as a large discouragement from going into the trades, even if it's not a hard barrier.
Whereas you could go into the trades at 18, learn everything you need to get into that trade, and learn all the accounting information you need by yourself which is probably only 10% of the business degree at most, and all of that without the aforementioned discouragements.
It's been going on since privatization.
It used to be that State industries would train lots of apprentices and keep the top percentage depending on how many they needed. The rest would then enter the job market with training and be available to private industries.
What happens now is that small companies spend tens or hundreds of thousands training someone who is then poached for a higher wage by a big firm. Of course, this isn't viable, so many smaller firms and/or sole traders go out of business over the last ~40 years, which is why it's been an issue that's increasingly obvious.
Large firms are unwilling to train as they realize that the same can be done to them, thousands in training costs and the the workers leave for more money. I believe that British Gas has managed to counter this by having qualified workers that are only licenced while they work for British Gas. If they leave then they have to re-sit all the exams at the cost of thousands of pounds.
That's because Labour had to pander to middle-class voters in 1997, and this is what middle-class voters wanted. This now extrapolates to almost every issue, and Labour are still dependent on the same middle-class voters. The only way that this will change is when there is reasonable representation in parliament for those who want, and want their kids, to take up trades. Currently, hardly anyone is pushing this issue.
The world is changing, and today's economy needs more graduates than it did 30 years ago. While they might have gone too far, increasing the number of people going to university was definitely the right thing to do.
I do agree that they didn't do enough to encourage people to go into the trades, and the Tories haven't been any better on that front while making it harder for people to go to university and dragging universities down through underfunding.
We don't need more graduates. We need more businesses that are willing to train people to do the jobs they need doing.
All more graduates has resulted in is the value of a degree dropping through the floor and stupid graduate requirements for jobs that never needed graduates and still don't need graduates.
Does it though? My GF works as a pricing analyst but has a degree in English, it has no relevance to the job but they still want a degree from applicants. Why? It's utterly pointless, she has learnt everything about it on the job.
[https://iea.org.uk/1997-the-last-year-of-pre-housing-crisis-britain/](https://iea.org.uk/1997-the-last-year-of-pre-housing-crisis-britain/)
According to the IEA it's been 26 years since it started.
The rot started c.2000 under Blair. All of the technical colleges and polytechnics closed under him and converted to universities. Funding for HE was significantly lopsided and FE suffered as a result.
You can argue about subsequent funding under the Tories but the greatest damage to technical trades in this country was under Blair.
You're right to think that, as it was the 1992 act enabled polytechnics to convert to universities. But very much like PFI, it was originally a Tory policy that was turned up to 11 by Blair.
I’m not old enough to really remember Blair’s impact, I went to sixth form/college in the late 2010s but I appreciate being educated about it on the thread ☺️
Back in the late 90s and through to mid 00s schools partnered with colleges to allow certain students to go and learn a trade skill 2 days a week. It was kind of a precursor to the apprenticeship schemes as they were often offered it in year 10, well before GCSEs.
Our school for example often offered it to the kids that were a nuscence (skiving, had poor backgrounds, caused trouble, etc). One of the guys who was sent off to a plumbing one is now a respected business owner in our local area, another is a carpenter and another two of them own their own building firm (again well respected in the area).
These were kids that they knew would fail all their GCSE's, wouldn't continue into higher education, and would likely end up being a burden to society. It was a fantastic program and turned their lives around whilst helping keep skilled labour going.
If you were to suggest that to a government official today you'd be slated for trying to stop people going to university, which they never would have done anyway and even if they had done would likely end up dropping out or getting a degree and then finding it was useless.
I think those schemes were positive in their own way. But once upon a time you got people who today would have passed GCSEs and a levels with flying colours going into trades, which is now uncommon, contributing to a brain drain. Hence why we often have to get tradies in from France germany Holland for complex skilled projects
Yes it's common to have graduates working in trades in many countries, beats working as a barista But the British class system actively discourages it.
What you’re describing as a concept more generally is vocational education.
Not everyone is built or raised the same way as a child, and so not all of us do well in the traditional format of education - and worse, exam based testing.
We should absolutely be offering a spectrum of options in terms of method of delivery for education, ranging from highly theoretical to highly practical.
Unfortunately the education system has largely remained the same since Victorian times, and tends to be stuck in a loop in which ideas such as vocational education reforms surface every few decade or so, then sink again when government follows tabloid headlines claiming only English and Maths count and some random employers claim kids leaving school don’t have the skills they need.
Lastly, long term change requires substantial investment. Which had been absent for decades. New Labour put money into education and it did a lot for primary level but we need to see another round of the same but for secondary. And it will be expensive after 15 years of grinding austerity.
It sounds like a good scheme, though consider you're only hearing the successes, not the failures.
Is also why trades was considered so unattractive and for people with low ambitions. When I was at school, going into trade was for the 'thick' kids, the troublemakers and the like, who had no incentive to learn because once they hit 16 they'd get a job with daddy (some even left on their 16th birthday and didn't hang around til exams). I'd rather trades was a pathway for everyone rather than being a 'reward' for delinquents, and my bank balance and life savings would agree.
Basically, I just feel the system is setup so that troublemakers are rewarded. That's' my experience with how the police/courts, schools and social work etc operate
> they'd get a job with daddy
Middle class kids call their father 'daddy' well beyond the age it's appropriate to do so. Not working.
And the phrase 'get a job from/with daddy' connotes privilege.
Leaving school at 16 to go on the tools is not privilege, your body is going to be fucked by 40 years old, and you'll be functionally crippled by 60.
With the money they're earning they can retire at 40. Don't have much sympathy, I've done physically damaging jobs for minimum wage.
if they're spending their money on coke binges (something endemic amongst tradies) and not saving for early retirement, that's their problem.
Right, but saying "getting a job with daddy" like it's some great privilege, when they're swapping the classroom for a transit van and a life of fucked knees and coke comedowns is a dumb shit thing to say.
As someone who's worked physically demanding jobs for minimum wage and literally worked just to survive with almost nothing to show from the actual sweat and tears, then yes it's a privilege. That they choose to get into cocaine addiction is their own problem and doesn't deserve any sympathy.
Welcome to being working class.
(Article)
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In the coming general election campaign, 300,000 will be one of the magic numbers, constantly on the lips of candidates throughout the land: 300,000 is the number of new homes a year that everyone agrees needs to be built, to keep up with population growth and young people being able to find somewhere to live. It is the government’s target, although they have actually managed about 200,000 a year. In particular, 300,000 is the number Sir Keir Starmer is sworn to make reality by “bulldozing” through regulations and mandating new building on the green belt.
Yet the truth is that no one in the near future is going to be building 300,000 homes a year. Even if the green belt was declared to be a giant New Town, and Nimbyism was made illegal, and anyone who thought of putting up a house was instantly given planning permission, it is very unlikely that such a number could be reached. Regulations could be bulldozed, councils mandated to hit targets, developers forced to get on with it, and still there would not be 300,000 new homes per year. At present it is a fantasy.
This is because we do not have in this country the electricians, plumbers, bricklayers, plasterers, tilers, scaffolders, bathroom fitters and roofers who would be needed to build 300,000 homes every year. Their skills cannot just be conjured up, but need training and apprenticeships that can take years. They are the very skills that will also be in demand to retrofit existing homes with heat pumps, change cladding that should never have been installed, and work on big infrastructure projects such as HS2. And they are skills that we — we as a society, including industry and schools, as well as ministers of all parties — have not been producing in sufficient numbers for a long time.
Brexit has not helped: the number of construction workers from EU countries has fallen sharply. Last year the government had to put a wide range of building skills on the shortage occupation list to allow in more migrants with relevant expertise. Ministers have been busy trying to fill the obvious gaps in the nation’s skills, pushing forward with Institutes of Technology, announcing skills bootcamps and a local skills improvement fund, all of which are very good initiatives. They have tried for years to improve apprenticeships, with mixed results. But moving the dial on construction skills, and moving it quickly, will still prove very difficult despite all these efforts.
One reason it is so difficult is the great scale of the problem. The Construction Industry Training Board forecasts that an extra 225,000 workers will be needed by 2027. Kingfisher has estimated that the UK will lose £98 billion of output due to a shortage of tradespeople. An analysis of OECD data by the think tank Onward suggests that building and construction is the sector in which we have the biggest skills shortfall, with mechanical and engineering skills not far behind. By contrast we have a surplus of skills in clerical work, sales, accounting and human resources. The number of new, trained building workers would need to be many tens of thousands each year, particularly as one in five of the current workforce is over fifty.
Another reason is cultural. We have for decades celebrated a university education and looked down on practical but vital skills. In the Kingfisher survey, only 13 per cent of 16 to 25-year-olds said they had been encouraged at school to consider trade career options, even though 42 per cent of them would have liked more information on such roles before deciding on their career. Young women in particular are unlikely to be given encouragement or relevant information. Deep-seated attitudes in careers advice and teaching will need changing.
A further and crucial obstacle is the way in which a very small business actually works. Many people in this industry are sole traders. Training an apprentice for two years is a cost and commitment that may extend further than an order book, and for the apprentice means lower pay, for a time, than alternative jobs. To have some hope of filling the huge gap in future skills, government policies would need to change the incentives at this micro level.
Yet if policies could be drawn together of sufficient scale, reaching deeply into the nation’s culture and changing the calculations of sole traders, the prize is huge. Unlike many European countries where populations have begun to fall, Britain still has an expanding population, bringing investment in housing, energy and infrastructure if we can supply the skills. Those acquiring the right skills will have a job for life: however impressive artificial intelligence programmes become they will struggle to install the electrical wires in your bathroom, guarantee they are safe and connect the right wires to the fuse box. Such jobs will be better paid than the national average. They will generally be a source of pride and satisfaction — part of the answer to a YouGov finding in 2015 that 37 per cent of British adults said their jobs were meaningless.
We really ought to be able to crack this problem. Rishi Sunak talks passionately about skills and was doing so on Monday. The many fresh efforts by ministers need drawing together in a major national drive to equip the country for housebuilding and energy transition. The Labour Party no doubt has similar good intentions, but as it finalises its manifesto it will need to focus heavily on this issue if promises about houses are to have any credibility.
There is no shortage of ideas for what to do. More apprenticeships could be fully funded or allowed tax credits. A one-stop advice service could help tradespeople through bureaucratic complications. Schools could give much greater prominence to tradespeople, particularly to female role models. There could be a new national online platform for work experience, a social media campaign to highlight lifelong skills, virtual reality educational technology to inspire young people to be part of building things for the future, and a new employment brokering service for construction and trades.
All these and other proposals have been made by think tanks, employers’ organisations or MPs.
Everybody in Britain knows it can be difficult to find an electrician or plumber. In one survey, a fifth of respondents said they had postponed a project in their home because they could not find people to do it. It is one of the factors holding our economy back. Voters would welcome some big and serious answers in the party manifestos. And in the endless interviews and debates to come, no candidate should be allowed to claim they will build 300,000 homes a year without explaining where they will find the skills to do it.
Addressing the massive problem of wage theft in the building trades would be a good start. So would paying a wage that encourages people to enter the trades. Better supervision of apprenticeship programmes would also help-- right now, many of them provide no training that leads to qualifications, and are used by large builders as a source of subsidised labour.
>Addressing the massive problem of wage theft in the building trades would be a good start.
Yes. My brother's a brickie and it's a complete wild West. Everyone just screws each other over. With those with the least leverage, experience, street smarts etc getting the worst of it.
The whole industry is structurally flawed and just creates cowboys. Of course there are some good trades, but there's a lot that aren't.
> So would paying a wage that encourages people to enter the trades.
Hell, a lot of construction work is on the shortage occupations list: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/skilled-worker-visa-shortage-occupations/skilled-worker-visa-shortage-occupations
> If your job is on the list, you can be paid 80% of the job’s usual going rate to qualify for a Skilled Worker visa.
> 5312 Bricklayers and masons – all jobs England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland 80% of going rate: £18,640 (£9.56 per hour)
> 5313 Roofers, roof tilers and slaters – all jobs England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland 80% of going rate: £16,160 (£8.29 per hour)
> 5315 Carpenters and joiners – all jobs England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland 80% of going rate: £18,000 (£9.23 per hour)
> 5319 Construction and building trades not elsewhere classified – all jobs England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland 80% of going rate: £17,760 (£9.11 per hour)
> 5321 Plasterers – all jobs England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland 80% of going rate: £19,200 (£9.85 per hour)
I don't know if you still need to pay NMW to skilled workers brought in like that, but currently 21-22s are paid £10.18 PH and 23+ paid £10.42, so these are either NMW or below NMW unless these skilled workers are 20 or younger.
The Tory solution to this problem is to keep pay down, and discourage training by encouraging use of immigrants instead where they're ready trained and cheap.
Yea I want a trade but I'm 40 and can't earn fuck all while I train (in any new role) because I have adult bills.
I hate my job but I'm stuck in it and thats depressing as fuck
Sorry that you're in this situation. Do whatever you can to get ahead. Heck, in this CoL crisis, if I see you stealing from work, I'm not gonna report you.
Haha, appreciated.
I'm trying. Messed up my education, had a bike accident and now drive a taci/private hire car 12+ hours a day and it's so under stimulating, if that's the right way to describe it.
Got a few ideas on the go but funding is a problem 😐
I’d like to see an overhaul of trade qualifications.
Anyone can get a van and call themselves a plasterer or plumber.
It attracts a certain type of person who can fall in to a trade.
I’d like to see formal system of recognised training. Qualifications have to be held to hold certain positions.
There’s a massive difference between a plumber, a gas man and a heating engineer. Yet no one knows the difference.
It’s almost like we need something like the old style apprenticeship system - that the Tories dismantled in the 80s and replaced with cheap labour YTS.
Sort of. But with a strong academic side too. Most plumbers haven’t got a clue about how hydronics work. They should. It’s literally their job.
Stratifying the work would mean you still get your pipe fitters and toilet fixers…but you also get highly trained, highly skilled engineers
You’re right. Get a basic plumber to do that. Save the heating engineers for installing heating system.
The pilot doesn’t serve you nuts on your flight. The flight attendant doesn’t land the plane.
Sort of but that creates a very locked in sector which means everyone knows everyone and you can get black listed and stuff. Happened with the watermen and lighter men in london until they changed away from that system for boat driving in 2005
The old system it was very very corrupt as you had to know a guy who knew a guy to even get your apprenticeship. It made it very hard to dela with as they all knew each other and thus became their own club and very militant.
The new system is like getting your drivers license but with a bit of extra work. Works much better as people outside the system can get a qualification without having to get a guild member to vouch for you. It means people are freer to move between jobs without checking that the guild has “signed it off”
This is already a thing across most trades, competent person schemes have been around for a long while. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/competent-person-scheme-current-schemes-and-how-schemes-are-authorised#current-schemes
The problem with that is it doesn't mean much when people doing the work are so rare to come by.
For example, you buy a house and you want a surveyor. Well, if you ring around the firms certified by RICS you can get one and probably at short notice.
If you say "right I need my house re-wiring I'm only going to hire someone in a certified person scheme" you'll be told no one can do it for months and months, maybe even a year. So then if someone told you "I know this electrician he did a good job on my house" it won't matter if they are certified because you'll take the risk.
I do think the trades should be regulated more because there's too many cowboys, BUT that only works if there's enough people to do the jobs.
Better regulation can only happen if there are quality control measures. This would become extremely complicated given the variety of traders providing services to the public and further complicated by the variety of services each one could provide.
There are many websites that already exist which attempt to catalogue reliable traders, but they only work when customers are willing to share the good work a trader has done and can do so in an accessible manner. There could be five good plasterers in an area but the top two will get the lion's share of the work from a given site because they happened to get good reviews posted first, to give an example. While others have said that competency schemes exist that could help to reassure someone that the person they hire will be competent; such schemes and qualifications only determine that the individual is *aware* of the safety requirements and good practises of their field and does little to enforce the practise of good work. After all, one of the biggest issues people have with traders is the sore lack of accountability for bad work.
Not to mention the fact that the definition of "good" work varies wildly from person to person.
The more I think about how a "perfect" trader's system would need to work the more I understand why the government hasn't tried to make such a cataloguing system themselves.
Tbh the sites are useless too
Good trades don’t use them because they’re stupidly busy already. My spark, plumber and painter are all rammed constantly and it’s only because they’re neighbours or friends that I get a look-in
>Better regulation can only happen if there are quality control measures. This would become extremely complicated given the variety of traders providing services to the public and further complicated by the variety of services each one could provide.
That's not true at all.
Solicitors have a recognised body, rules about conduct, all across a variety of services and they don't have "quality control". So do accountants, auditors, etc etc the list goes on.
A set of rules isn't about "is this person technically the best at their job". I'm not worried about someone doing work that just isn't that great.
I'm worried about a) people doing work that is unsafe and someone gets hurt b) someone doing work that is fundamentally faulty and causes damage when it fails and c) someone who doesn't turn up to do jobs and/or takes my money and doesn't do the work.
You don't need to have a vast contingent of civil servants to do that. Have it so you need to be registered to perform a trade, and you'll get your certification stripped off you if you do anything dangerous, do anything that fails seriously and it was your fault, or act unethically.
It's that simple.
Yes there will need to be a professional membership body, and yes people who register probably need to pay an annual fee. So what though? It's no different to many jobs.
It's not there to be like "Dave is a messy plasterer 1 star". It's there to be like "Is Dave dangerous? Is he completely negligent? Is he unethical?" just like in the same way you can have a shit solicitor but they aren't kicked out of the profession.
Using you're example, this is already covered by existing legislation as of 2003 in Scotland & 2005 in England & Wales, any electrical work involving placing a new circuit, working within the consumer unit, or work within a bathroom (with caveats) requires building control notification with an electrical safety certificate provided by a competent person ([https://electrical.theiet.org/bs-7671/building-regulations/part-p-england-and-wales/frequently-asked-questions/](https://electrical.theiet.org/bs-7671/building-regulations/part-p-england-and-wales/frequently-asked-questions/)).
For gas work, this has been legislated since 1991, with work covering combustion & gas carrying components requiring a gas safe/CORGI registered engineer. ([https://www.gassaferegister.co.uk/media/1449/who-can-legally-work-on-a-gas-appliance-factsheet.pdf](https://www.gassaferegister.co.uk/media/1449/who-can-legally-work-on-a-gas-appliance-factsheet.pdf)).
In general building there is registered schemes required for, any & all structural alterations, new bathroom installations, replacement windows or doors, replacement roofing & cavity and solid wall insulation. ([https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/building-work-replacements-and-repairs-to-your-home/building-work-replacements-and-repairs-to-your-home](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/building-work-replacements-and-repairs-to-your-home/building-work-replacements-and-repairs-to-your-home)).
My point being, what are you actually asking for, should homeowners, DIYers & indeed, unregistered general tradeys not be allowed to change a plug faceplate, or paint a wall? Because most all high risk activities are already covered in one way or another & people contravening this are already committing offences.
> I’d like to see formal system of recognised training. Qualifications have to be held to hold certain positions.
I don't see how increasing the regulatory requirements will solve a shortage.
What proposals do you have to counteract the short term reduction in labour that your policy would create?
The amount of labour would stay the same. But you’d know at what level each particular tradesperson was on. Long term tradespeople would have a scheme to progress. Perhaps leading to more people willing to take it on as there would be a progression path leading to higher status and better pay.
> The amount of labour would stay the same. But you’d know at what level each particular tradesperson was on
Except nobody would be certified when you introduced the scheme, so you'd have a massive short term drop in certified labour.
You haven't explained HOW the amount of labour will stay the same after you introduce regulatory barriers to entry.
Also the premise is that it would attract entrants who were interested in being a highly qualified engineer. You will always have plumbers and basic tradesmen. But I’d like to encourage more, perhaps slightly more academic people to take it up. If it had some kudos or progression it may well do that.
I'm not sure it would solve the issue though. No one would know the difference after the fact, so calling yourself a 'plumbing technician' would skirt around it.
Ultimately, people want to pay as little as possible for a job that fixes the problem, from a reputable tradesperson. Sites like checkatrade were supposed to fix this, but people can game the reviews. The reality is that you really need to know someone trustworthy in the trade who can recommend someone good.
Maybe. I see it a bit like when you go to see a doctor.
Yes you can have a jr doctor remove your appendix. Or you can have a consultant. The cost wouldn’t be that different.
In an environment with high energy costs and a climate crisis I’d always recommend getting a proper job over a cheap and cheerful
Awful idea. So many other industries regulated to death and it’s stifling enterprise.
I do think there should be a trade body that plumbers or other tradies become members of that ensure the quality of their members. In that sense like how the FCA oversees financial advice, which is the field I work in.
I work in trades. There’s very few true experts I’ve met. Training is very poor
Germany, for example, has a much higher regard for their “engineers”. Better training, better pay, better service for the public. Better all round.
Rather than relaying on dangerous Dave from down the pub to do your plumbing why not get a proper heating engineer. And know you’re getting one.
I also went to uni. At the time I thought a trade pathway was something less capable people chose. I’d rather encourage intelligent people in to trades by it being respected and professional.
Sure you can still have your bog standard plumber. But what about having proper engineers as well?
I'm an engineer at my work and technicians get paid just as well, it's the responsibilities that are separate. But places that call it all together end up devaluing both skillsets
> Rather than relaying on dangerous Dave from down the pub to do your plumbing why not get a proper heating engineer. And know you’re getting one.
We already have gas safe certification?
Yes you’re right. The gas safe qualification is the absolute minimum you need to have to not be dangerous. That’s it. It doesn’t teach gas engineers anything about heating design. It doesn’t even teach them to fix boilers. It’s just a safety qualification.
Most gas engineers I know couldn’t tel me what a condensing boiler is. What is condensing? Why is it good? How do we achieve it?
Most boilers rarely condense, yet they’ve been around for 20 years.
A rated boilers are not A rated if they’re fitted by someone who knows absolutely nothing another engineering. This is the state of the British heating industry
Edit: also a plumber doesn’t need any qualifications
> Most gas engineers I know couldn’t tel me what a condensing boiler is.
Most GPs couldn't tell me the interactions of the cocktail of prescription medications I might be on.
There's a clear division of labour in construction between designers (architects) and people who read the plans and implement them.
It would be massively inefficient to have someone design a heating system (skillset A), be the same person that physically labours at installing it (skillset B).
One heating system designer could knock out five plans a day on a desktop (let's say), but each system could take a full day to install. With five "super engineers" you could get through one job every two days, with 80% of the first day wasted.
One heating design engineer, and five installers would get through five jobs a day.
Ricardo's comparative advantage.
This is correct in terms of building sites and in some new construction. But the typical home owner in the UK doesn’t employ a heating engineer to design their system. They get Dean and Bazza from down the pub to whack something in.
Did Dean and Bazza strong arm them into this arrangement? Why did this adult not consider approaching a heating consultant first?
Did they ask a local site labourer to build their house without plans in lieu of approaching an architect, too?
So how about taking people who are out of work and actually offering them full training for a trade...imagine the horror of training people proactively to fill a gap.
(this isn't anti migrant sentiment I'm just stating what I'm told by friends either based in Europe or from there originally)
I've a few eastern European friends, they quite often say working age unskilled men who live in remote parts of their countries with limited job opportunities will go to the UK to get a minimum wage job because there's simply nothing for them in their area.
It's seen as a bit of a novel escape to go to the UK and have some kind of life, granted even if it's a relatively poor one on minimum wage and living in a HMO. But it's better than bumming about a little rural village with no real opportunities. Alternatively quite a lot get conned into moving over on false promises and what is essentially modern slavery, then have their passports taken and won't go to police for fear of deportation.
Create subsidised trade schools. With no age limit to apply.
That only costs a small loan, which can be payed back after you get employed in the field.
And a free grant to cover living costs while training.
What’s really depressing is the prospect of 300,000 new homes of the type that’s been built here with little change since the 80s.
Also it won’t solve the problems of key workers being able to afford to live near their place of work.
It won’t address the problem of astronomical rents and companies hoovering up property in areas where families etc actually want to live.
Tradespeople should demand more of the ~£63k profit made on the average shitbox (that was 2017. It's nearer £67k now). [0]
"On average, in 2022, the largest housebuilders paid over £22,000 in dividends for each new home built." [1]
[0] https://www.brunel.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/articles/Builders-are-making-thumping-profits-by-over-charging-for-new-homes-%E2%80%93-new-findings
[1] https://www.shu.ac.uk/news/all-articles/latest-news/uk-housebuilders-research
Yep. But then we just pass the skills shortage onto another sector, that now lacks the people who might have worked there but have instead become brickies.
Instead of housebuilding it will be our logistics or our infrastructure that fall even further behind.
Our deeper problem is a lack of working age people.
> Yep. But then we just pass the skills shortage onto another sector, that now lacks the people who might have worked there but have instead become brickies.
> Our deeper problem is a lack of working age people.
The UK employment rate is [75.5%.](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/employmentintheuk/september2023) Given that [64%](https://data.oecd.org/pop/working-age-population.htm) of the population is considered working age, this leaves 10.7 million working age people who don't work. Some proportion of these will be unable to work due to disability, but even if you cut that in half, there are more than 5M people capable of work.
There is simply no way to argue the UK has a lack of working age people. Quite the opposite. Millions of people choose not to work, and highest on international surveys for the reason are poor wages and lack of workplace respect.
Workforces always need slack. Once a country is overemployed people can't get staff.
For instance I'm a chartered accountant. I'm not looking for bricklaying, or computer programming, or being a surveyor. I'd need to retrain for that and there's no point. My replacement needs to be ready trained too.
So those industries need a slack of people trained to do it - and if you add that up nationwide the number of required unemployed people goes up really quite quickly.
If you don't have that the economy stagnates as things can't grow/get needed workers.
> Workforces always need slack. Once a country is overemployed people can't get staff.
I agree, but this is typically in the 4-5% range. I don't think the economy needs 25% of the population to be unemployed. If it did, I would question the structure and premise.
No, but there's other factors coming in to play. People looking after children, housewives, people who simply don't want or need to work for money, people taking time off for health...
It seriously cuts down on the number willing/needing and able to work. Which is why the actual unemployment rate (with government fudging, admittedly) is far less than 25%.
One of our real problems is underemployment. People stuck delivering Pizza as they can't afford to train and do something else because they need the money etc. They count as employed, but aren't as productive as they could be.
> People looking after children, housewives, people who simply don't want or need to work for money, people taking time off for health...
With the exception of being a caregiver to kids, all of those are a reformulation of what I argue above: those people just don't want to work, for a variety of reasons. They can and should be enticed back into the workforce with better wages and conditions. As for kids, if you pay caregivers much more than it costs for daycare, unsurprisingly, many of them work. Labour follows supply and demand forces.
I agree that underemployment is also an issue.
I don't think you're correct. However you set wages there appears to be a rough upper bound percentage of the population who are going to work.
Just to keep with your trivialised model, if we just massively upped wages, then inflation rises and then an equilibrium will be found again where some people would rather not work (house wives etc).
In short, I think you have a narrative in your mind and you're contriving your model of the world to keep that narrative intact.
You're confusing the employment rate and unemployment rates.
The 4-5% slack range is for the unemployment rate, and has historically been termed as being at 'full employment'.
A good chunk of that 24.5% that are non-employed are sick, early retired, independently moneyed, or mothers. How are you going to get them back into work?
The employment rate for 25-54 year olds is 84.7%. There's no one left to draw from.
Our employment rate is the highest in decades, and is high by international comparisons.
There are many reasons people choose not to work. [Here are some of the top reasons people quit.](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/09/majority-of-workers-who-quit-a-job-in-2021-cite-low-pay-no-opportunities-for-advancement-feeling-disrespected/) As wages rise and conditions improve, some of those people who previously chose not to work, choose to work. This is normal labour supply and demand.
I'm not sure what your point is re the employment rate for 25-54 year olds, or the historical figures. The bottom line is that there are 5-10M able bodied, working age people.
>As wages rise and conditions improve, some of those people who previously chose not to work, choose to work. This is normal labour supply and demand.
Thats the substitution effect. You've also omitted [the income effect](https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/fp233.pdf) which induces people to work less as wages rise, both on the intensive margin of reducing their hours worked, but also on the extensive margin by inducing some to drop out of work.
>I'm not sure what your point is re the employment rate for 25-54 year olds
We are effectively at the upper-bound of those in prime age working life actually working. The marginal effort of government policy inducing one of those people into work is likely going to be greater than whatever the marginal benefit of one of those additional people going into work.
>are 5-10M able bodied, working age people.
I have no idea where you've gotten able-bodied from. You've roughly estimated the number of people included in the non-employed bucket but you have no idea what the composition of that group is. As I said, the demographic characteristics of those between 16-64 who are non-employed [include higher-education students, mothers, the early retired and long-term sick.](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/methodologies/aguidetolabourmarketstatistics) The biggest 'drag' on the employment rate disaggregated by age is 16-24 year olds. I wonder why.
These people are not 'unemployed' in the way you are trying to portray (i.e. work-shy layabouts). The tradeoffs of some policy trying to drag those people into active employment are likely to be considerable, either by - reducing their investment in human capital by taking them from education into low-skill work and stunting their lifetime earnings (and ergo tax revenue); reducing time between mothers and young children which will harm developmental outcomes for those babies and/or strongly disincentivising fertility decisions among women of childrearing age (also making the demographic issues worse in the longer term), or by taking sick people and stuffing them into jobs where their health will deteriorate and therefore end up costing the state more than otherwise.
The one group of people that it might be useful think about targeting to bring back into the labour force are the early retirees but they aren't going to help sectoral shortages in skilled professions because which 61 year old who is basically a few years shy of retirement going to respec into being a plumber if they used to be an accountant?
Is it not fair to say that 75.5% represents close to an all time high for that metric?
Obviously it will never be 100%, but if it's never been higher than \~75% either, why do you think there are more people capable of work?
For context the same metric in France is 68%, and Germany 78% (both similar all time highs for those countries)
It's not just the sick/disabled, you should consider stay at home parents, early retirement, Children aged 16-18, the wealthy who need not work?
University students count for 6% of your "missing" working age people alone.
History would seem to suggest you'll never get more than \~75% of working age adults in work, so the original comment remains valid.
There are no people left to fill positions created.
> There are no people left to fill positions created.
There are 5-10M of them. I'm not sure why you're denying the official statistics. I cited a government link above. Do you think they're just lying to us? I don't understand your appeal to historical precedent. The UK has always had a lot of working age people who chose not to work. Their reasons were many and varied. A large factor was women who were disenfranchised from the workforce. Today there are still many reason for why those people don't want to work, [including factors researched by companies like Pew Research.](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/09/majority-of-workers-who-quit-a-job-in-2021-cite-low-pay-no-opportunities-for-advancement-feeling-disrespected/) Should those factors be address, those people would return to the workforce.
The UK has a shortage of companies willing to pay decent wages and treat their employees like human beings. There is no shortage of workers.
I was explaining to you that there is a ceiling below 100% employment at which people cannot be coerced into work for any reason, and that ceiling appears to be ~75%.
It has never been higher in the UK, and other countries have similar findings.
For example - Someone that has taken early retirement will never rejoin the workforce at any realistic pay point or conditions.
Someone that is still in education 16-18 isn’t even allowed to join the workforce proper.
I’m not denying statistics, I’m giving context to them.
This section of society, has never had jobs and most likely never will regardless of conditions. Without this context, repeating 5-10m don’t have jobs, is a pointless statement.
I’m not sure if your research citing poor conditions in the USA as the reason people MOVED jobs in 2021 (80% found new jobs so are not unemployed) has any relevance to the UK market or this discussion. But I think comparing our current economy to historic UK economies seems far more relevant, and in that comparison we are at the highest employment levels we’ve ever had.
So I do not see the 5-10m people ready to work?
Our employment rate over the last couple of years has been higher than at any time since 1970. We simply don't have spare workers
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/employment-rate#:~:text=Employment%20Rate%20in%20the%20United,percent%20in%20March%20of%201983.
> Our employment rate over the last couple of years has been higher than at any time since 1970.
This is a non-sequitur. How does that address what I wrote?
> We simply don't have spare workers
We have 5-10M of them. Are you arguing with official statistics?
> This is a non-sequitur. How does that address what I wrote?
It's a relevant fact, which shows that no government policies/economic environment since 1970 has been able to achieve a higher level of employment.
> We have 5-10M of them. Are you arguing with official statistics?
Official statistics? Do you mean when you just made this number up by guessing that half of the people who are not working might be disabled? Is that what official statistics are?
> It's a relevant fact, which shows that no government policies/economic environment since 1970 has been able to achieve a higher level of employment.
I'm not disputing that. I never argued otherwise.
> Official statistics? Do you mean when you just made this number up by guessing that half of the people who are not working might be disabled? Is that what official statistics are?
Official statistics are the ones I linked above showing that 10.7M working age people don't work. Feel free to ignore the estimate on disability. We can just stick with 10.7M if you prefer.
Okay let's also talk about a huge shift in wage placement following the report that Brits are 10k short changed a year... So let's get our pay bumped up yeah?
We will never solve our skills shortage when you can make more money as an estate agent, a civil servant or a supermarket manager than as an engineer. It’s pathetic what employers pay skilled workers in this country.
Depends on what type of civil servant but yes I take your point. Challenge with trades is can be how long it you can keep working before you body gives out.
Good tradespeople are not paid badly. A plumber in my area has a 6 month waiting list to do a bathroom. He is getting paid a lot.
The problem is that to get good money, you need to be good at your job. To get good money as a supermarket average, you just need to be average.
Implicitly an average supermarket worker makes more than an average plumber. Which doesn't seem right, and again, doesn't seem to fit with supply & demand, unless there are a load of average plumbers twiddling their thumbs because nobody wants to use them.
That's nonsense. Plumbers aren't low paid, and definitely aren't in minimum wage. A semi decent plumber is easily in the high rate tax band with minimum effort.
I disagree. The high earners in supermarkets are the very few, who are in charge of a large workforce. They pay that much, because thats what it costs to get someone who's good at management.
Independent tradesman is the only way you get paid a fair wage generally as all building companies are corner cutting penny pinchers who would much rather underpay a poor quality workman and just stonewall customers until 90% stop complaining.
Most don’t have time or energy to keep complaining for the job to be done properly. The 5-10% who kick up enough fuss get their work done to a slightly better standard after multiple avenues of complaining. This is cheaper than paying for quality from the start.
What people mostly resent about the construction industry, as far as domestic consumers are concerned, are the prevelance of "one-man-band" outfits.
The public have become accustomed to consistency of service from large chains and brands like Tesco, or Vodafone, or Apple, or Hovis. What the public yearn for in construction is a large brand of builders. They want to be able to ring up "Tradies^tm " and get an *employee*, who goes through regularl quality assessment, to do some work.
There would therefore be a customer service rep, a tradie that installs some pipe, a clerk of works that supervises them, a payments department, a consistent catalogue of works and prices from their sales guys, and a complaint department.
People don't like dealing with sketchy man-with-van outfits that don't have cashflow, don't show up because they can't manage their time, don't guarantee their work and phoenix their company every three months.
I don't agree, but that's probably because I've lived in the same area for some time.
There's some local small businesses and independent traders that me and my mates have used and found reliable, and a bunch of others that I'd avoid. I don't want to deal with some large faceless company and get whoever is available that week, whether they are any good or not.
The opposite argument is that with a large company if one of their people goes off sick or has an accident, you're not left with a half finished roof or kitchen or wiring job. I guess I've been lucky so far.
Like all generalities there are exceptions. If you and your mates have lived in an area long enough then of course you've built up a repertoire of reliable trades people.
But you move to a new area and take a punt on a trades person and I'd say the hit rate is probably something like 2 out of 3 interactions is poor to terrible.
Where I'd agree is that large businesses can be just as bad. The whole industry is fucked.
I think the problem with a Tesco/ Vodafone type structure is that there is zero incentive for tradespeople to belong to it rather than be independent. Tradies who want a 'steady job just fulfil contracts for landlords or other commercial entities like housebuilders. The personal element, of making a difference to someone's house therefore to their lives etc, is a big element of the relationship between the good individual tradie and the householder.
So it's the opposite situation from what you describe round me (and for me). Everyone wants to find the one-man-band that they trust.
Having someone from a chain or from a company with a customer services rep come round would massively increase the cost as well.
The problem is not one man bands, it is the shortage of the good ones.
Everything is word of mouth- the good tradesperson does not bother to work for anyone not recommended to them as a good customer, and the householder does not bother to ask anyone who is not recommended as a good worker.
The big advantage of finding someone good is that you then get good after-job service- the small problems and the maintenance arising from the big job will be sorted out as the person on the way home from the big jobs etc.
If you have a big job, then it is mediated by the supplier (typically the trade likes Howdens or Travis Perkins), who may well do free design/consult, but if you are an individual, your main relationship is with the individual who does or is in charge of your job/project.
Rather than spending £170K/person sending refugees to rwanda they could use that money to train them and fund free courses for anyone else who wants them.
We could very easily hit 300k homes a year with our current trades.
I saw a few days back a video of a NY skyscraper going up in 12 months, must have been a couple dozen floors. The rate of construction in this nation is a cruel joke.
Transition to 6-8 story flats, and productivity per worker will rise. Not rocket science is it.
Hague going to acknowledge the importation of 5+ million working class Eastern Europeans who undercut everyone and absolutely destroyed pay and the subsequently the entire system that creates new tradies and provides security later their career? No, i guess its just not enough female role models.
Depends who you are in the trades. My brother in law is a tradesman whose hourly rate is lower than my sisters who works in the NHS. He has to work 50-60 hours a week to make up a decent wage to raise a family. He doesn’t feel like he can even negotiate a higher wage because all his colleagues came from the international market and all work even longer hours for less pay.
Bollocks. It absolutely did destroy pay for over a decade and companies are still hooked on cheap imported tradesman. It has started to recover somewhat but all those tradies kids went into stacking shelves and pushing paper because they could earn more/same for far easier work. Your average plumbing career is basically on par with a career at Tesco's at similar levels. The only place they diverge are if a plumber sets up their own business and is good at that side of the business too.
https://www.checkatrade.com/blog/trade/how-much-is-a-plumbers-salary-in-the-uk/
You aren't getting £45k stacking shelves in Tesco. If you are the manager of a decently-sized store, you might get that.
Pretty much everyone has the skills to set up as a sole trader
>Pretty much everyone has the skills to set up as a sole trader
Obviously not, considering there is a massive pay difference between those that are sole traders and those that are salaried or do you think people are working for Russel Taylor Group for the great workplace environment despite the £20k-£30k they are missing out on?
I love how it's always a headline that's just "If only we all just started working together and made things better like the good old Empire Days!!??" :D
Like, it's always written by a boomer or some young LinkedIn Lunatic. While the rest of us just want to do bare minimum, get paid, not be greedy and just enjoy our hobbit lives.
Some really good perspectives and suggestions on this issue in this thread. Though like with a number of other big issues I'm not sure if there is any obvious or easy path to solving the problem.
A huge loss was discontinuing the old Nursing diploma, then introducing fees.
We've a massive loss in the health and social care sector, especially in nursing because people are losing the access to a now degree only profession.
Those that do graduate are getting their NHS experience then quickly emigrate.
Invest in education and training? Invest in any part of the future of England?
Can we have a party that does that instead of seeing how much more miserable they can make people? A party with some shred of concern for the country they aim to rule? Some patriotism? Is that too much to ask?
We seem to have a "skills shortage" in every profession these days. Why do we think we have a skills shortage rather than just not enough workers all round to meet the demand? Surely if we suddenly start training everyone to be tradesmen we're just going to end up with a shortage of workers in other fields.
Loads of semi skilled people who cannot get recognised as fully skilled, though they literally do the fully skilled job, day in, day out (IME of construction).
Loads and loads of people who do the job and are part qualified, but only get labourers pay "because qualifications". Qualifications they can't get as the companies paying them (through temp agencies) as labourers want to keep paying them as labourers, so won't do anything that helps them build their portfolio of work evidence for their trade.
And no, it's not that these companies are particularly active in blocking, they just aren't incentivised to do anything about it (especially given they can still use the labour), and the workers get to a point where they can't afford to do it themselves given the precarious situation some of them are in (some do get through and become qualified, but they aren't the norm IME).
The probably with the UK is tradesmen are disproportionately small scale operations, father and son businesses are stereotypical. And you get varying quality and fees, there is no standardisation, even with trades regulation bodies. A lot of them are absolute cowboys intent on fleecing, and it seems like 50% of all tradesmen have a cocaine habit, which is probably why they charge so much in the first place.
But basically it means that during economic downturns, there's a shortage of work and such a shortage of training, there is no incentive to train people up. I knew kids of tradesmen literally manning the tills at supermarkets and pulling pints during downturns. Then suddenly when times are good, we have a shortage. And it's why we are semi dependent on foreign tradesmen.
Big infrastructure/housing projects are best done in downturns when labour is relatively cheap, and it keeps skills fresh amongst the young generation. But instead we do infrastructure when times are good and tradesmen can charge sky high prices.
Also the fetishisation of going to university is also a factor.
I looked at going into trades many times during periods of neeting between 18-24 and found it was more or less impossible. Even less hope if you are older. Intend to self learn some construction/craft skills when I get a cheap house overseas. Basically I want to be self sufficient so I more or less would never need to call a tradesman anytime in my life.
This is putting the cart before the horse. We can't start training new tradespeople until we start projects for them to work on. If we have more projects than we have tradesmen, the value of their labour will increase, and more people will become tradesmen. The supply is self-regulating. We don't need the government to regulate it.
You can't solve an over-regulation problem with more regulation. Literally all we need to do is drop our Soviet-style central planning system and let property developers develop property. The market can sort out everything else on its own.
Have you tried getting a tradesman in to your house? Most of them don't even bother to respond with a quote. There are plenty of projects for them to work on already
To be honest this ties into the whole education system being so past its sell by date it's not funny. We have a school system still identical to what it was a century ago in curriculum and learning tools, as if the country is training children to pass the civil service india test. Teaching subjects that aren't useful to 90% of the students. Schools become basically babysitting facilities to allow parents to work all while the actual education that would help economicly and people as adults is totally neglected.
The NHS is our single biggest employer in this country but is there a GCSE on Healthcare? Do kids learn to inject, bandage, treat minor injuries and illness and get graded on it? This should be a subject that looms as big on the curriculum as Maths. Doublely so when you think that most of us will end up being carers for someone at some stage in our life be they parents or partners.
There's a bigger question on when we educate people for what. People work till almost 70 now yet by 16 we expect them to have a career mapped out. And would education not be received better later in life? All the pressure we put on kids to early on. Our current system helps no one, not the kids, not the economy.
Educate kids till 16 with a better curriculum put them in the workplace from then on. No expectation should be placed on them finding a career. Have uni style courses available from 21-25 if they want them. Free educational courses will be detirmined by the needs of the economy, plumbers, electricians, nurses etc will payment expected for courses that aren't in demand. The aim is to have Brits with steady good jobs by 30s. 21 year olds could of course opt out of this and continue to work if they enjoy it. They could do a course later in life if needed but may have to pay.
Ultimately the demand for many trades is artificially inflated by the planning system. They force houses to be built in a certain fashion and by certain materials
For example, field laid brick is essentially never used in commercial buildings any more, for a reason.
If we were tossing up manufactured/prefabricated homes the number of tradesmen required would be a tiny fraction of what is needed now.
Bricklaying exists as a significant construction trade primarily by command of the state.
Prefabrication would also slash the demand for plumbers, electricians and the like because wiring and pipework would be largely installed in a factory setting with enormous increases in productivity.
It is unreasonable to use methods from the 1930s in a country crippled by chronic labour shortages.
Another New Labour 'win'. Send everyone to uni, so we have a lack of skilled trades and people who are in debt from uni in low paying jobs and unable to buy a house.
It goes back at *least* to Thatcher, this dream that we will be a country exclusively of administrators and investment bankers and research chemists, and there's only been lip service about anything else from every government since.
It might well go back further and I'm just not aware of it.
In any case, student debt circa pre 2010 (£1-3k, and free for low income students) is not a factor in housing costs.
Furthermore, [here are the enrolment figures](https://www.statista.com/statistics/284230/university-applicants-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/) in question, where was it that "everyone" got "sent" to uni?
These are the types of issues that take a decade+ for changes to filter through to the point where they break or fix industries.
From initial fuckup, to noticing the fuckup, to implementing a fix, to the fix having a real impact, can take 20-30 years end to end.
It's plausible to be a flaw of new labour that the tories tackled as soon as they reasonably could have been expected to spot it *and it still wouldn't be fixed*.
I mean, we both know the tories haven't done shit to fix this. But even if they had in the last 5 years, I wouldn't expect it to have made a meaningful change before 2025.
It's important to be aware of that, because this is something Labour will not be able to fix quickly.
This is solving yesterday's problems. We need to be getting into building 3d printed or fab-assembled houses and stop treating every new suburban semi as a boutique hand-crafted design that needs an army of tradies to assemble. That's how you build enough houses to a high enough standard, and we could be world leaders in modern homebuilding at the same time.
>Bring the taxes to Dubai levels for the next 40 years and all will be solved
I'm sure it will be solved because the country will have collapsed and no one will be here to complain lol
My mind boggles.. it's at best advanced common sense, some a re suitable for a proper university education, some are not.
There's no judgement there; a balanced economy needs a balanced skill set.
It's like heads & tails on a coin.
Make the best coin & both sides of the coin the best they can be.
Good luck out there
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Your party spent 14 years gutting further education. This is like waking up from a coma.
This is the elephant in the room with the whole skills shortage and “degrees aren’t preparing young adults for the workforce” discourse. Was Michael Gove not responsible for free schools and academisation over comprehensives? The same schools ran by middle to upper class, CEO-style headteachers and SLT staff who prioritised the highest A-Level grades and admissions into Russell Group universities over ALL ELSE. I went to one of these schools back in the late 2010s, if you wanted to do a degree apprenticeship or even go to a non Russell group university because it had a year in industry placement or taught the course in a way you preferred - the idea was quickly shot down. The Tories are absolutely responsible for many young people and their parents now believing in traditional higher education over apprenticeships, A Levels over BTEC, Russell Group over non Russell Group, academic over vocational, etc. They’re gaslighting people nationally and it’s so ludicrous.
To be fair, that’s been going on for decades. When I was doing my GCSE’s around 2003, you were basically told to go onto do A levels or there is nothing else. And there wasn’t really. The whole education system of the last 30 years has been geared up to getting students to university, and sod the rest. We now have millions of people with degrees which mean nothing, or at least there aren’t the jobs out there for those degrees. There has actually been a positive move towards apprenticeship and apprenticeship degrees in the last 5 years or so. IMO, they are shit and many companies take the apprentices on as a tax break, rather than a workforce for the future. But there are more choices than when I left school, it was either uni or work.
>We now have millions of people with degrees which mean nothing, or at least there aren’t the jobs out there for those degrees. Do we? Any source on this
Dont have any factual information but most of my mates who have done a biology degree end up working in dead end jobs for min wage.
> The Tories are absolutely responsible for many young people and their parents now believing in traditional higher education over apprenticeships They can't win
Don’t want to come across as a whataboutism, as they’re two separate issues. But it’s an issue that’s been brewing for well over 14 years, yes the Tories have underfunded education in all forms. But Labours push under Blair to prioritise university over all other forms of further education has a lot to answer for in terms of creating shortages in blue collar professions. Both parties need an extraordinary change in tact.
New Labour still funded FE though, that’s the difference
The other problem is that people use being a tradie as a threat to kids at school - "if you don't study hard and do well, you'll end up being a brickie or a plumber! You won't have a proper job!" So now we have a situation where graduates in rented accommodation they can barely afford working office jobs for just above minimum wage look down on plumbers who earn hundreds of pounds an hour just for showing up and own their own homes.
This snobbery is dreadful!! (Edit: not saying you’re being a snob; but agreeing with you that the idea of someone is a tradie is a most classist most snobby idea… that said, I recognise it comes from a good intention of wanting to promote social mobility.) And it’s the same snobbery that drives the idea behind Blair’s goal of 50% of the country going to uni. What for? Are 50% of jobs graduate jobs? Is there no other way of learning that’s considered worthwhile? Seriously! It’s a type of snobbery that’s so widespread and so widely… accepted! Like someone who becomes a skilled craftsperson or tradesperson is a failure?? Nah you can gfys if that’s what you think, Tony n Dave. Of course anyone should be able to go to uni—just like anyone should be able to pursue a career in manual skills/trades. But the idea that a 3-year degree certificate topped off with a thesis on the “Pedagogy of PVC Pipes” to be a plumber is insanity—some parts of tertiary education have become a racket! (Not saying I don’t value trades/craft education; just saying that putting the academic model on that type of skill doesn’t fit!!)
it was the worst thing Blair did. Those insane 50% goals also meant the price had to be passed on, the country could never afford free tuition for that many people
> it was the worst thing Blair did. I'd say leaving Iraq to rot after getting rid of Saddam was worse.
I was 100% one of these snobs. Until I realized that my part-time support job at an ISP paid me more per hour than my university fine art lecturers were earning per hour. Then the message was slammed home when our post-university career support was a 2-hour lecture on how to scam local councils for grants, led by a woman who spent most of the time kvetching because her latest installation piece had been demolished after a kid hurt themselves on it.
Sadly not a new phenomenon, and tied closely to the deeply embedded class system. It's interesting to read D. K. Brown's history of British naval architecture. In *The Grand Fleet*, he remarks that, while naval Draughtsmen had effectively attained a degree-level qualification after four years' intensive training, "there was a class distinction. The ability of draughtsmen was undervalued." This was before and during the First World War.
I've never heard trades disparaged except to directly address a fuckwit/cowboy trader, or to rip on BTECs ran by clueless tutors (BTEC college). It was usually cleaning toilets that was the example of a shit job.
I have heard people disparage "office jobs" far more.
They were shit upon from a great height at my school - the sense was that you shouldn't be limiting yourself to being a tradie when you could use education to get a better future. This thought process that later resulted in the 50%+ going to university goal under new labour.
to be fair i know enough tradies and while they make more than me, would i fuck trade my office job for theirs, those dudes work hard every day. and i cant be fucked with that. i also dont want to be 55 and still crawling under floors and trying to get some miserable bastard to pay me on time.
Plumbers and the like are still underpaid relative to your average office worker, especially after the devaluation of degrees. The physical stress is a lot more than sitting on a desk all day and many modern office jobs don't require particularly more thinking than a good plumber uses.
If you are under 30, you won't know this yet, but spending years sitting at a desk five days a week will ruin your health. You end up with atrophied glutes and incredibly tight hip flexors, which destroy your posture and cause back issues. This is even more true if you work from home using a cheapo chair you grabbed from Amazon for £200 and don't even have to walk to the station or bus stop anymore. If you drive, it's even worse because you'll spend hours sitting, then walk to your car where you will sit, and then when you get home, you'll sit down again - likely for the rest of the evening. The only point of the day where you spend a considerable period not sitting down is when you are sleeping.
After a thirty year office career I looked OK thanks to sports but I still had a heart attack and needed a big operation. It's dreadful for your health to sit in the same place for years.
thing is, you hear of tradesmen dropping dead on the job just as often, its almost like its a total lottery, sure you can make your odds better but its a total gamble. not that the guy you replied to is wrong, iv spent my childhood and teenage years sitting in shit school chairs all day, then slightly better uni chairs and now decent office chairs. its coming for us all.
> cheapo chair you grabbed from Amazon __*for £200*__ The chairs at the office are much nicer (circa £600 new), but surely you can get a decent chair for less than £200?
Used maybe.
Eeeehhhh I mean they did prioritise uni but the main cut and thrust was "further education" which included college for trades apprenticeships. Kids who would have just dropped or been kicked out of high school were being funneled into trades intro courses in colleges (which was hell for the colleges). While I agree that the stigma they created probably did a lot of damage I'm not so sure it's that black and white, certainly not in the same way the tories caretaking has been.
Doesn't matter. Yes, you are right, but in fourteen since then, it could have been fixed. Nothing to with Labour any more.
> Blair to prioritise university over all other forms of further education has a lot to answer for in terms of creating shortages in blue collar professions. Blair's target was 50% of young people into higher eduction - why because the workplace required it. That target included vocational qualifications like BTECs, HNDs, and NVQ's for plumbers, vehicle mechanics, electricians and even theatre technicians like me. If you want to be an electrical, water, or automotive engineer you're going to need a straight to degree or a qualification with a path to a degree. If like my nephew you want to work in high voltage engineering then you're going to need an electrical engineering degree, apprenticeship which comes with a masters equivalent, and a range of City & Guilds Courses. The whole point being:- - 1) job portability - the need to prove your skills to move between employers where you train on the job. Otherwise, you're trapped. - 2) The path to further training to improve or diversify your employment prospects rather than having to start all over again. To move from electrician to electrical project manager or engineer, for example - if you have the degree, you can bolt on the right C&G course to switch tracks. - 3) The need for continuing professional development. You need to update your skills to current standards regularly, there needs to be a pathway for that. TL;DR: There are no blue collar professions any more.
Well given they also drove through hard Brexit which got rid of half of the Eastern European tradesmen as well I’d say they are wearing it. 14 years later you could have kids who hadn’t even started school already qualified in a trade. But it’s Labour’s fault.
FE died before even Thatcher, but she did bury it. Like most things in this country it was mismanaged by both parties for decades post WW2. Almost all of the major HE and FE reforms beyond that took place in the 80s and early 90s and set the country on a path with too many universities that dont really have any business being one and shifted the focus away from FE. Blair did....nothing......good or bad... It was under the Coalition and later that university places surged once student places were no longer limited
I don't agree with that. A degree in business management is obviously an asset to a plumber
I disagree! This is the he problem! A 12-week course in finance for SMEs would be great!!!! But a 3-year degree? Folks have better things to do with their time
> Folks have better things to do with their time Why? 18 year olds today have a 50 year career ahead of them. Spending 3 of those years on a degree is not an issue. The degree is not the thing that's preventing people from joining the trades.
> Spending 3 of those years on a degree is not an issue. The degree is not the thing that's preventing people from joining the trades. It is, although you could argue that it's indirect. If you invest 3 years of your time into getting a business degree, meaning you spend a large amount of time on business-specific stuff rather than mere accounting or budgeting, you are coming away with a chunk of outstanding student debt and a range of contacts that are good for a white-collar business career but are generally useless for a trade career. After doing so, you would then need to go into the apprenticeship you would have done at 18 anyway, meaning you're now behind everyone else *and* you have outstanding finance, *and* the support you might have had at 18 (like living with family) is possibly no longer there and all of that acts as a large discouragement from going into the trades, even if it's not a hard barrier. Whereas you could go into the trades at 18, learn everything you need to get into that trade, and learn all the accounting information you need by yourself which is probably only 10% of the business degree at most, and all of that without the aforementioned discouragements.
It's been going on since privatization. It used to be that State industries would train lots of apprentices and keep the top percentage depending on how many they needed. The rest would then enter the job market with training and be available to private industries. What happens now is that small companies spend tens or hundreds of thousands training someone who is then poached for a higher wage by a big firm. Of course, this isn't viable, so many smaller firms and/or sole traders go out of business over the last ~40 years, which is why it's been an issue that's increasingly obvious. Large firms are unwilling to train as they realize that the same can be done to them, thousands in training costs and the the workers leave for more money. I believe that British Gas has managed to counter this by having qualified workers that are only licenced while they work for British Gas. If they leave then they have to re-sit all the exams at the cost of thousands of pounds.
That's because Labour had to pander to middle-class voters in 1997, and this is what middle-class voters wanted. This now extrapolates to almost every issue, and Labour are still dependent on the same middle-class voters. The only way that this will change is when there is reasonable representation in parliament for those who want, and want their kids, to take up trades. Currently, hardly anyone is pushing this issue.
The world is changing, and today's economy needs more graduates than it did 30 years ago. While they might have gone too far, increasing the number of people going to university was definitely the right thing to do. I do agree that they didn't do enough to encourage people to go into the trades, and the Tories haven't been any better on that front while making it harder for people to go to university and dragging universities down through underfunding.
We don't need more graduates. We need more businesses that are willing to train people to do the jobs they need doing. All more graduates has resulted in is the value of a degree dropping through the floor and stupid graduate requirements for jobs that never needed graduates and still don't need graduates.
Does it though? My GF works as a pricing analyst but has a degree in English, it has no relevance to the job but they still want a degree from applicants. Why? It's utterly pointless, she has learnt everything about it on the job.
> and today's economy needs more graduates than it did 30 years ago. If it did, graduate salaries would be double to triple their current levels.
[https://iea.org.uk/1997-the-last-year-of-pre-housing-crisis-britain/](https://iea.org.uk/1997-the-last-year-of-pre-housing-crisis-britain/) According to the IEA it's been 26 years since it started.
"One the key Tufton Street lobbyist groups says it's Labour's fault"
I thought it was another one.
The rot started c.2000 under Blair. All of the technical colleges and polytechnics closed under him and converted to universities. Funding for HE was significantly lopsided and FE suffered as a result. You can argue about subsequent funding under the Tories but the greatest damage to technical trades in this country was under Blair.
Everything you listed happened under the Major government and prior.
You're right to think that, as it was the 1992 act enabled polytechnics to convert to universities. But very much like PFI, it was originally a Tory policy that was turned up to 11 by Blair.
I’m not old enough to really remember Blair’s impact, I went to sixth form/college in the late 2010s but I appreciate being educated about it on the thread ☺️
Back in the late 90s and through to mid 00s schools partnered with colleges to allow certain students to go and learn a trade skill 2 days a week. It was kind of a precursor to the apprenticeship schemes as they were often offered it in year 10, well before GCSEs. Our school for example often offered it to the kids that were a nuscence (skiving, had poor backgrounds, caused trouble, etc). One of the guys who was sent off to a plumbing one is now a respected business owner in our local area, another is a carpenter and another two of them own their own building firm (again well respected in the area). These were kids that they knew would fail all their GCSE's, wouldn't continue into higher education, and would likely end up being a burden to society. It was a fantastic program and turned their lives around whilst helping keep skilled labour going. If you were to suggest that to a government official today you'd be slated for trying to stop people going to university, which they never would have done anyway and even if they had done would likely end up dropping out or getting a degree and then finding it was useless.
I think those schemes were positive in their own way. But once upon a time you got people who today would have passed GCSEs and a levels with flying colours going into trades, which is now uncommon, contributing to a brain drain. Hence why we often have to get tradies in from France germany Holland for complex skilled projects
Yes it's common to have graduates working in trades in many countries, beats working as a barista But the British class system actively discourages it.
What you’re describing as a concept more generally is vocational education. Not everyone is built or raised the same way as a child, and so not all of us do well in the traditional format of education - and worse, exam based testing. We should absolutely be offering a spectrum of options in terms of method of delivery for education, ranging from highly theoretical to highly practical. Unfortunately the education system has largely remained the same since Victorian times, and tends to be stuck in a loop in which ideas such as vocational education reforms surface every few decade or so, then sink again when government follows tabloid headlines claiming only English and Maths count and some random employers claim kids leaving school don’t have the skills they need. Lastly, long term change requires substantial investment. Which had been absent for decades. New Labour put money into education and it did a lot for primary level but we need to see another round of the same but for secondary. And it will be expensive after 15 years of grinding austerity.
It sounds like a good scheme, though consider you're only hearing the successes, not the failures. Is also why trades was considered so unattractive and for people with low ambitions. When I was at school, going into trade was for the 'thick' kids, the troublemakers and the like, who had no incentive to learn because once they hit 16 they'd get a job with daddy (some even left on their 16th birthday and didn't hang around til exams). I'd rather trades was a pathway for everyone rather than being a 'reward' for delinquents, and my bank balance and life savings would agree. Basically, I just feel the system is setup so that troublemakers are rewarded. That's' my experience with how the police/courts, schools and social work etc operate
> they'd get a job with daddy Middle class kids call their father 'daddy' well beyond the age it's appropriate to do so. Not working. And the phrase 'get a job from/with daddy' connotes privilege. Leaving school at 16 to go on the tools is not privilege, your body is going to be fucked by 40 years old, and you'll be functionally crippled by 60.
Yeah the thick troublemakers at my school certainly weren't afforded any sort of familial opportunity when school was finished
With the money they're earning they can retire at 40. Don't have much sympathy, I've done physically damaging jobs for minimum wage. if they're spending their money on coke binges (something endemic amongst tradies) and not saving for early retirement, that's their problem.
Right, but saying "getting a job with daddy" like it's some great privilege, when they're swapping the classroom for a transit van and a life of fucked knees and coke comedowns is a dumb shit thing to say.
As someone who's worked physically demanding jobs for minimum wage and literally worked just to survive with almost nothing to show from the actual sweat and tears, then yes it's a privilege. That they choose to get into cocaine addiction is their own problem and doesn't deserve any sympathy. Welcome to being working class.
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yeah I'm just saying when plumbers are earning more than doctors, my sympathy for their 'suffering' isn't really there.
Your average tradesman isn’t earning anywhere near enough to retire at 40
Is this what psychologists call "projection"?
(Article) --- In the coming general election campaign, 300,000 will be one of the magic numbers, constantly on the lips of candidates throughout the land: 300,000 is the number of new homes a year that everyone agrees needs to be built, to keep up with population growth and young people being able to find somewhere to live. It is the government’s target, although they have actually managed about 200,000 a year. In particular, 300,000 is the number Sir Keir Starmer is sworn to make reality by “bulldozing” through regulations and mandating new building on the green belt. Yet the truth is that no one in the near future is going to be building 300,000 homes a year. Even if the green belt was declared to be a giant New Town, and Nimbyism was made illegal, and anyone who thought of putting up a house was instantly given planning permission, it is very unlikely that such a number could be reached. Regulations could be bulldozed, councils mandated to hit targets, developers forced to get on with it, and still there would not be 300,000 new homes per year. At present it is a fantasy. This is because we do not have in this country the electricians, plumbers, bricklayers, plasterers, tilers, scaffolders, bathroom fitters and roofers who would be needed to build 300,000 homes every year. Their skills cannot just be conjured up, but need training and apprenticeships that can take years. They are the very skills that will also be in demand to retrofit existing homes with heat pumps, change cladding that should never have been installed, and work on big infrastructure projects such as HS2. And they are skills that we — we as a society, including industry and schools, as well as ministers of all parties — have not been producing in sufficient numbers for a long time. Brexit has not helped: the number of construction workers from EU countries has fallen sharply. Last year the government had to put a wide range of building skills on the shortage occupation list to allow in more migrants with relevant expertise. Ministers have been busy trying to fill the obvious gaps in the nation’s skills, pushing forward with Institutes of Technology, announcing skills bootcamps and a local skills improvement fund, all of which are very good initiatives. They have tried for years to improve apprenticeships, with mixed results. But moving the dial on construction skills, and moving it quickly, will still prove very difficult despite all these efforts. One reason it is so difficult is the great scale of the problem. The Construction Industry Training Board forecasts that an extra 225,000 workers will be needed by 2027. Kingfisher has estimated that the UK will lose £98 billion of output due to a shortage of tradespeople. An analysis of OECD data by the think tank Onward suggests that building and construction is the sector in which we have the biggest skills shortfall, with mechanical and engineering skills not far behind. By contrast we have a surplus of skills in clerical work, sales, accounting and human resources. The number of new, trained building workers would need to be many tens of thousands each year, particularly as one in five of the current workforce is over fifty. Another reason is cultural. We have for decades celebrated a university education and looked down on practical but vital skills. In the Kingfisher survey, only 13 per cent of 16 to 25-year-olds said they had been encouraged at school to consider trade career options, even though 42 per cent of them would have liked more information on such roles before deciding on their career. Young women in particular are unlikely to be given encouragement or relevant information. Deep-seated attitudes in careers advice and teaching will need changing. A further and crucial obstacle is the way in which a very small business actually works. Many people in this industry are sole traders. Training an apprentice for two years is a cost and commitment that may extend further than an order book, and for the apprentice means lower pay, for a time, than alternative jobs. To have some hope of filling the huge gap in future skills, government policies would need to change the incentives at this micro level. Yet if policies could be drawn together of sufficient scale, reaching deeply into the nation’s culture and changing the calculations of sole traders, the prize is huge. Unlike many European countries where populations have begun to fall, Britain still has an expanding population, bringing investment in housing, energy and infrastructure if we can supply the skills. Those acquiring the right skills will have a job for life: however impressive artificial intelligence programmes become they will struggle to install the electrical wires in your bathroom, guarantee they are safe and connect the right wires to the fuse box. Such jobs will be better paid than the national average. They will generally be a source of pride and satisfaction — part of the answer to a YouGov finding in 2015 that 37 per cent of British adults said their jobs were meaningless. We really ought to be able to crack this problem. Rishi Sunak talks passionately about skills and was doing so on Monday. The many fresh efforts by ministers need drawing together in a major national drive to equip the country for housebuilding and energy transition. The Labour Party no doubt has similar good intentions, but as it finalises its manifesto it will need to focus heavily on this issue if promises about houses are to have any credibility. There is no shortage of ideas for what to do. More apprenticeships could be fully funded or allowed tax credits. A one-stop advice service could help tradespeople through bureaucratic complications. Schools could give much greater prominence to tradespeople, particularly to female role models. There could be a new national online platform for work experience, a social media campaign to highlight lifelong skills, virtual reality educational technology to inspire young people to be part of building things for the future, and a new employment brokering service for construction and trades. All these and other proposals have been made by think tanks, employers’ organisations or MPs. Everybody in Britain knows it can be difficult to find an electrician or plumber. In one survey, a fifth of respondents said they had postponed a project in their home because they could not find people to do it. It is one of the factors holding our economy back. Voters would welcome some big and serious answers in the party manifestos. And in the endless interviews and debates to come, no candidate should be allowed to claim they will build 300,000 homes a year without explaining where they will find the skills to do it.
Addressing the massive problem of wage theft in the building trades would be a good start. So would paying a wage that encourages people to enter the trades. Better supervision of apprenticeship programmes would also help-- right now, many of them provide no training that leads to qualifications, and are used by large builders as a source of subsidised labour.
>Addressing the massive problem of wage theft in the building trades would be a good start. Yes. My brother's a brickie and it's a complete wild West. Everyone just screws each other over. With those with the least leverage, experience, street smarts etc getting the worst of it. The whole industry is structurally flawed and just creates cowboys. Of course there are some good trades, but there's a lot that aren't.
> So would paying a wage that encourages people to enter the trades. Hell, a lot of construction work is on the shortage occupations list: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/skilled-worker-visa-shortage-occupations/skilled-worker-visa-shortage-occupations > If your job is on the list, you can be paid 80% of the job’s usual going rate to qualify for a Skilled Worker visa. > 5312 Bricklayers and masons – all jobs England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland 80% of going rate: £18,640 (£9.56 per hour) > 5313 Roofers, roof tilers and slaters – all jobs England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland 80% of going rate: £16,160 (£8.29 per hour) > 5315 Carpenters and joiners – all jobs England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland 80% of going rate: £18,000 (£9.23 per hour) > 5319 Construction and building trades not elsewhere classified – all jobs England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland 80% of going rate: £17,760 (£9.11 per hour) > 5321 Plasterers – all jobs England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland 80% of going rate: £19,200 (£9.85 per hour) I don't know if you still need to pay NMW to skilled workers brought in like that, but currently 21-22s are paid £10.18 PH and 23+ paid £10.42, so these are either NMW or below NMW unless these skilled workers are 20 or younger. The Tory solution to this problem is to keep pay down, and discourage training by encouraging use of immigrants instead where they're ready trained and cheap.
Yea I want a trade but I'm 40 and can't earn fuck all while I train (in any new role) because I have adult bills. I hate my job but I'm stuck in it and thats depressing as fuck
Sorry that you're in this situation. Do whatever you can to get ahead. Heck, in this CoL crisis, if I see you stealing from work, I'm not gonna report you.
Haha, appreciated. I'm trying. Messed up my education, had a bike accident and now drive a taci/private hire car 12+ hours a day and it's so under stimulating, if that's the right way to describe it. Got a few ideas on the go but funding is a problem 😐
I’d like to see an overhaul of trade qualifications. Anyone can get a van and call themselves a plasterer or plumber. It attracts a certain type of person who can fall in to a trade. I’d like to see formal system of recognised training. Qualifications have to be held to hold certain positions. There’s a massive difference between a plumber, a gas man and a heating engineer. Yet no one knows the difference.
It’s almost like we need something like the old style apprenticeship system - that the Tories dismantled in the 80s and replaced with cheap labour YTS.
Sort of. But with a strong academic side too. Most plumbers haven’t got a clue about how hydronics work. They should. It’s literally their job. Stratifying the work would mean you still get your pipe fitters and toilet fixers…but you also get highly trained, highly skilled engineers
> you also get highly trained, highly skilled engineers How many people are willing to pay the £100 premium to have their toilet fixed though?
You’re right. Get a basic plumber to do that. Save the heating engineers for installing heating system. The pilot doesn’t serve you nuts on your flight. The flight attendant doesn’t land the plane.
> The pilot doesn’t serve you nuts on your flight. Don't give Ryanair these cost-cutting ideas!
Sort of but that creates a very locked in sector which means everyone knows everyone and you can get black listed and stuff. Happened with the watermen and lighter men in london until they changed away from that system for boat driving in 2005
Does the system today actually work any better? These various guilds and associations have been a thing for centuries even as the trades changed.
The old system it was very very corrupt as you had to know a guy who knew a guy to even get your apprenticeship. It made it very hard to dela with as they all knew each other and thus became their own club and very militant. The new system is like getting your drivers license but with a bit of extra work. Works much better as people outside the system can get a qualification without having to get a guild member to vouch for you. It means people are freer to move between jobs without checking that the guild has “signed it off”
This is already a thing across most trades, competent person schemes have been around for a long while. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/competent-person-scheme-current-schemes-and-how-schemes-are-authorised#current-schemes
The problem with that is it doesn't mean much when people doing the work are so rare to come by. For example, you buy a house and you want a surveyor. Well, if you ring around the firms certified by RICS you can get one and probably at short notice. If you say "right I need my house re-wiring I'm only going to hire someone in a certified person scheme" you'll be told no one can do it for months and months, maybe even a year. So then if someone told you "I know this electrician he did a good job on my house" it won't matter if they are certified because you'll take the risk. I do think the trades should be regulated more because there's too many cowboys, BUT that only works if there's enough people to do the jobs.
Better regulation can only happen if there are quality control measures. This would become extremely complicated given the variety of traders providing services to the public and further complicated by the variety of services each one could provide. There are many websites that already exist which attempt to catalogue reliable traders, but they only work when customers are willing to share the good work a trader has done and can do so in an accessible manner. There could be five good plasterers in an area but the top two will get the lion's share of the work from a given site because they happened to get good reviews posted first, to give an example. While others have said that competency schemes exist that could help to reassure someone that the person they hire will be competent; such schemes and qualifications only determine that the individual is *aware* of the safety requirements and good practises of their field and does little to enforce the practise of good work. After all, one of the biggest issues people have with traders is the sore lack of accountability for bad work. Not to mention the fact that the definition of "good" work varies wildly from person to person. The more I think about how a "perfect" trader's system would need to work the more I understand why the government hasn't tried to make such a cataloguing system themselves.
Tbh the sites are useless too Good trades don’t use them because they’re stupidly busy already. My spark, plumber and painter are all rammed constantly and it’s only because they’re neighbours or friends that I get a look-in
>Better regulation can only happen if there are quality control measures. This would become extremely complicated given the variety of traders providing services to the public and further complicated by the variety of services each one could provide. That's not true at all. Solicitors have a recognised body, rules about conduct, all across a variety of services and they don't have "quality control". So do accountants, auditors, etc etc the list goes on. A set of rules isn't about "is this person technically the best at their job". I'm not worried about someone doing work that just isn't that great. I'm worried about a) people doing work that is unsafe and someone gets hurt b) someone doing work that is fundamentally faulty and causes damage when it fails and c) someone who doesn't turn up to do jobs and/or takes my money and doesn't do the work. You don't need to have a vast contingent of civil servants to do that. Have it so you need to be registered to perform a trade, and you'll get your certification stripped off you if you do anything dangerous, do anything that fails seriously and it was your fault, or act unethically. It's that simple. Yes there will need to be a professional membership body, and yes people who register probably need to pay an annual fee. So what though? It's no different to many jobs. It's not there to be like "Dave is a messy plasterer 1 star". It's there to be like "Is Dave dangerous? Is he completely negligent? Is he unethical?" just like in the same way you can have a shit solicitor but they aren't kicked out of the profession.
Using you're example, this is already covered by existing legislation as of 2003 in Scotland & 2005 in England & Wales, any electrical work involving placing a new circuit, working within the consumer unit, or work within a bathroom (with caveats) requires building control notification with an electrical safety certificate provided by a competent person ([https://electrical.theiet.org/bs-7671/building-regulations/part-p-england-and-wales/frequently-asked-questions/](https://electrical.theiet.org/bs-7671/building-regulations/part-p-england-and-wales/frequently-asked-questions/)). For gas work, this has been legislated since 1991, with work covering combustion & gas carrying components requiring a gas safe/CORGI registered engineer. ([https://www.gassaferegister.co.uk/media/1449/who-can-legally-work-on-a-gas-appliance-factsheet.pdf](https://www.gassaferegister.co.uk/media/1449/who-can-legally-work-on-a-gas-appliance-factsheet.pdf)). In general building there is registered schemes required for, any & all structural alterations, new bathroom installations, replacement windows or doors, replacement roofing & cavity and solid wall insulation. ([https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/building-work-replacements-and-repairs-to-your-home/building-work-replacements-and-repairs-to-your-home](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/building-work-replacements-and-repairs-to-your-home/building-work-replacements-and-repairs-to-your-home)). My point being, what are you actually asking for, should homeowners, DIYers & indeed, unregistered general tradeys not be allowed to change a plug faceplate, or paint a wall? Because most all high risk activities are already covered in one way or another & people contravening this are already committing offences.
> I’d like to see formal system of recognised training. Qualifications have to be held to hold certain positions. I don't see how increasing the regulatory requirements will solve a shortage. What proposals do you have to counteract the short term reduction in labour that your policy would create?
The amount of labour would stay the same. But you’d know at what level each particular tradesperson was on. Long term tradespeople would have a scheme to progress. Perhaps leading to more people willing to take it on as there would be a progression path leading to higher status and better pay.
> The amount of labour would stay the same. But you’d know at what level each particular tradesperson was on Except nobody would be certified when you introduced the scheme, so you'd have a massive short term drop in certified labour. You haven't explained HOW the amount of labour will stay the same after you introduce regulatory barriers to entry.
There would still be plumbers and gas engineers. But some would be better qualified than others
> But some would be better qualified than others Again, NOBODY would be qualified on day 1. How would you make that happen?
There are some qualifications out there. But it doesn’t matter how many you do or don’t do everyone is at the same level.
Also the premise is that it would attract entrants who were interested in being a highly qualified engineer. You will always have plumbers and basic tradesmen. But I’d like to encourage more, perhaps slightly more academic people to take it up. If it had some kudos or progression it may well do that.
I'm not sure it would solve the issue though. No one would know the difference after the fact, so calling yourself a 'plumbing technician' would skirt around it. Ultimately, people want to pay as little as possible for a job that fixes the problem, from a reputable tradesperson. Sites like checkatrade were supposed to fix this, but people can game the reviews. The reality is that you really need to know someone trustworthy in the trade who can recommend someone good.
Maybe. I see it a bit like when you go to see a doctor. Yes you can have a jr doctor remove your appendix. Or you can have a consultant. The cost wouldn’t be that different. In an environment with high energy costs and a climate crisis I’d always recommend getting a proper job over a cheap and cheerful
Awful idea. So many other industries regulated to death and it’s stifling enterprise. I do think there should be a trade body that plumbers or other tradies become members of that ensure the quality of their members. In that sense like how the FCA oversees financial advice, which is the field I work in.
I work in trades. There’s very few true experts I’ve met. Training is very poor Germany, for example, has a much higher regard for their “engineers”. Better training, better pay, better service for the public. Better all round. Rather than relaying on dangerous Dave from down the pub to do your plumbing why not get a proper heating engineer. And know you’re getting one. I also went to uni. At the time I thought a trade pathway was something less capable people chose. I’d rather encourage intelligent people in to trades by it being respected and professional. Sure you can still have your bog standard plumber. But what about having proper engineers as well?
Engineers and tradespeople are different, and it's annoying that this country seems to insist they're the same
We ought to respect technician more than we do
I'm an engineer at my work and technicians get paid just as well, it's the responsibilities that are separate. But places that call it all together end up devaluing both skillsets
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Yeah this should change. It should be up there with doctor 👨⚕️
> Rather than relaying on dangerous Dave from down the pub to do your plumbing why not get a proper heating engineer. And know you’re getting one. We already have gas safe certification?
Yes you’re right. The gas safe qualification is the absolute minimum you need to have to not be dangerous. That’s it. It doesn’t teach gas engineers anything about heating design. It doesn’t even teach them to fix boilers. It’s just a safety qualification. Most gas engineers I know couldn’t tel me what a condensing boiler is. What is condensing? Why is it good? How do we achieve it? Most boilers rarely condense, yet they’ve been around for 20 years. A rated boilers are not A rated if they’re fitted by someone who knows absolutely nothing another engineering. This is the state of the British heating industry Edit: also a plumber doesn’t need any qualifications
> Most gas engineers I know couldn’t tel me what a condensing boiler is. Most GPs couldn't tell me the interactions of the cocktail of prescription medications I might be on. There's a clear division of labour in construction between designers (architects) and people who read the plans and implement them. It would be massively inefficient to have someone design a heating system (skillset A), be the same person that physically labours at installing it (skillset B). One heating system designer could knock out five plans a day on a desktop (let's say), but each system could take a full day to install. With five "super engineers" you could get through one job every two days, with 80% of the first day wasted. One heating design engineer, and five installers would get through five jobs a day. Ricardo's comparative advantage.
This is correct in terms of building sites and in some new construction. But the typical home owner in the UK doesn’t employ a heating engineer to design their system. They get Dean and Bazza from down the pub to whack something in.
Did Dean and Bazza strong arm them into this arrangement? Why did this adult not consider approaching a heating consultant first? Did they ask a local site labourer to build their house without plans in lieu of approaching an architect, too?
So how about taking people who are out of work and actually offering them full training for a trade...imagine the horror of training people proactively to fill a gap.
No, those people are only allowed to be security guards or shelf stackers. Thanks DWP!
And do it for almost free!!!
He not wrong Britain faces a labour shortage if wants to build or rebuild the economy. His govt legacy was ignoring it and making it worse.
Woeful lack of skilled labour but we are somehow ending up with 700k a year coming in? so who the hell are we letting in?
(this isn't anti migrant sentiment I'm just stating what I'm told by friends either based in Europe or from there originally) I've a few eastern European friends, they quite often say working age unskilled men who live in remote parts of their countries with limited job opportunities will go to the UK to get a minimum wage job because there's simply nothing for them in their area. It's seen as a bit of a novel escape to go to the UK and have some kind of life, granted even if it's a relatively poor one on minimum wage and living in a HMO. But it's better than bumming about a little rural village with no real opportunities. Alternatively quite a lot get conned into moving over on false promises and what is essentially modern slavery, then have their passports taken and won't go to police for fear of deportation.
> so who the hell are we letting in? Most non-EU migrants are not in work. They're students or dependents.
Create subsidised trade schools. With no age limit to apply. That only costs a small loan, which can be payed back after you get employed in the field. And a free grant to cover living costs while training.
What’s really depressing is the prospect of 300,000 new homes of the type that’s been built here with little change since the 80s. Also it won’t solve the problems of key workers being able to afford to live near their place of work. It won’t address the problem of astronomical rents and companies hoovering up property in areas where families etc actually want to live.
Tradespeople should demand more of the ~£63k profit made on the average shitbox (that was 2017. It's nearer £67k now). [0] "On average, in 2022, the largest housebuilders paid over £22,000 in dividends for each new home built." [1] [0] https://www.brunel.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/articles/Builders-are-making-thumping-profits-by-over-charging-for-new-homes-%E2%80%93-new-findings [1] https://www.shu.ac.uk/news/all-articles/latest-news/uk-housebuilders-research
Brickies would need to be paid a hell of a lot more if you wanna address the skills shortage
Yep. But then we just pass the skills shortage onto another sector, that now lacks the people who might have worked there but have instead become brickies. Instead of housebuilding it will be our logistics or our infrastructure that fall even further behind. Our deeper problem is a lack of working age people.
> Yep. But then we just pass the skills shortage onto another sector, that now lacks the people who might have worked there but have instead become brickies. > Our deeper problem is a lack of working age people. The UK employment rate is [75.5%.](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/employmentintheuk/september2023) Given that [64%](https://data.oecd.org/pop/working-age-population.htm) of the population is considered working age, this leaves 10.7 million working age people who don't work. Some proportion of these will be unable to work due to disability, but even if you cut that in half, there are more than 5M people capable of work. There is simply no way to argue the UK has a lack of working age people. Quite the opposite. Millions of people choose not to work, and highest on international surveys for the reason are poor wages and lack of workplace respect.
Workforces always need slack. Once a country is overemployed people can't get staff. For instance I'm a chartered accountant. I'm not looking for bricklaying, or computer programming, or being a surveyor. I'd need to retrain for that and there's no point. My replacement needs to be ready trained too. So those industries need a slack of people trained to do it - and if you add that up nationwide the number of required unemployed people goes up really quite quickly. If you don't have that the economy stagnates as things can't grow/get needed workers.
> Workforces always need slack. Once a country is overemployed people can't get staff. I agree, but this is typically in the 4-5% range. I don't think the economy needs 25% of the population to be unemployed. If it did, I would question the structure and premise.
No, but there's other factors coming in to play. People looking after children, housewives, people who simply don't want or need to work for money, people taking time off for health... It seriously cuts down on the number willing/needing and able to work. Which is why the actual unemployment rate (with government fudging, admittedly) is far less than 25%. One of our real problems is underemployment. People stuck delivering Pizza as they can't afford to train and do something else because they need the money etc. They count as employed, but aren't as productive as they could be.
> People looking after children, housewives, people who simply don't want or need to work for money, people taking time off for health... With the exception of being a caregiver to kids, all of those are a reformulation of what I argue above: those people just don't want to work, for a variety of reasons. They can and should be enticed back into the workforce with better wages and conditions. As for kids, if you pay caregivers much more than it costs for daycare, unsurprisingly, many of them work. Labour follows supply and demand forces. I agree that underemployment is also an issue.
I don't think you're correct. However you set wages there appears to be a rough upper bound percentage of the population who are going to work. Just to keep with your trivialised model, if we just massively upped wages, then inflation rises and then an equilibrium will be found again where some people would rather not work (house wives etc). In short, I think you have a narrative in your mind and you're contriving your model of the world to keep that narrative intact.
You're confusing the employment rate and unemployment rates. The 4-5% slack range is for the unemployment rate, and has historically been termed as being at 'full employment'.
A good chunk of that 24.5% that are non-employed are sick, early retired, independently moneyed, or mothers. How are you going to get them back into work? The employment rate for 25-54 year olds is 84.7%. There's no one left to draw from. Our employment rate is the highest in decades, and is high by international comparisons.
There are many reasons people choose not to work. [Here are some of the top reasons people quit.](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/09/majority-of-workers-who-quit-a-job-in-2021-cite-low-pay-no-opportunities-for-advancement-feeling-disrespected/) As wages rise and conditions improve, some of those people who previously chose not to work, choose to work. This is normal labour supply and demand. I'm not sure what your point is re the employment rate for 25-54 year olds, or the historical figures. The bottom line is that there are 5-10M able bodied, working age people.
>As wages rise and conditions improve, some of those people who previously chose not to work, choose to work. This is normal labour supply and demand. Thats the substitution effect. You've also omitted [the income effect](https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/fp233.pdf) which induces people to work less as wages rise, both on the intensive margin of reducing their hours worked, but also on the extensive margin by inducing some to drop out of work. >I'm not sure what your point is re the employment rate for 25-54 year olds We are effectively at the upper-bound of those in prime age working life actually working. The marginal effort of government policy inducing one of those people into work is likely going to be greater than whatever the marginal benefit of one of those additional people going into work. >are 5-10M able bodied, working age people. I have no idea where you've gotten able-bodied from. You've roughly estimated the number of people included in the non-employed bucket but you have no idea what the composition of that group is. As I said, the demographic characteristics of those between 16-64 who are non-employed [include higher-education students, mothers, the early retired and long-term sick.](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/methodologies/aguidetolabourmarketstatistics) The biggest 'drag' on the employment rate disaggregated by age is 16-24 year olds. I wonder why. These people are not 'unemployed' in the way you are trying to portray (i.e. work-shy layabouts). The tradeoffs of some policy trying to drag those people into active employment are likely to be considerable, either by - reducing their investment in human capital by taking them from education into low-skill work and stunting their lifetime earnings (and ergo tax revenue); reducing time between mothers and young children which will harm developmental outcomes for those babies and/or strongly disincentivising fertility decisions among women of childrearing age (also making the demographic issues worse in the longer term), or by taking sick people and stuffing them into jobs where their health will deteriorate and therefore end up costing the state more than otherwise. The one group of people that it might be useful think about targeting to bring back into the labour force are the early retirees but they aren't going to help sectoral shortages in skilled professions because which 61 year old who is basically a few years shy of retirement going to respec into being a plumber if they used to be an accountant?
Is it not fair to say that 75.5% represents close to an all time high for that metric? Obviously it will never be 100%, but if it's never been higher than \~75% either, why do you think there are more people capable of work? For context the same metric in France is 68%, and Germany 78% (both similar all time highs for those countries) It's not just the sick/disabled, you should consider stay at home parents, early retirement, Children aged 16-18, the wealthy who need not work? University students count for 6% of your "missing" working age people alone. History would seem to suggest you'll never get more than \~75% of working age adults in work, so the original comment remains valid. There are no people left to fill positions created.
> There are no people left to fill positions created. There are 5-10M of them. I'm not sure why you're denying the official statistics. I cited a government link above. Do you think they're just lying to us? I don't understand your appeal to historical precedent. The UK has always had a lot of working age people who chose not to work. Their reasons were many and varied. A large factor was women who were disenfranchised from the workforce. Today there are still many reason for why those people don't want to work, [including factors researched by companies like Pew Research.](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/09/majority-of-workers-who-quit-a-job-in-2021-cite-low-pay-no-opportunities-for-advancement-feeling-disrespected/) Should those factors be address, those people would return to the workforce. The UK has a shortage of companies willing to pay decent wages and treat their employees like human beings. There is no shortage of workers.
I was explaining to you that there is a ceiling below 100% employment at which people cannot be coerced into work for any reason, and that ceiling appears to be ~75%. It has never been higher in the UK, and other countries have similar findings. For example - Someone that has taken early retirement will never rejoin the workforce at any realistic pay point or conditions. Someone that is still in education 16-18 isn’t even allowed to join the workforce proper. I’m not denying statistics, I’m giving context to them. This section of society, has never had jobs and most likely never will regardless of conditions. Without this context, repeating 5-10m don’t have jobs, is a pointless statement. I’m not sure if your research citing poor conditions in the USA as the reason people MOVED jobs in 2021 (80% found new jobs so are not unemployed) has any relevance to the UK market or this discussion. But I think comparing our current economy to historic UK economies seems far more relevant, and in that comparison we are at the highest employment levels we’ve ever had. So I do not see the 5-10m people ready to work?
Our employment rate over the last couple of years has been higher than at any time since 1970. We simply don't have spare workers https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/employment-rate#:~:text=Employment%20Rate%20in%20the%20United,percent%20in%20March%20of%201983.
> Our employment rate over the last couple of years has been higher than at any time since 1970. This is a non-sequitur. How does that address what I wrote? > We simply don't have spare workers We have 5-10M of them. Are you arguing with official statistics?
> This is a non-sequitur. How does that address what I wrote? It's a relevant fact, which shows that no government policies/economic environment since 1970 has been able to achieve a higher level of employment. > We have 5-10M of them. Are you arguing with official statistics? Official statistics? Do you mean when you just made this number up by guessing that half of the people who are not working might be disabled? Is that what official statistics are?
> It's a relevant fact, which shows that no government policies/economic environment since 1970 has been able to achieve a higher level of employment. I'm not disputing that. I never argued otherwise. > Official statistics? Do you mean when you just made this number up by guessing that half of the people who are not working might be disabled? Is that what official statistics are? Official statistics are the ones I linked above showing that 10.7M working age people don't work. Feel free to ignore the estimate on disability. We can just stick with 10.7M if you prefer.
Okay let's also talk about a huge shift in wage placement following the report that Brits are 10k short changed a year... So let's get our pay bumped up yeah?
We will never solve our skills shortage when you can make more money as an estate agent, a civil servant or a supermarket manager than as an engineer. It’s pathetic what employers pay skilled workers in this country.
Some tradies rake it in these days. Their hourly rate is on par with junior lawyers and financial advisors
Sure, but it helps that none of them pay any tax
Think trades all get paid more than those on average. Especially if there's a shortage.
Depends on what type of civil servant but yes I take your point. Challenge with trades is can be how long it you can keep working before you body gives out.
There’s a shortage of tradespeople yet they’re badly paid, why? Shouldn’t supply and demand push up their wages?
Good tradespeople are not paid badly. A plumber in my area has a 6 month waiting list to do a bathroom. He is getting paid a lot. The problem is that to get good money, you need to be good at your job. To get good money as a supermarket average, you just need to be average.
Hang on, how much can someone make at a supermarket?
Implicitly an average supermarket worker makes more than an average plumber. Which doesn't seem right, and again, doesn't seem to fit with supply & demand, unless there are a load of average plumbers twiddling their thumbs because nobody wants to use them.
That's nonsense. Plumbers aren't low paid, and definitely aren't in minimum wage. A semi decent plumber is easily in the high rate tax band with minimum effort.
I disagree. The high earners in supermarkets are the very few, who are in charge of a large workforce. They pay that much, because thats what it costs to get someone who's good at management.
Independent tradesman is the only way you get paid a fair wage generally as all building companies are corner cutting penny pinchers who would much rather underpay a poor quality workman and just stonewall customers until 90% stop complaining. Most don’t have time or energy to keep complaining for the job to be done properly. The 5-10% who kick up enough fuss get their work done to a slightly better standard after multiple avenues of complaining. This is cheaper than paying for quality from the start.
Because we were shopping for tradespeople on the international market and the international market would always undercut the local market.
What people mostly resent about the construction industry, as far as domestic consumers are concerned, are the prevelance of "one-man-band" outfits. The public have become accustomed to consistency of service from large chains and brands like Tesco, or Vodafone, or Apple, or Hovis. What the public yearn for in construction is a large brand of builders. They want to be able to ring up "Tradies^tm " and get an *employee*, who goes through regularl quality assessment, to do some work. There would therefore be a customer service rep, a tradie that installs some pipe, a clerk of works that supervises them, a payments department, a consistent catalogue of works and prices from their sales guys, and a complaint department. People don't like dealing with sketchy man-with-van outfits that don't have cashflow, don't show up because they can't manage their time, don't guarantee their work and phoenix their company every three months.
I don't agree, but that's probably because I've lived in the same area for some time. There's some local small businesses and independent traders that me and my mates have used and found reliable, and a bunch of others that I'd avoid. I don't want to deal with some large faceless company and get whoever is available that week, whether they are any good or not. The opposite argument is that with a large company if one of their people goes off sick or has an accident, you're not left with a half finished roof or kitchen or wiring job. I guess I've been lucky so far.
Like all generalities there are exceptions. If you and your mates have lived in an area long enough then of course you've built up a repertoire of reliable trades people. But you move to a new area and take a punt on a trades person and I'd say the hit rate is probably something like 2 out of 3 interactions is poor to terrible. Where I'd agree is that large businesses can be just as bad. The whole industry is fucked.
Places like that do exist, Wren Kitchens would be one.
I think the problem with a Tesco/ Vodafone type structure is that there is zero incentive for tradespeople to belong to it rather than be independent. Tradies who want a 'steady job just fulfil contracts for landlords or other commercial entities like housebuilders. The personal element, of making a difference to someone's house therefore to their lives etc, is a big element of the relationship between the good individual tradie and the householder. So it's the opposite situation from what you describe round me (and for me). Everyone wants to find the one-man-band that they trust. Having someone from a chain or from a company with a customer services rep come round would massively increase the cost as well. The problem is not one man bands, it is the shortage of the good ones. Everything is word of mouth- the good tradesperson does not bother to work for anyone not recommended to them as a good customer, and the householder does not bother to ask anyone who is not recommended as a good worker. The big advantage of finding someone good is that you then get good after-job service- the small problems and the maintenance arising from the big job will be sorted out as the person on the way home from the big jobs etc. If you have a big job, then it is mediated by the supplier (typically the trade likes Howdens or Travis Perkins), who may well do free design/consult, but if you are an individual, your main relationship is with the individual who does or is in charge of your job/project.
I don't think that's especially true in housebuilding. Indeed most of our bigger housebuilding businesses have fairly risible reputations.
Rather than spending £170K/person sending refugees to rwanda they could use that money to train them and fund free courses for anyone else who wants them.
Or we could invest in more automated methods of construction, that cost slightly more (for now) but are not as labour intensive.
All these opinions are so weird. It's like someone who's just starting in economics and politics. We've been over some of these ideas for centuries.
We could very easily hit 300k homes a year with our current trades. I saw a few days back a video of a NY skyscraper going up in 12 months, must have been a couple dozen floors. The rate of construction in this nation is a cruel joke. Transition to 6-8 story flats, and productivity per worker will rise. Not rocket science is it.
Hague going to acknowledge the importation of 5+ million working class Eastern Europeans who undercut everyone and absolutely destroyed pay and the subsequently the entire system that creates new tradies and provides security later their career? No, i guess its just not enough female role models.
Pay in the trades is not "destroyed". They earn more than most once they're qualified
Depends who you are in the trades. My brother in law is a tradesman whose hourly rate is lower than my sisters who works in the NHS. He has to work 50-60 hours a week to make up a decent wage to raise a family. He doesn’t feel like he can even negotiate a higher wage because all his colleagues came from the international market and all work even longer hours for less pay.
Bollocks. It absolutely did destroy pay for over a decade and companies are still hooked on cheap imported tradesman. It has started to recover somewhat but all those tradies kids went into stacking shelves and pushing paper because they could earn more/same for far easier work. Your average plumbing career is basically on par with a career at Tesco's at similar levels. The only place they diverge are if a plumber sets up their own business and is good at that side of the business too.
https://www.checkatrade.com/blog/trade/how-much-is-a-plumbers-salary-in-the-uk/ You aren't getting £45k stacking shelves in Tesco. If you are the manager of a decently-sized store, you might get that. Pretty much everyone has the skills to set up as a sole trader
>Pretty much everyone has the skills to set up as a sole trader Obviously not, considering there is a massive pay difference between those that are sole traders and those that are salaried or do you think people are working for Russel Taylor Group for the great workplace environment despite the £20k-£30k they are missing out on?
https://uk.indeed.com/cmp/Russell-Taylor-Group-Ltd/salaries/Plumber/Edinburgh-SCT Which shelf stackers are getting £22/hr?
I love how it's always a headline that's just "If only we all just started working together and made things better like the good old Empire Days!!??" :D Like, it's always written by a boomer or some young LinkedIn Lunatic. While the rest of us just want to do bare minimum, get paid, not be greedy and just enjoy our hobbit lives.
Some really good perspectives and suggestions on this issue in this thread. Though like with a number of other big issues I'm not sure if there is any obvious or easy path to solving the problem.
A huge loss was discontinuing the old Nursing diploma, then introducing fees. We've a massive loss in the health and social care sector, especially in nursing because people are losing the access to a now degree only profession. Those that do graduate are getting their NHS experience then quickly emigrate.
Invest in education and training? Invest in any part of the future of England? Can we have a party that does that instead of seeing how much more miserable they can make people? A party with some shred of concern for the country they aim to rule? Some patriotism? Is that too much to ask?
Soooo Tories that caused a skills shortage now complaining about a skills shortage, priceless!
We seem to have a "skills shortage" in every profession these days. Why do we think we have a skills shortage rather than just not enough workers all round to meet the demand? Surely if we suddenly start training everyone to be tradesmen we're just going to end up with a shortage of workers in other fields.
Any growing industry needs to find or train skilled workers, why is housing any different?
Loads of semi skilled people who cannot get recognised as fully skilled, though they literally do the fully skilled job, day in, day out (IME of construction). Loads and loads of people who do the job and are part qualified, but only get labourers pay "because qualifications". Qualifications they can't get as the companies paying them (through temp agencies) as labourers want to keep paying them as labourers, so won't do anything that helps them build their portfolio of work evidence for their trade. And no, it's not that these companies are particularly active in blocking, they just aren't incentivised to do anything about it (especially given they can still use the labour), and the workers get to a point where they can't afford to do it themselves given the precarious situation some of them are in (some do get through and become qualified, but they aren't the norm IME).
Why would you pick up a trade in a country where nothing gets built?
Its not the lack of labour. Its the lack of planning permission approvals.
The probably with the UK is tradesmen are disproportionately small scale operations, father and son businesses are stereotypical. And you get varying quality and fees, there is no standardisation, even with trades regulation bodies. A lot of them are absolute cowboys intent on fleecing, and it seems like 50% of all tradesmen have a cocaine habit, which is probably why they charge so much in the first place. But basically it means that during economic downturns, there's a shortage of work and such a shortage of training, there is no incentive to train people up. I knew kids of tradesmen literally manning the tills at supermarkets and pulling pints during downturns. Then suddenly when times are good, we have a shortage. And it's why we are semi dependent on foreign tradesmen. Big infrastructure/housing projects are best done in downturns when labour is relatively cheap, and it keeps skills fresh amongst the young generation. But instead we do infrastructure when times are good and tradesmen can charge sky high prices. Also the fetishisation of going to university is also a factor. I looked at going into trades many times during periods of neeting between 18-24 and found it was more or less impossible. Even less hope if you are older. Intend to self learn some construction/craft skills when I get a cheap house overseas. Basically I want to be self sufficient so I more or less would never need to call a tradesman anytime in my life.
This is putting the cart before the horse. We can't start training new tradespeople until we start projects for them to work on. If we have more projects than we have tradesmen, the value of their labour will increase, and more people will become tradesmen. The supply is self-regulating. We don't need the government to regulate it. You can't solve an over-regulation problem with more regulation. Literally all we need to do is drop our Soviet-style central planning system and let property developers develop property. The market can sort out everything else on its own.
Have you tried getting a tradesman in to your house? Most of them don't even bother to respond with a quote. There are plenty of projects for them to work on already
Grant some planning permission, then the trades will come. It's a chicken and egg type of situation.
To be honest this ties into the whole education system being so past its sell by date it's not funny. We have a school system still identical to what it was a century ago in curriculum and learning tools, as if the country is training children to pass the civil service india test. Teaching subjects that aren't useful to 90% of the students. Schools become basically babysitting facilities to allow parents to work all while the actual education that would help economicly and people as adults is totally neglected. The NHS is our single biggest employer in this country but is there a GCSE on Healthcare? Do kids learn to inject, bandage, treat minor injuries and illness and get graded on it? This should be a subject that looms as big on the curriculum as Maths. Doublely so when you think that most of us will end up being carers for someone at some stage in our life be they parents or partners. There's a bigger question on when we educate people for what. People work till almost 70 now yet by 16 we expect them to have a career mapped out. And would education not be received better later in life? All the pressure we put on kids to early on. Our current system helps no one, not the kids, not the economy. Educate kids till 16 with a better curriculum put them in the workplace from then on. No expectation should be placed on them finding a career. Have uni style courses available from 21-25 if they want them. Free educational courses will be detirmined by the needs of the economy, plumbers, electricians, nurses etc will payment expected for courses that aren't in demand. The aim is to have Brits with steady good jobs by 30s. 21 year olds could of course opt out of this and continue to work if they enjoy it. They could do a course later in life if needed but may have to pay.
Ultimately the demand for many trades is artificially inflated by the planning system. They force houses to be built in a certain fashion and by certain materials For example, field laid brick is essentially never used in commercial buildings any more, for a reason. If we were tossing up manufactured/prefabricated homes the number of tradesmen required would be a tiny fraction of what is needed now. Bricklaying exists as a significant construction trade primarily by command of the state. Prefabrication would also slash the demand for plumbers, electricians and the like because wiring and pipework would be largely installed in a factory setting with enormous increases in productivity. It is unreasonable to use methods from the 1930s in a country crippled by chronic labour shortages.
Another New Labour 'win'. Send everyone to uni, so we have a lack of skilled trades and people who are in debt from uni in low paying jobs and unable to buy a house.
It goes back at *least* to Thatcher, this dream that we will be a country exclusively of administrators and investment bankers and research chemists, and there's only been lip service about anything else from every government since. It might well go back further and I'm just not aware of it. In any case, student debt circa pre 2010 (£1-3k, and free for low income students) is not a factor in housing costs. Furthermore, [here are the enrolment figures](https://www.statista.com/statistics/284230/university-applicants-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/) in question, where was it that "everyone" got "sent" to uni?
Yeah, when are Labour going to get out of government so the Tories can have a real crack at sorting it all out!
These are the types of issues that take a decade+ for changes to filter through to the point where they break or fix industries. From initial fuckup, to noticing the fuckup, to implementing a fix, to the fix having a real impact, can take 20-30 years end to end. It's plausible to be a flaw of new labour that the tories tackled as soon as they reasonably could have been expected to spot it *and it still wouldn't be fixed*. I mean, we both know the tories haven't done shit to fix this. But even if they had in the last 5 years, I wouldn't expect it to have made a meaningful change before 2025. It's important to be aware of that, because this is something Labour will not be able to fix quickly.
Massive cultural change has lasting impact on society shocker!
I blame the Romans! They're at the real heart of this!
Why're you acting like New Labour chained up all the young people and forced them to go to university against their will?
This is solving yesterday's problems. We need to be getting into building 3d printed or fab-assembled houses and stop treating every new suburban semi as a boutique hand-crafted design that needs an army of tradies to assemble. That's how you build enough houses to a high enough standard, and we could be world leaders in modern homebuilding at the same time.
Bring the taxes to Dubai levels for the next 40 years and all will be solved. Simple economics
Dubais lack of taxes are funded by their oil profits. How exactly would that work here?
Not sure how dropping tax rates by more than 50% would solve this. Can you explain?
>Bring the taxes to Dubai levels for the next 40 years and all will be solved I'm sure it will be solved because the country will have collapsed and no one will be here to complain lol
The tradespeople who do cash-in-hand jobs with the Range Rover on their business expenses are probably paying Dubai-level tax rates
300,000 homes a year doesn't even house incoming immigration, never mind allowing young people in houseshares to have their own place.
Read this half asleep and was confused why Max Branning is discussing shortage of skilled labour
My mind boggles.. it's at best advanced common sense, some a re suitable for a proper university education, some are not. There's no judgement there; a balanced economy needs a balanced skill set. It's like heads & tails on a coin. Make the best coin & both sides of the coin the best they can be. Good luck out there
Weekly reminder: "skills shortage" is code for "pay and conditions down for these workers is too high"