Where have all the builders gone?THE great British builder may not be getting as much time for his hallowed teabreak these days. The government has announced plans to increase the pace of housebuilding, which has failed to keep up with demand in recent years. Yet there are not many brickies around to do the job. Since the financial crash of 2008, which saw many small building firms go to the wall, the construction workforce has shrunk from 2.5m to 2.2m. This shortage of manpower, combined with a lack of materials, could undermine efforts to build the houses Britain needs. “Either we need more people or we need to construct homes in a different way,” says Mark Farmer of EC Harris, a property consultancy.
To meet current demand, about 250,000 new homes are needed each year. Yet last year only about 150,000 were built. Increasing annual housebuilding even to 230,000 would require an extra 120,000 or so people in the industry, Mr Farmer estimates. Finding those workers is proving tricky. The number of bricklayers and masons working in Britain has fallen from 100,000 to 70,000 since 2008, according to the Office for National...Continue reading
via Brian Rushton, Can we fix it? No we can’t
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