Eamon Dyas

I came upon this as a post from someone called Robert Stewart on Facebook. His profile says that he “is a property entrepreneur, former RAF fighter pilot and housing commentator specialising in unlocking housing supply through commercial conversion, brownfield development and planning reform”. Apparently he also ran a scaffolding company. 

Although he’s not exactly my kind of person because of what he does he provides an intelligent insight into the issues that confront not only his business but businesses generally when it comes to skills shortages. Here’s what he says about housing:

“Empty buildings we won’t convert.

A generation we won’t train.

A housing list we can’t clear.

Three problems. And each one is the answer to the other two.

We treat empty buildings, planning, housing and skills as four separate debates. They’re not. They’re one loop, spinning the wrong way.

Britain is covered in empty space. Dead retail, redundant offices, the floors above every high street shop. Already built. Already owned. To turn it into homes you go through a planning system designed to stop bad things, not to help good conversions happen fast. So the building rots on a technicality while the waiting list grows outside its front door.

And converting is skilled work. Trades, not mega projects. Exactly the work you could train a young person on, in their own town, on a real site. But we’ve hollowed out the pipeline, so even where the work exists, the hands don’t.

Then there’s cost, the part nobody wants to hear.

Everyone loves a greedy developer. But walk into an empty building in half the towns in this country and the problem isn’t greed. It’s arithmetic. Labour’s scarce, materials cost more, and the finished flat sells for a fraction of the same flat in Chester or York. Same building, same work, same housing need. The number just doesn’t add up.

That’s where most people give up. If the maths doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

Except we’re already spending the money. We’re just spending it at the wrong end.

Councils in England spent £2.8 billion on temporary accommodation last year. A third of that on emergency B&Bs and hostels, families sharing a kitchen with strangers. And here’s the number that should end the argument. Since 2009, spending is up 176 percent while the number of families housed is up only 129 percent. We’re paying more and more to house fewer people worse.

That’s not a country that can’t afford to fix this. It’s a country pouring a fortune into not fixing it.

So stop spending it downstream on the hotel room. Spend it upstream on the building.

A grant to close the viability gap. A guaranteed lease to remove the risk once it’s done. The state provides the certainty only the state can. Private capital and local trades do the building. I know it works because I’ve done it. A derelict working men’s club in Chester, converted to thirteen flats, leased to the council on a guaranteed rent.

Marginal on paper. Made bankable by one thing, a public lease that told the bank the income was real.

That’s not a subsidy. It’s the same money the state already spends on a hotel room, spent once to build a home instead of monthly to rent a problem.

But it has to be national. The support that exists today is a mess, a different pot in every region, a different rule in every council. You can’t build a business on a lottery. One framework. The same grant, the same lease, the same rules, in every town from Cornwall to the North East. Not fifty schemes that expire before you’ve drawn the plans. Not devolved so your town’s chances depend on which mayor shouts loudest.

That’s when the loop spins the right way. Buildings get converted because the maths works. The maths works because the state buys the outcome it’s already overpaying for. The conversions train a generation. And that workforce brings the cost down on the next one.
Four problems. One framework. Each piece finally in reach of the one next to it.

That’s not a slogan. It’s a design choice. And right now we’re choosing the £2.8 billion hotel bill instead.

So here’s the question. If you were writing that one national framework, what’s the first rule you’d put in it?”

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This is something I read on Facebook and one that is confirmed by a conversation I had with a local plumber who repaired a leak for me. 

“I used to own a scaffolding business. We took on apprentices. And I watched the majority of them walk out before they were anywhere near qualified.

Not because they were lazy. Not because they didn’t want to work. Because the model was broken in a way that nobody running it from Whitehall ever had to feel.

Here’s how it actually works at the small business level.

You take on an apprentice. They’re on a lower wage, fine, that’s the deal.

The government covers some of the training costs, fine.

But what nobody covers is the invisible cost. The one that actually kills it.

Your best operator is now running at half speed. Because the apprentice can’t work unsupervised.

Every task takes longer. Every job runs over. The client gets frustrated. The margin disappears.

And you’re left with a choice between hitting your deadline and developing your apprentice, and the deadline always wins.

So the apprentice gets less supervision than they need. The training suffers.

They feel unsupported. And eventually they leave.

Nearly half of all construction apprentices drop out before completing their training. Nearly half. In a sector that is desperate, on its knees, for qualified people.

And we’re haemorrhaging almost one in two before they get there.

This isn’t an attitude problem. It’s a design problem.

Germany has a dropout rate of 25%. Ireland, 20% for craft apprenticeships.

The difference isn’t that German or Irish young people are more committed. The difference is that those countries have national supervisory frameworks.

Structured support that sits alongside the employer. Coaches who work across multiple apprentices, multiple firms, catching the ones who are struggling before they walk.

We have nothing equivalent. We dumped the entire supervisory burden onto the small firms least equipped to carry it, wondered why uptake was low and dropout was high, and then called it a skills crisis.

It’s not a skills crisis. It’s a system failure.

Here’s what I’d replace it with.

A National Apprenticeship Employer.

Government becomes the employer of record. It carries the wage, the admin, the liability. It provides a roving supervisory structure, senior tradespeople covering multiple apprentices across multiple small firms simultaneously.

The small business gets skilled hands arriving on site, structured, supported, and supervised by someone else. They contribute to the training without bearing the full cost of it.

The apprentice gets proper development instead of being left to sink or swim on a busy site.

The government is already spending money on a system that loses nearly half its apprentices before they qualify. Redesign it. Put the supervisory infrastructure where it should have been all along, at the national level, not dumped on a firm of five scaffolders just trying to get the job done.

We have a million young people doing nothing. We have an industry that can’t find workers. We have a housing target that is fiction without those workers.

The connection is there. The system just isn’t designed to make it.

That’s Point 8 of the Build Don’t Blame manifesto. Not a spending commitment.

A redesign.

#propertyinvestment #UKProperty #propertyinsights #propertyeducation #buildingcommunities #builders #landlord”

Pete Whitelegg adds:

Isn’t a significant component part of the problem here is who is doing the heavy lifting. Small to medium sized business appear to be struggling with apprenticeships. When I did my apprenticeship local authorities took on loads of apprentices. They all had direct labour forces. We also had large scale industry that required skilled labour and therefore had apprentices. 

These days much of the economy works on a sub contracting or agency basis. No wonder the system fails.