Housebuilders

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Best for securing this debate and join him, the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, and others in pointing out that if we do not do something about construction skills, we will not get any additional homes. In fact, we will fall backwards, not move forward.

There has been a dramatic fall in the number of construction apprenticeships in this country over not just the past few years but the past few decades. I shall give a few examples of recent problems. In 2012-13 construction apprenticeship starts fell to only 14,000, whereas in the early 1970s one large construction company alone had three times that number going through its books. This is a real national crisis. Although we have seen a small upturn, so the 14,000 starts in 2012-13 have now crept back up to 21,000, which sounds like good news, the continuing bad news is that only 10% of those are level 3, the level of a truly skilled craftsperson.

This is a true national crisis, but it has been many years in the making. It would be easy to say that it is all the fault of the major housebuilders, who have just decided that it is cheaper and easier to pull in skilled adult employees from eastern Europe, but it is fairer to say that there was an existing crisis and the arrival of the accession states covered it up. This crisis has been a long time in the making and only the large construction companies can make any serious dent in what is going on. They are fundamental to the apprenticeship system and to the development of construction skills. Even if we see a revival of small companies, which I hope we will, the nature of the construction industry is such that if the big companies are not truly involved, it just will not happen.

At this point, I shall refer to a company that has not come up much: Carillion. It has not come up much because it is on the verge of bankruptcy rather than making record profits and it is not primarily a housebuilder, but it is a fundamental part of what is left of our construction skills training system. It was originally made up of the names of my youth—Wimpey and Mowlem—which were central to what is left of the system. They are where I get my numbers from. In the Wimpey training—I do not know quite what to call them—sites, numbers plummeted in the 1970s and 1980s so that where it had been taking on 7,000 apprentices a year, the number went down to about 1,000, most of whom, even now, go on to other companies, not to Carillion.

The problem is no doubt partly the company’s own fault, but it is also very much a failure of government policy. What is truly shocking is that we have had a Construction Industry Training Board and a construction industry training levy all these years. When the other industrial training boards went, it was felt that the nature of the construction industry meant that the levy was important. It is not particularly difficult to come to the conclusion that the Construction Industry Training Board has not done a terribly good job. In fact, in this last year and a half, many of the leading companies have expressed in public real concerns about the performance of the CITB, and a government review stated, “We cannot really see any reason to change; it is all too difficult”. We have had a review of these industrial training boards from the Department for Education, and the main result is that the CITB will increasingly concentrate on enabling others to provide high-quality services, except when intervention is needed to secure the quality and efficiency of services. That gets a prize for a number of things as a piece of prose, but not as a solution to an acute problem.

The other thing I want say quickly before I close is that apprenticeships are among the other respects in which Section 106 is no longer working, and I would be happy to explain at length why this is the case.

In conclusion, I have two questions for the Minister. First, in the context of this recognised national crisis in housebuilding, will the Government consider revisiting the issue of apprenticeships and training in construction, not simply in the context of the narrow view of the CITB but more generally in terms of the evident failure of the combined industry and government policy to produce the skills that we need? That failure impacts particularly on working-class boys. Secondly, in that same context, will they consider having a proper look at Section 106?