Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps he is taking to promote productivity in the construction sector.

On 5^th July, we announced an ambitious Sector Deal with the construction industry to transform the sector’s productivity. This includes the Government’s commitment to invest £170m through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund in the Transforming Construction: Manufacturing Better Buildings programme. The programme will improve productivity through promoting the development and commercialisation of digital, manufacturing, energy generation and storage technologies for the construction and built environment sectors.

The Government will also work with the sector to promote increased investment in skills development. This will be achieved through a joint commitment to implement reforms to the Construction Industry Training Board to make it more strategic and industry led, and to enable the sector to make best use of funding from the Apprenticeship Levy.

In addition, the government has already committed to investing £600 billion in infrastructure over the next decade to provide the industry with certainty about levels of investment, and to encourage it to invest in skills and new technologies to meet this. The Sector Deal will support this objective.