A NEET solution?

With apologies for the awful pun, Community Housing Cymru put out a press release this week about their research into the analysis of trends in Wales about NEETs (ie young people who are neither in education, employment or training).  This group has grown in proportion since 2021, and now exceeds the UK average, and is greater than Scotland or England such that “the Welsh increase cannot be explained solely by broader UK labour market conditions”.  At the same time, we know that there are significant deficits in construction skills in Wales.  As the data analysis document identifies,

“To meet demand, Wales needs 2,200 construction workers each year, yet the workforce is shrinking by around 300 annually. In the retrofit sector, current labour supply meets just 87% of demand. This is projected to plummet to 25% over the next decade.”

I am entirely catholic about what we call it – a crisis, emergency, or whatever.  Personally, I just prefer to describe it as requiring construction skills to build or retrofit or rehabilitate properties to meet housing need.  We know about the WG commitment to build social homes and the general level of housing need in Wales.  The construction skills deficit was a big talking point at last week’s conference in Scotland.  Community Housing Cymru are calling on the WG to publish a national construction skills strategy to meet the NEET and housing need head-on.  Lots of people like strategies but my view is that we can promise to do whatever we want; but, those promises are empty unless we have the people to build them.  Alongside a strategy, we need urgent action to rectify this skills deficit.

Apologies for only a short post today for what should be an obvious reason.