Tag Archives: London

Parliament faces construction skills gap

Blog No Comments
Westminster

The Houses of Parliament in London are falling down and in need of what will be a multi-billion restoration project. As a result, Members of Parliament, peers and civil servants are facing a skills gap literally on their crumbling doorstep.

Construction News reported last week (Specialist skills shortage poses ‘risk’ to £4bn Parliament restoration [£]) that Parliament’s Joint Committee on the Palace of Westminster had warned that a lack of specialist skills across the sector could hamper the parliamentary restoration programme. In a report (Restoration and Renewal of the Palace of Westminster – available here), the committee devoted a section (“Managing the supply chain“) of Chapter 6 to detailed discussion of the need for specialist construction skills.

The committee received evidence from construction industry organisations including the RIBA, RICS and CIBSE, all of whom pointed out the need to start investing at the earliest possible opportunity in the skills that will be needed to deliver the Westminster restoration and renewal (R&R) programme. It also highlighted that most of these skills tend to be found the heritage and conservation sectors, where the vast majority of firms are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

  • The RIBA told the committee a “great skills shortage issue resulting from declining investment into the conservation sector and a large pipeline of works in the UK that would divert resources from the R&R Programme.” But even without this pipeline of expected works, there might still be insufficient skills available in the market to tackle the scale of the challenge entailed in the R&R Programme – even though it’s expected to start no sooner than 2023.
  • RICS suggested the R&R programme might become an “exemplar project” demonstrating how training and the sustainability of skills could be built into large programmes.
  • CIBSE also suggested that, rather than viewing the supply and capacity as a challenge, the R&R programme provided a unique opportunity to develop a new generation of skilled heritage workers, through apprenticeships and other career development activity, and also to bring a significant number of young women into the sector (diversity being an ongoing issue – post).

The committee was clearly under no illusion of the need to start engaging with supply chains, and also recognised that the project provided opportunities not only to engage with SMEs, but to spread the work well beyond London and the south-east of England (in much the same way that Crossrail has involved companies the length and breadth of the UK), and to develop a strategy for training and creating apprenticeships that would leave a legacy of skills and experience.

In short, the Westminster project, is, to use the RIBA’s words, “an ideal opportunity for educating and training the next generation in the skills needed to maintain, repair and enhance the historic buildings and to be an ongoing exemplar project for those skills and craftsmanship.” With SkillsPlanner’s focus on skills in London and the southeast, we will be watching for any mobilisation with respect to this project with interest.

SkillsPlanner at Number 10

Blog No Comments
SkillsPlanner team at No10

A personal landmark and also one for SkillsPlanner. This month saw a meeting with the Policy Unit at Number 10 Downing Street, attended by myself, Scott Young (Tideway, right) and fellow Ethos partner Colin Middleton (who heads up the SkillsPlanner councils and brokerage work packages). The meeting followed an introduction made by Mime Consulting, who have developed Skills Route (a portal to help young people understand their options after finishing GCSEs). Number 10 asked for more information and offered a meeting, so we went along to explain the project.

It was a very successful meeting. Lots of time given for us to talk (we went over the allotted time by about 20 minutes), with some pertinent questions asked and further connections made. All rather exciting.

The reshuffle dust settles …

Blog No Comments
GCS 2016-20

As the UK political establishment settles down after the EU Referendum (post) and the resulting spate of resignations and changes of office, the UK construction sector is now beginning to identify the new figures who will be leading key initiatives on areas such as housebuilding and planning, construction strategy, and skills.

Prime Minister Theresa May’s Cabinet reshuffle saw a plethora of new appointments, and as the various Cabinet ministers have begun to settle into their portfolios and some tasks have been moved between ministries, various junior minister posts have also been finalised.

Succeeding Nick Boles, Harlow MP Robert Halfon is the new apprentices and skills minister, appointed by education secretary Justine Greening – the skills brief having been moved from the former Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS, now the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, BEIS). Halfon appears well-suited to his new brief. He employed the first parliamentary apprentice, and says he has “led from the front in championing apprenticeships.” We assume he will be taking responsibility for pushing forward the Government’s Post-16 Skills Plan, its response to the Sainsbury Review, published last week (post).

From our point of view on the SkillsPlanner project, another key appointment has been Croydon MP Gavin Barwell, appointed the new housing and planning minister in the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG). Barwell is also minister for London; our two-year SkillsPlanner project is strongly focused on London and the southeast, and we expect Barwell will be working closely with London Mayor Sadiq Khan (post).

And, Cabinet Office minister Ben Gummer, MP for Ipswich, will oversee the government’s own construction strategy (post) and programme, lead on its procurement policy, and also look at digital transformation of government. The latter particularly interests SkillsPlanner; data, much of it provided by government or government-funded organisations and projects, is at the core of our open linked data platform, and the wider construction industry is also engaged in a deeper digital shift outlined in the February 2015 Digital Built Britain strategy (post).

Update (1 August 2016) – At BEIS, Jesse Norman MP, minister for industry and energy, will be responsible for industrial policy covering infrastructure and construction.

Addressing the skills gap

Blog No Comments
CIRIA logo

It is always helpful to engage with fellow industry professionals as we seek to improve UK construction, and I am looking forward to presenting with my SkillsPlanner colleague Chris Dransfield at next month’s CIRIA half-day conference, “Addressing the skills gap“, in London on 6 July 2016.

As you would expect of a research and information organisation, the CIRIA event will look at recent and current surveys and academic research highlighting current shortages and gaps in skills (some of which have previously been discussed on our SkillsPlanner blog), including:

The CITB CSN, for example, predicts sustained growth from 2016-2020 of 2.5% every year and says we could require 232,000 new jobs, driven largely by infrastructure and private housing, with new nuclear power stations at Hinkley Point, Somerset, and Wylfa, Anglesey, alongside rail projects such as Crossrail and HS2, and increases in house-building.

The CIRIA conference will explore current industry initiatives, research and trends within the construction skills gap area, and will enable the sharing of ideas and best practice through presentations and discussion relating to these initiatives and trends. We are looking forward to discussing:

  • How can we make the construction industry more attractive to graduates and school leavers and what are the barriers to attracting new talent?
  • What are the current models of graduate schemes and apprenticeships and what initiatives are currently challenging and improving these processes?
  • What are the future skills (digital, off site manufacturing, sustainability skills) that we need develop through staff training and apprenticeships, and how can we diversify the opportunities for people entering the construction sector?
  • How can we ensure supportive and inclusive environments and improve retention rates?
  • Can skills provision adapt to accommodate changing construction environments and technologies?

If these are questions that you have been asking in your own organisations, it would be great to meet you at the conference on 6 July.

Can Sadiq Khan help London’s skills shortage?

Blog No Comments
SadiqKhanmanifestoimage

As a collaborative R&D project focused, initially, on the construction skills challenges of London and the southeast, our SkillsPlanner team has learned a lot about the need for joined-up thinking in and around the capital. We have also watched the London Mayoral and Greater London Assembly elections with considerable interest. Now that the votes have been cast, we hope Sadiq Khan, his GLA colleagues, and his proposed “Skills for Londoners” Task Force will make a profound difference in how we deliver future skills to support new housing and infrastructure over the next five years – and beyond.

As the CIOB’s CEO Chris Blythe recently remarked, the lack of a construction skills pipeline could damage the London Mayor’s housing and infrastructure plans. But it’s not just about our immediate skills shortages.

We also need to show young people that they can enjoy a long, exciting and rewarding career while they help deliver our built assets. And as London grows and technologies change, our people also need to know they can retrain, gain new knowledge and skills, and continue to contribute to the London construction economy.

Our ambitions seem well aligned with Mr Khan’s manifesto commitments:

  • to “develop a city-wide, strategic approach to skills…”
  • to “map the skills gap”
  • to “create a pipeline of skilled London workers”, and
  • to “close the gap between our … housing targets and the need for more skilled construction workers in London.”

To do this, in our view, high quality information – data – will be vital. If we can clearly forecast future skills needs and match London organisations’ ability to deliver, we can reassure both workers and employers – and London policy-makers. I hope Sadiq Khan encourages more pan-London data-sharing, including via SkillsPlanner, to help us make construction better connected and more resilient.

To change the image, first change construction

Blog No Comments

We need to tackle some of the fundamental issues in the construction industry before we can effectively change “the image of construction”, and wider sharing of data should be part of the solution.

“The image of construction” has featured heavily this week for me (to be honest, it often does – as previous posts probably show).

On Tuesday, I was part of a CIMCIG-led roundtable discussion in London with Mark Farmer, the consultant helping the Construction Leadership Council to address issues relating to construction skills and the future needs of the industry (see gov.uk news release).

Yesterday I joined a panel discussion at the Women in Construction and Engineering Awards day, part of which focused on how current images of construction and engineering make them unattractive to potential entrants, parents, teachers and even careers advisors.

And today, I have been reading in Construction News (YouGov poll finds two-thirds of public would not consider career in construction) about a survey for Construction United showing:

  • more than half of the public view construction work as ‘strenuous’ or ‘dirty’, with just 11 per cent saying it was ‘exciting’
  • 23 per cent viewed construction work as creating ‘mess, traffic and inconvenience’
  • people do not see the industry as academically driven, with 41 per cent saying it was one the least likely sectors to require a further or higher education qualification

Such survey findings are nothing new. They simply confirm that the “image” problem persists year after year despite numerous campaigns to change popular perceptions. Industry insiders maintain that we need to “present how fantastic it is to work in construction and change some of those perceptions… all of us who work in construction love it; we just haven’t been very good collectively at expressing that message” (to quote Suzannah Nicol of Build UK).

To change the image, first change construction

At this week’s CIMCIG meeting, I repeated my view that the “image of construction” is a symptom of a more deep-rooted reputation issue. Bluntly, the industry’s reputation is not just the result of what it says and what others say about it, but – importantly – about what it does and how it behaves.

The reality, evidenced in report after report (read my Ethos blog post: Building a better built environment industry), is that the UK construction industry has for decades been recognised as:

  • overly-complex, fragmented and price-fixated in its procurement approaches
  • adversarial in its supply chain relations
  • poor in its payment practices
  • wasteful in its project execution
  • conservative in its adoption of new technologies, and
  • short-termist and reactive in its approach to human skills development and R&D.

Add to this the ‘macho’ culture on many sites and the painfully slow progress in addressing diversity issues (see: Let’s share more data on skills and diversity), is it any wonder that the industry currently known as construction has an image problem?

At a Constructing Excellence conference in 2014, I said the industry needed to stop thinking of itself as a monolithic entity and start to identify changes it could make across its many disciplines, and then get them communicating, running long-term, integrated, pan-sector campaigns, and working collaboratively with partners, trade bodies and (most importantly, perhaps) its customers and end-users. Currently though, we seem to be more focused on trying to fix the image, rather than fixing the reasons behind that image.

It’s not just about campaigns

CITB’s Jane Gleave was at the CIMCIG meeting and talked about the GoConstruct campaign (read my pwcom post); last month I noted the launch at Ecobuild of Build UK’s new video; and this week’s story in Construction News (which launched its own #LoveConstruction campaign in July 2013) is based on a poll undertaken for yet another campaign, Construction United, launched in February 2016 and building towards a week of events in October.

And while we’re talking about “image”, to me it is unfortunate that the campaign’s home page perpetuates a view of construction as site-based. Efforts are being made by the Chartered Institute of Building, among others, to get government agencies to accept wider definitions of construction that take account of the inputs of product manufacturers and of professions such as architects, engineers and quantity surveyors, according to a Construction Index report today. We also tend to underplay the key roles played in many construction businesses by accountants, lawyers, marketing, PR, HR and IT people, plus a myriad of administrators.

Nonetheless, Construction United does recognise that there is already an industrial strategy looking to address some of the underlying problems:

constructionunited“Construction 2025 identified a number of areas that needed addressing, so Construction United aims to bring everyone with a vested interest in construction together to raise awareness of the key issues facing the sector, including image, skills gaps and the wellbeing of employees at all levels.”

It’s not just about raising awareness of the key issues, but actually doing something about them. Construction 2025 and the Government Construction Strategy 2016-2020 (see previous post: Tackling skills gaps – can we learn from BIM?) prescribe a suite of changes aimed at making construction and the built environment more cost effective and sustainable. The BIM programme has shown that the industry can collaborate to tackle the underlying fragmented structures, silo-based attitudes, anti-collaborative behaviours and out-dated technologies – and BIM shows we can be sophisticated users of technology and data, not just stereotyped wielders of bricks, concrete and steel.

If government can inspire such changes in project delivery, surely it can work with industry so that construction skills provision also benefits from even more collaboration and more sharing of data? Incidentally, the UK was confirmed yesterday as the world’s leader in Open Data (see the 3rd Open Data Barometer report).

WhereTheWorkIsWhere the Work Is

Through the SkillsPlanner project, we see some signs this is beginning to happen. Yesterday, for example, SkillsPlanner programme director Rebecca Lovelace attended an Institute for Public Policy Research launch of a jobs and skills tool called Where The Work Is. This jobs data platform draws on historic data on over 1.5 million jobs posted online by employers across all sectors in the UK from 2012 to 2014 and normalised against government data on vacancies, and we have incorporated some of the same datasets into our developing SkillsPlanner data catalogue. Clearly, we would welcome more contributions of data to help improve our understanding of the construction skills supply and demand challenges.

Incidentally, Where The Work Is also provided supporting data for a report, “Jobs and Skills in London: Building a More Responsive Skills System in the Capital” (download PDF), which recommended that the Greater London Authority might be given a more active role in funding adult education providers, and be given the capability to shift to a results-based funding model for adult skills in the future. This fits neatly with some of the aspirations we have for SkillsPlanner – if we can demonstrate its success in construction, we feel its data-driven approach can be applied to many other sectors of the economy too.

Industry buzz about SkillsPlanner

Blog No Comments
SkillsPlanner launch title slide

Last week’s formal launch in London of SkillsPlanner (see previous post) has prompted a lot of industry discussion and a flurry of interest in participating in the project, while also recognising the challenges lying ahead.

  • “The event was excellent and generated a very positive message.” — Jacquie McDonnell, Bexley College
  • An excellent event, and everybody seemed so upbeat about the future. We are heavily involved in ensuring the project’s success … a great tool /mechanism for us to understand and meet the needs of an ever-expanding construction sector.” — Tony Hyland, Department of Work and Pensions
  • “It is a pleasure to be part of a process and technology that thrives on collaboration. We have a lot of work to do to break down barriers and get people to realise that open data is the only way to go.” — Caroline Blackman, Laing O’Rourke
  • “I think everyone was impressed with the quality of industry and academic support for the project – it certainly looks ‘quality assured’. The turnout was very impressive as well.” — Kevin O’Connor, Durkan
  • “It was a really good evening, very informative, and also interesting to see the breadth of organisations involved. Looking forward to continuing the partnership on development. — Kath Moore, Women into Construction


Update (8 March 2016) – Ben Pritchard from construction management consultancy Invennt attended the launch event (along with colleague Tim Fitch), and has written a blog post –
Skillsplanner – open data meets the skills shortage – about the project. Ben and I are also active in Constructing Excellence which has been discussing wider use of Open Data in the sector.

SkillsPlanner formally launched

Blog No Comments
SkillsPlanner launch holding slide

SkillsPlanner was formally launched last night (Wednesday 24 February 2016) at the Institution of Civil Engineers in London.

Over 130 industry guests were welcomed by SkillsPlanner programme director Rebecca Lovelace. She then introduced Andy Mitchell, CEO of Tideway, one of our SkillsPlanner partners, who described the challenges of delivering a mega-project under London that will require contributions from 20,000 workers during its design, construction and commissioning. With research suggesting 44% of firms struggling to recruit people with the right skills, he was adamant that the industry needs to collaborate more in order to attract the people it needs to deliver future built assets. He finished with a resounding call to arms:

Tideway Andy Mitchell at SkillsPlanner launch“This is a bold and ambitious two-year pilot…. SkillsPlanner has the potential to link employer demands for skills qualifications and behaviours to a responsive education and training sector who can train the individuals who can and will be the future of our industry. And I really hope this vision becomes a reality over the next couple of years …. let’s see what we can do to make something of this because we do need change. And this is a really exciting opportunity to secure that change….”

Sir Nigel Shadbolt, chair of SkillsPlanner partner Seme4 and co-founder of the Open Data Institute, then described the opportunity that Open Linked Data provides to give greater transparency on industry skills supply and demand, using the Tideway project and London boroughs as illustrations of the potential power of the data-driven platform being developed. “SkillsPlanner is a planning tool, an engine to help us draw conclusions about future skills,” he said. But he twice identified challenges in gathering data:

“The challenges will not be technical. Ultimately, they will turn out to be human, about how far we can persuade collaborators to actually provide data – data that is fit for purpose and that we can move from a very siloed world.”

He continued:

“Whilst we will be able to furnish the technical platform, the real challenge is getting hold of the data, finding out if it has any of the quality attributes we care about, and is it actually categorising the things we care about. Data is often presented to us with the wrong codes or the wrong sets of divisions. Given the modern workforce, it’s collected against categories that seem fit for the 1950s. How do we build dynamic classifications of this workforce? Data should not be fixed – it should be dynamic and vary through time.”

A Q&A session allowed audience members to quiz a panel of experts involved with the project. Issues included how the data might be sourced and verified, how SkillsPlanner could be used by schools to enthuse teachers and parents, and how the industry needs to be more committed to guaranteeing worthwhile jobs and future careers following training.

Reviewing the event today, Rebecca Lovelace said:

Rebecca LovelaceIt was an amazing evening. There was a real sense in the room of people truly understanding the potential of SkillsPlanner and fully agreeing with the principle of open collaboration. The number of emails I have received today committing to supporting SkillsPlanner has been quite simply brilliant.

The number of organisations engaged with the project is a reflection of our belief that SkillsPlanner must be built collaboratively with its future users. If your organisation is interested in collaborating with SkillsPlanner, please do get in touch. It’s a truly exciting time and we will achieve so much more by working together.

Twitter stats SkillsPlanner 24 FebJudging from Twitter (see our Storify stream from the event, and we have more shareable content here), the event created a lot of industry buzz, with many follow-up discussions about how training providers, construction businesses and other industry bodies can get involved, particularly by supplying data. If your organisation would like to contribute to the project, please email [email protected].

SkillsPlanner and The Sharing Economy

Blog No Comments
LGiU logo

SkillsPlanner project director Rebecca Lovelace will be talking about SkillsPlanner at a seminar, The Local Authority and the Sharing Economy, organised by the Local Government Information Unit (LGiU), on 23 February 2016 at the NCVO near King’s Cross in London.

The Sharing Economy

The Sharing Economy is a socio-economic ecosystem built around the sharing of human and physical resources. It includes the shared creation, production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods and services by different people and organisations.

It is estimated that 25% of UK adults are already sharing online and that global revenues in the sharing economy could rise from £9 billion today to £230 billion in 2025.

The sharing economy allows people to share property, resources, time and skills across online platforms. This can unlock previously unused, or under-used assets – helping people make money from their empty spare room and the tools in their sheds they use once a year. It allows people to go from owning expensive assets, such as cars, to paying for them only when they need them.

Local authorities and the Sharing Economy

Local authorities are increasingly looking at the sharing economy and how it might work for them to enable and empower communities, to provide community care for those in need and to optimize the resources that they can share with other agencies.

In the UK some local authorities are looking at sharing the local authority’s building with local community groups; building new housing developments with car club bays incorporated and integrated into the local transport network and creating local online hubs where residents and businesses can share their skills and possessions with each other.

Collaboration and SkillsPlanner

Rebecca LovelaceThe 23 February seminar will focus on how local authorities might unleash the power of the sharing economy for their local communities and for collaboration between agencies. It will feature case studies on resource and information sharing – which is where Rebecca and SkillsPlanner fits in.

She will describe how the project has developed to date, and talk about its ambitions for the future. Its core partners already includes three London local authorities – Camden, Islington and Westminster councils – with further local authorities and other public sector organisations part of the wider team providing contributions in kind alongside numerous private sector collaborators.

Click here for more information about the LGiU event.

Ethos launches £1.3m collaborative solution to skills shortages

Blog No Comments
SkillsPlanner Logo

Ethos’s most ambitious initiative yet, SkillsPlanner, an innovative approach to solving skills shortages, has been awarded £827k development funding from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency. SkillsPlanner is a data platform that will allow stakeholders within an industry or sector to share current and future employment needs, facilitating collaborative planning, training and brokerage to meet the industry’s requirements.

Ethos and project partners* secured the funding through the ‘Solving Urban Challenges with Data’ competition: SkillsPlanner is based on a powerful Linked Open Data platform, created by technology leader and project partner Seme4. It will launch with a two-year R&D project focussed on the London construction industry which needs an estimated 180,000 new skilled entrants to deliver construction projects in the capital and the South East by 2019. Ethos and its project partners will invest a total of £1.3m in this development phase.

Key projects such as HS2, Tideway and Crossrail, planning authorities including Westminster and Islington, main contractors, supply chains, training providers and industry bodies will share skills supply and demand data. The data will be integrated and linked to create a platform that enables:

  • skills providers to define existing provision and develop demand-led training
  • businesses to benefit from more sustainable procurement of local labour, reduced resource and HR costs
  • local authorities to collaborate on the design and delivery of local skills provision; and
  • local job brokerage initiatives to operate more efficiently and effectively.

website version of infographic
Key industry figures have pledged their support for the project.

In a joint statement, SkillsPlanner partners Louise Townsend, Sustainable Business Director at Morgan Sindall and Trudy Langton-Freeman, HR Business Partner at Costain, set out the case for a collaborative initiative: ‘The skills shortage in the sector is rapidly becoming a serious impediment to the industry’s ability to deliver above and beyond what is expected of it. We must work together as an industry to define and predict the timely provision of these industry-critical skills. SkillsPlanner provides a collaborative opportunity to do this.’

Chris Dransfield of Crossrail sees great potential for SkillsPlanner to, ‘reduce brokerage costs & improve outcomes for all our stakeholders.’

‘Mastering data sources and being able to analyse this data in a timely manner will be essential for colleges to understand labour market needs and reconcile them with student demand,’ says Martin Doel of the Association of Colleges.

Highlighting the importance of understanding skills needs in the longer term, Alex MacLaren of BIM2050 said, ‘the collaborative premise of this new platform, harnessing available data to improve efficiency, awareness and reduce waste, is exactly the innovation we want to see in the future construction industry.’

SkillsPlanner project director Rebecca Lovelace says: ‘SkillsPlanner is an Ethos ‘perfect storm’. It demonstrates how a genuinely collaborative approach can create an economically viable solution to a complex urban challenge, resulting in a positive social outcome.’

*Association of Colleges, Camden Council, Good People, Islington Council, Seme4, Tideway, Plymouth University, and Westminster Council.

SkillsPlanner is an inclusive and collaborative project. To find out more and get involved go to skillsplanner.net

Press contact Paul Wilkinson [email protected], 07788 445920, @EEPaul

About InnovateUK
Innovate UK is the UK’s innovation agency. It works with people, companies and partner organisations to find and drive the science and technology innovations that will grow the UK economy For further information visit www.innovateuk.gov.uk