The Government is drawing up a new Construction Jobs Plan aimed at tackling the shortage of workers across the UK construction industry, with Housing and Planning Minister Matthew Pennycook confirming that a comprehensive package of measures will be published later this year.
The plan is expected to address not only the number of people entering construction, but also the industry’s ability to train, retain and upskill workers at a time when the Government is simultaneously seeking to accelerate housebuilding, retrofit and major infrastructure projects.
Giving evidence to the House of Lords Built Environment Committee, Pennycook acknowledged that construction is facing “quite serious pressures” on its workforce and said the Government needs to do more to expand, upskill and diversify the sector.
“We are going to publish a construction jobs plan later this year,” he told the committee. He described it as a “far more comprehensive package of support from the Government and what the industry is doing, as well, to address shortages”.
The announcement comes as the latest figures from the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) underline the scale of the challenge. Its Construction Workforce Outlook 2026-2030 estimates that an average of 41,200 additional workers will be required every year between 2026 and 2030.
That equates to around 206,000 additional workers over the five-year period, taking the projected UK construction workforce from 2.61 million in 2025 to around 2.68 million by 2030. The requirement reflects both anticipated growth in construction activity and the need to replace workers leaving the industry.
Construction workforce under pressure
The timing of the Construction Jobs Plan is particularly important because the Government has set ambitious targets for housebuilding while the industry is already struggling with recruitment and retention.
CITB forecasts that construction output will remain subdued during 2026 before recovering from 2027 onwards. Public new housing is expected to be one of the strongest areas of growth, with average annual growth of 3.6% between 2026 and 2030. Infrastructure is forecast to grow by 2.5% annually, while private new housing is expected to increase by 2.5%.
The Government is committed to delivering 1.5 million homes in England during the Parliament, alongside its ambitions for social housing, infrastructure and the retrofit of existing properties.
That creates a fundamental problem: planning reform can make land available and speed up permissions, while investment can create demand, but neither can deliver homes if there are insufficient skilled workers available to build them.
Pennycook told peers that the workforce challenge was not specifically related to the Government’s New Towns Programme, but was a national issue.
“There is no doubt that there are quite serious pressures on the construction workforce,” he said. “We said, from the moment we were elected, that we have to do more to expand and upskill that workforce, and diversify it.”
He also sees the New Towns Programme as an opportunity to provide greater certainty for construction businesses, particularly firms involved in modern methods of construction (MMC).
Pipeline certainty is critical
One of the most important themes emerging from the Government’s thinking is the relationship between workforce capacity and a reliable pipeline of work.
Pennycook argued that one reason Category 1 MMC has struggled to develop is the lack of certainty over future demand. A long-term New Towns Programme, he said, could provide the pipeline required to give MMC businesses the confidence to invest and grow.
This is an important point for the wider construction sector. Businesses are unlikely to recruit and train significant numbers of workers if they cannot see sufficient work ahead to keep those employees occupied.
The National Federation of Builders (NFB) believes the same principle should apply to traditional SMEs.
Richard Beresford, chief executive of the NFB, said: “The government has put several strategies in place to better align a pipeline of work with the ambition to grow the construction workforce, and they have been communicative across industry to understand our perspectives.
“The recognition of the MMC pipeline that secures employment and investment must be carried into the broader jobs strategy, particularly in planning reforms and procurement. Underpinning any plan must be the understanding that because SMEs train 8 in 10 construction apprentices, they are key to capacity growth. The mantra must be ‘ensuring the trainers and retainers win work’.”
The argument is that construction workforce policy cannot simply concentrate on training places. Employers need the confidence to take on apprentices and new workers, while those workers need sustainable careers once their training is complete.
Government already investing in construction skills
The Construction Jobs Plan will build on substantial investment already announced by the Government.
The £625 million Construction Skills Package is designed to deliver up to 60,000 additional skilled construction workers during the Parliament. It includes increased training provision, improved teaching, industry placements and ten Construction Technical Excellence Colleges.
A new Foundation Apprenticeship is also intended to provide another route into the industry, while the Government has highlighted the importance of attracting women and people returning to the workforce.
The Government has also allocated funding to expand construction training capacity. Some £195 million is being used to increase capacity in construction courses, with employer involvement a key requirement of the programme. (GOV.UK Assets)
However, the CITB figures demonstrate why further action is required. Even if the Government achieves its target of 60,000 additional skilled workers, that represents only part of the additional workforce requirement identified by the industry body.
The Government therefore needs to address recruitment, training and retention simultaneously.
NFB warns against repeating MMC mistakes
The NFB has also warned that the Government needs to learn lessons from previous attempts to stimulate MMC.
Rico Wojtulewicz, director of policy at the NFB, said: “Any measures to grow and sustain worker capacity require an understanding of how industry operates. For example, the Conservative government spent billions of pounds on MMC but because they focused on volumetric, ignoring 99% the of MMC that 100% of industry can utilise, their approach failed.
“Labour are right to use new towns to enable MMC, but if it is just those built in factories, rather than enabling the definitions already established by the broader MMC Framework, they will embed failure and do little to nothing to ensure we increase the skills and workforce required to retrofit 28 million UK homes.”
Wojtulewicz believes the decline of SME housebuilding illustrates the importance of maintaining a diverse construction base.
“History teaches us that the mantra of ‘ensuring trainers and retainers win work’ is the one to follow and the Government is right to link demand with workforce growth,” he said.
“In the 1980’s, SMEs built around 40% of homes and we trained more than 20,000 bricklayers and carpenters. In 2026, SMEs build 9% of homes and in total, fewer than 20.000 construction apprentices get trained.”
His comments underline a wider concern that concentrating too heavily on large developers and factory-based construction could fail to address the underlying skills shortage.
Can the Construction Jobs Plan deliver?
The Government has already acknowledged that the answer requires more than simply increasing the number of training places.
Pennycook pointed to investment in skills, the work being undertaken by the Department for Education, greater devolution of skills provision and initiatives such as Technical Excellence Colleges and homebuilding hubs on large-scale sites.
The challenge will be turning those individual initiatives into a coherent workforce strategy.
That will mean making construction careers more attractive, reducing the number of people who leave the sector, improving training and ensuring employers have sufficient confidence in the future pipeline to take on apprentices and new entrants.
It will also require construction to attract workers from a broader section of the population, including women and younger people, while ensuring existing skilled workers remain in the industry for longer.
The Government’s planning reforms are intended to accelerate housebuilding and create greater certainty for developers. New planning rules introduced in August are designed to fast-track homes around stations and other well-connected locations, while wider reforms seek to create a faster and more predictable planning system. (GOV.UK)
But the success of those reforms will ultimately depend on whether the construction industry has the capacity to respond.
The forthcoming Construction Jobs Plan therefore has the potential to become a critical part of the Government’s wider housing strategy. With CITB forecasting a requirement for 206,000 additional workers by 2030, the issue is no longer simply about how many homes Britain wants to build.
It is about whether the country has enough people with the right skills to build them.
