We are seriously struggling for decent trades at the minute. My regular joiners are booked up for 2 months mininum in advance so had to make the dreaded call to agency on Monday. Cue yesterday when 62 year old Brian turned up, a man I was assured was good. Turning up in a car never fills me with confidence…
He lasted precisely 30 mins before I had to have the awkward conversation of how he wasn’t right for the job.
“I haven’t got a router and I’ve never used one” being the catalyst behind my decision.
Such a shortage!

George Osborne’s looking for a second job currently, maybe give him a call.

Industry fails to train and value staff in lack of personnel shocker! I’m amazed that the building trade got so far into 21 century before the skills shortage bit.

The samething happens in construction everytime we come out of a recession, its nothing new.

Robots.

I should imagine the government will opt for the recession option rather than the training.

Sandwich +1

For years now politicians have led the ‘got to go to uni’ charge. Schools and universities are a marketing machine for degrees – and we just don’t value our trades enough. I would be more than happy for my lads to pick up some tools…

There have been loads going to college too!

A few years ago i tried changing jobs to construction? and dispite having done a level 2 c&g had practical skills but because I was over 25 no one wanted to takee on to train.

Another friend has had the same problem. Attitude was closed shop unless you already had a good mate cousin etc

A few years back I drove my nephew around our local millionaires row pointing out all the houses that I knew were owned by builders.
He is now a brickie and on a pound per brick.
Unfortunately he’s not saved a penny and sleeps on his mate’s floor.

When I was 62 I wasn’t very good either. I’m much better now I’m 63.

A pound per brick!!!! I’ve now got this vision in my head of a wages clerk going round in his/her business suit counting the bricks laid in a wall 😆

Wrighty – just out of interest, do you need to see any qualifications from your joiners? Are they on a day rate?

I only ask as I’m pretty handy (hobby carpenter and have restored a few houses) and might explore this as a second line of employment.

It’s all going to be very well that we’re going to encourage inward investment in infrastructure when we’ve been reliant on imported skills for years and now we’ve done a really good job of telling them they’re not wanted. This combined with an education systems that churns out unemployable graduates in subjects we don’t need!

Brexit innit. 😀

I work in construction in the SE and the skills shortage has always been a problem. When I talk to the site guys, who are overwhelmingly Eastern European, most have a planned a route out of the UK and back to Europe since the Brexit ref. Most seem to favour Germany. If they do start to leave for Germany the skills gap will worsen.

Successive UK government have done too little for too long. Construction seems to be a vocation that a lot of people look down on ( it can be hard, dirty work) and conditions aren’t great.

mitsumonkey – Member

A pound per brick!!!! I’ve now got this vision in my head of a wages clerk going round in his/her business suit counting the bricks laid in a wall

That’s the QS does that, not the Wages Clerk 😉

siwhite you’d be better off advertising locally and getting all the cash in hand work like most chippies around here do.
Joking aside most carpenters I know who are any good are all self employed and work mainly with other trades who are also self employed taking on extensions etc.
The ones I speak to have no interest in working for big firms/site work.

This is why Davis said last week he doesn’t expect immigration to decrease after Brexit and May is talking about keeping freedom of movement this morning.

The joys of post-truth politics

As for construction workers, what sort of benefits are included, sick pay, annual leave, pension etc?

I have a router and i know how to use it, bush is worn though and its slightly off centre so you can only use it one way…

What do you need doing?

Brickies are on the front line when it comes to automation in the construction industry. There are already machines out there that can do large expanses of bricky work. From a personal point of view, I’ve seen a few things in my own trade which can automate tasks normally reserved for the “lad”…but nothing that affects me yet or in the near future

Leaving all that aside. There is a massive skills shortage in construction. Personal experience on a lot of sites last year, when things started getting busy again would indicate that there is a skills shortage on site too, even if there’s a full compliment of bodies there. 😆

So desk wallahs can have a giggle about it – but we’ve got to ask ourselves what this means in the grander scheme. It means: lower skilled workers starting to look for skilled workers day rates and skilled workers looking for day rates that make desk jockeys faint (once they’ve done the mental arithmetic to reach a pro-rata salary figure). It means sites desperate to get labour start hiring untrained staff and giving responsibility to less experienced guys & gals in a dangerous environment. It means that quality of construction goes down, costs go up, accidents increase, deaths and career ending injuries increase. The cost to build your extension, loft-conversion or knock-through go through the roof. (No pun intended.)

Skills shortages in construction (while good news for the likes of me – I can start a little bit of upward pressure on rates that have hardly changed in five or six years) are not great news when we have a national outcry for infrastructure investment, calls for MOAR houses, MOAR building, etc etc.

Ring Nick Knowles – he always seems to have a large supply of tradesmen on tap. And they work for cakes!

Biggest shortage I see on site is decent brickies, there seem to be quite a few crap ones, but not many that are very good, and most sites are running Polish/Irish gangs as it’s all they can get, not to say they’re any worse than some of the british lads.

The work just about meets minimum standards usually, but pretty it ain’t. On the smaller scale side of things there’s very high quality work going on, older experienced brickies just getting it done, but they’re happy doing what they do and don’t want to go lodging or chasing the money.

One moan you always hear is that big sites never use local blokes, then site tell you they put the feelers out and nobody local wanted to get their health and safety certs. up to date or could actually meet the criteria. I guess payment terms can be a stumbling block too, some will be on 60 or 90 days, fair time to wait for your first cheque if you’re used to weekly pay and have spent it all by Thursday……

Labour Agencies have killed this industry.

I have a trade and without bragging too much i’m pretty good at it but when quiet over the winter there two of us enquired about site work and the going rate was what i was on 15 years ago as an employee ie holidays thats all you might get in the building trade if your lucky. Things are busy again but some folk want their work cheap as chips done and are not realistic about rates too many dodgy untrained folk doing us out of work
As to the £1 for every brick you wouldnt get that anywhere north of London maybe 50p
Im self employed no paid holidays, all insurance to pay, new vehicle to lease and fuel etc etc

That’s the QS does that, not the Wages Clerk

No we don’t. That’s a Bonus Surveyor.

and £60per m2 for labour only brickwork? Not on my watch.

There is a massive shortage of QS’s at the moment.
According to the RICS it’s easier to employ a ballet dancer than a QS at the moment.

I’m fighting off employment agencies with a shitty stick at the moment trying to entice me away.
One chancer, who i’ve never had any contact with before, phoned the reception at work yesterday and claimed that we were best buddies at Uni and he wanted to catch up as he had been out of the country for years.

http://www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/news/view/easier-to-employ-a-ballet-dancer-than-a-quantity-surveyor

Next time you pass a road construction gang, notice how few are under 50 y/o.

And my lad went to college for joinery, couldn’t get an apprenticeship. Both firms he tried out with decided not to take one on, worried about demand (over the next 3 years).

But on the opposite side how hard is it to get a trade in (just had a granny annex done, and it wasn’t easy scheduling).

I nearly went for a job as a QS once, alas it had been filled and I ended up as a trainee roof designer for the same firm…. for 6 months.

Then building control and still here nearly 9 years later but wondering if the other side of the fence would be any better now.

The recession sorted the construction labour market out a bit, it put a lot of the poorer builders out of work round my way, on the whole work is better quality now that it was pre-recession as the chancers and untrained guys who were just riding the wave disappeared. But good trades are very busy now so I expect them to start popping up again as the demand is there.

My likely next big project is 3 office blocks of 30 x 15m its a steel frame box to take the roof with the entirety of the walls in brickwork. I’m **** dreading it. Brickies at the minute have taken militancy to a new level and if it’s not how they want it they throw the rattle and walk. The Lou d a brick thing ain’t happening anywhere near here but the lads on housing are easily pulling 1k a week for 4 1/2 days

Years ago straight out of Uni I went to work in construction recruitment. We couldn’t pay enough, £200-£300 per day for trades and up. (2001 – London)

1 out of 25 would be a decent human, probably 30% no show and most would walk if the site was cold/more than 2 stops away etc. Anyone decent had gone self employed already. I couldn’t understand it. A bloke with no education but willing to learn could have been picking up £60k a year in 2001. Almost without exception they were all broke, usually drunk and totally untrustworthy.

Everyone at school in the 90s with a brain had been talked into further education, those with Dads in the trades were all set up already. All those lads who would have traditionally gone onto a ‘tools’ job were just ignored, abandoned as feckless and they’d gone on to fill that brief magnificently.

We just used to ship buses full of guys from Poland and Lithuania, it was the only way.

When I talk to the site guys, who are overwhelmingly Eastern European, most have a planned a route out of the UK and back to Europe since the Brexit ref.

Agree with you on this. Only going to get worse when Hinckly point and HS2 get going…………..

Recruitment agencies dont get me started on them, bring in Eastern European and pay them peanuts gets rates down, i re sat the cscs got the pass paper for £20 to sit the test but they want £30 more to get your card printed and prove you have qualifications, i’ve advanced craft c&g from 35 years ago but agree so many guisers claiming to be time served

Recruitment agencies dont get me started on them, bring in Eastern European and pay them peanuts gets rates down,

How many times did ‘time served salt of earth’ trades tell me this as they turned down job after job paying double what we paid the Eatern European guys, eventually they would reluctantly do me a favour and take a job and then fail to bother turning up til 1pm on the Monday.

Inevitably it was the agencies fault when two Polish lads would do it for half the money and actually stay on site past 3pm.

I understand the economics of immigrant labour driving down expectations for everyone but that time taught me to look beyond the anecdotes. There was way more than enough work for everyone at decent rates but the British guys didn’t like it when they couldn’t demand any terms and conditions they fancied.

When we were doing our last big build they combined a robot bricklayer demo with some of our research partners, the one I saw in action was almost exactly like this:

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WX58CZwyiU[/video]

Next time you pass a road construction gang, notice how few are under 50 y/o.

Just the same in our industry (Engineering)
We use a steel fabrication company to build machinery base frames, and to provide coded welders, etc.
The last two contract welders we’ve had have both now retired, and the average age at their works is mid-50s.

Its funny how some things change when i was 20 in the building trade 90% of guys probably smoked, loads had drink problems, hangovers until 12, many drove still half pissed and due to the fact i hated bowls and never got too excited about fitba but liked cycling of any kind “are ye a poof” was thought by a few until you have kids. Things now I work around maybe 12 guys , 1 smoker and a couple o vapes, some eat porridge wi blueberries and two 25 years younger than me ride road bikes with me

i think that mirrors a wider change in society though (sorry, slightly off topic!)

i work at a university and at the freshers fairs these days it’s full of strapping lads with massive biceps advertising the Protein Shake and Tight Shirt Society. Can’t imagine such a thing when i was at uni!

This year they also had the Feminism Society opposite the Pole Dancing Club (sorry, ‘Pole Fitness’) which was a very funny touch from someone…

That ketchupbot video had me sat here stifling giggles. Not sure why it tickled me quite so much!

“I haven’t got a router and I’ve never used one” being the catalyst behind my decision.

Do many site chippies use Routers?

It’s more a cabinet maker thing IME…

Have to confess I have two but one of them has never left it’s box, must get round to selling it….

Do many site chippies use Routers?

Google trend hinge jig for starters.

Google trend hinge jig for starters.

Fair point!

Although you can chisel out a hinge / lock rebate pretty quickly if you do them a lot.

I just use a chisel as it’s not worth buying the jig for the odd door now and again.

The builders who did our house extension contracted in a guy to hang all the doors. he turned up with an assortment of routers/jigs and absolutely ripped though it.

I’ve previously done site carpentry (and kitchen fitting) and you’d never compete with a hammer and chisel these days.

You can even buy hinges now with rounded corners so you don’t have to clean up the holes with a chisel after routing them out.