TEENaGE KICKS
As the dad of a teenage daughter, one of my growing concerns is youth unemployment. As an industry professional, I’m concerned about Britain’s record infrastructure pipeline and our significant and sustained industry skills gap. By the end of the decade, the UK will have spent a record amount on bolstering its crumbling water infrastructure, carried out a oncein-a-generation upgrade to the electricity grid and made major progress on record-breaking transport schemes, such as High Speed 2 and the Lower Thames Crossing.
While the ambition is to be applauded, carrying out all these major projects at the same time does raise one obvious question; who is going to do all the work? On top of the aforementioned schemes, a recordbreaking number of renewable energy projects have just secured government contracts, as the country marches towards clean power by 2030 and work continues to bolster the country’s nuclear generation fleet at Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C.
Delivery of these projects is dependent on a workforce made up of civil engineers, surveyors, electricians, builders, welders and many more. The number of workers needed to deliver projects in any of these sectors will be higher than ever before. Put together, I genuinely worry that, unless we finally solve the skills challenge, something will have to give.
The UK Government’s recently refreshed infrastructure pipeline illustrates the scale of the challenge. Produced by the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA), the second iteration of the 10-year delivery pipeline is valued at an eye-watering £718bn and is comprised of 734 planned projects across energy, transport, health and water. To deliver the projects in the infrastructure pipeline, NISTA estimates that the UK will require an annual average workforce of between 621,000 and 697,000 over the next two years and between 629,000 and 706,000 over the next five years.
More generally, the CITB estimates that the UK’s construction sector will need to recruit an additional 239,300 workers (or 47,860 per year) between now and the end of the decade. That would take the entire UK construction workforce – including housing, repair and maintenance, as well as infrastructure – to just shy of three million.
A more detailed breakdown recently produced by the CITB concludes that an additional 1,380 surveyors will need to be recruited every year until 2028 to meet demand, with 1,600 more civil engineers required each year during the same period. It is a sizeable challenge and one that the industry has been warning policymakers for longer than I care to remember.
Mark Farmer’s 2016 report, ‘Modernise or Die’, set alarm bells ringing across the whole construction sector. While his follow-up report this year recognises that some progress has been made, not enough has been done in the intervening years to plug the impending skills gap.
A major problem, which dogged the sector a decade ago and continues to do so today, is its ageing workforce, with only 19% of workers under 25. There is, however, an increasing programme of policies in place to close the gap. Work is underway across government, the construction sector and the wider built environment to secure a strong and sustainable pipeline of skilled workers who can deliver the pipeline of projects. This includes the £625m construction skills package announced at the spring budget last year, alongside the work of the Construction Skills Mission Board.
The government has also promised to publish a construction jobs plan and review of the temporary shortage list in the coming months. While I welcome these initiatives, delivery is almost always more difficult than policymaking. The key is to ensure there is cross-department and cross-sector visibility of the challenge. The last thing that we want as a country is to pit clients against one another in a scramble for resources. If that happens, I fear crucial upgrades to essential services, such as wastewater treatment works or new hospitals, could be delayed at the expense of more lucrative contracts being offered by private energy developers or even data centres.
While the nation has a gigantic construction skills gap, it is simultaneously suffering from a growing youth unemployment challenge. For the first time, the UK has a higher percentage of unemployment among 16 to 24-year-olds than the EU average.
According to data published by the office for National Statistics, one in seven of the UK’s 16 to 24-year-olds – almost a million people – are currently not employed or in education or training, with 60% never having had a job. This figure represents three years of growth in youth unemployment, bucking the trend seen by most European neighbours, who are starting to get a grip on the continent’s youth unemployment problem.
One possible solution is to look overseas to see how other countries are tackling their own infrastructure buildouts. Spain – which traditionally had a high unemployment rate – is mobilising its workforce. In 2025, the country reported that unemployment had fallen from a high of 26% to below 10%, largely boosted by efforts to get younger people into work and changes to immigration rules which allowed the country to plug gaps in its labour market.
Spain has also taken advantage of several EU-backed programmes, such as Youth Guarantee Plus and the 2019-2021 Youth Employment Action Plan. These initiatives emphasise vocational training, personalised career guidance and digital skill development to bridge the gap between education and labour market needs.
I believe there must be more that we can learn from European nations on how they are tackling youth unemployment and there must also be more that we can do as a sector to attract the workforce of tomorrow to join the sector today. As a concerned industry professional and a fearful father, I am going to think more about what I can do to help solve the industry skills shortage in the months and years ahead.