Nobody knows how many people this industry needs

The question comes first again this week. It belongs to the economics students I briefed at Lancaster on Friday as much as to me, and some of you will know the answer before they do.

This week's question: how many people does UK construction actually need to recruit over the next five years? The CITB says 206,000 extra workers by 2030. The Trade Skills Index says 937,000 recruits by 2032. The same industry quotes both, often in the same speech.

About 200,000, the CITB numberAround half a millionClose to a millionNobody knows, and that is the problem

Vote with one tap, and read my take on Friday: community.lechley.com/question. The five questions the students are working on are further down.

From my desk

Last week I asked who you call when you hit a problem you cannot take to your board. Seventy of you tapped the first option, the former boss or mentor who takes the call for nothing. The next most popular answer got twenty-three. The paid adviser who already knows the business came last, which is the gap the two conversations behind the question described. I will come back to it on the question page once I have read the replies.

On Wednesday I spent two hours with the first of those two on the idea I mentioned last week. It is further on than it was. That is all I will say for now.

On Tuesday, the day before the Budget, I spoke to the group managing director of a northern housebuilder I have known for years. They were sitting tight until the Chancellor had spoken, and the picture was blunt. On a good site they make 20 per cent gross. It used to be 30 plus, and a generation ago it was 50. The HBF's number is that £65,000 to £70,000 has gone onto the cost of building a house since 2020, with next to no movement in what it sells for. A site needs 0.65 to 0.7 sales a week to carry its prelims and its sales office; some are doing twenty a year, and that is what bleeds a builder dry. Offsite manufacture is "far too expensive" when there is no headroom for another pound of build cost, and a housebuilder works to a sales programme, not a build programme. Trades are not the problem, because the industry is building at half what it should; they become the problem the day anyone tries for 300,000 homes. On the new equity loan: one or two extra sales a week at best, nothing like the old Help to Buy, with mortgage rates still starting with a six. That is the ground the CPA forecast stands on.

The same afternoon, a leader who works across offsite manufacture and devolution landed on the point the Budget made the next day: the mayors are starting to talk to each other, and there is appetite for one person to advise several combined authorities at once on modern methods and social housing. That role does not exist yet. I think it will.

On the desk, first interviews ran on a Construction Manager appointment for a major Manchester heritage scheme, the shortlist for an Operations Director at the UK arm of an Irish contractor went to the client, and on Friday morning I briefed the economics student groups at Lancaster University who have taken on five questions about the industry's training gap. The questions are further down, because some of you will know the answers before they do.

The market observation is the two numbers that opened this issue. Tuesday's CPA forecast and Wednesday's Budget point the same way: housing down, infrastructure up, and a market that is no longer one market. I wrote up what the Budget did not answer, which is who delivers any of it, on the community on Friday; the link is in the Budget item below.

The week in construction

• The Construction Products Association now expects UK construction output to fall 4% in 2026, worse than the 3.3% it forecast in the summer, with 2027 growth cut to 0.4%. Private housing takes the hit, down 10% this year and another 3% next; infrastructure keeps growing, 2.5% this year and 2.9% in 2027. That gap is the story, not the headline. The same quantity surveyor now gets two different conversations depending on whose logo is on the card, and the water, rail, energy and nuclear programmes are the ones still hiring at pace. If your CV reads housebuilding, this forecast is asking what your move is, and I would like to hear your answer: hit reply. Source: Lechley Community, from Construction Enquirer, 27 Oct
• Wednesday's Budget put another £1.5bn into the Social and Affordable Homes Programme and confirmed Your First Home, a £4.7bn equity loan scheme for around 70,000 first-time buyers, a 2.5% deposit with a 20% government loan, from April 2027. No changes to building regulations this Parliament beyond safety, biodiversity net gain dropped for brownfield sites under 1.5 hectares, £1.5bn of borrowing for mayors, £100m for a local apprenticeship service and six more months of the red diesel cut. It lands against NHBC registrations down 13% in the third quarter. The housebuilder I spoke to on Tuesday expects the loan to add one or two sales a week per site at best, nothing like the old Help to Buy. The CPA's Noble Francis called the April 2027 start "extremely disappointing", and he is right that nothing here moves a site start before next spring. The durable part is the shift of affordable housing money and decisions to councils and mayors who can borrow against their own balance sheets. The hiring that follows is at the delivery end: surveyors and employer's agents who know registered provider contract forms, and project managers who have run phased council-owned sites. The bigger gap is the client's chair: combined authorities have spent years administering grants, and very few have built the teams that run a £500m scheme and hold a tier-one to account when the first claim lands. My full read is at Budget 2026: who is going to deliver it? Sources: Building, 28 Oct, and Lechley Community, 29 Oct
• Mace Construct reported a £62m pre-tax loss for 2025 on revenue up 10% to £2.3bn, after close to £60m of exceptional items, £23m of them the cost of separating from Mace Consult in March. Strip those out and the business swung from a £28m operating loss to a £6.5m operating profit, with £205m of cash and no debt. Turnover falls to around £1.75bn this year and headcount has gone from about 2,000 to 1,600 since January, with £1.8bn to £2bn pencilled in for 2027. Jason Millett leaves as chief executive at the end of December and executive chairman Mark Reynolds takes the job himself from January, alongside a reshuffle below him and a new name next week. Monday's count on the community had Mace Construct with 100 senior vacancies open, more than twice anyone else, while headcount fell by a fifth. Both are true at once: the business is changing who it employs, not only how many. Reynolds running it himself rather than hiring from outside tends to mean the project directors already inside get the step up. Sources: Building, 27 Oct, and Lechley Community, 29 Oct
• Thames Water has named nine teams for its £4.8bn Major Projects Framework covering AMP8 and AMP9: BAM Nuttall, Barhale, Costain, Binnies with Cadagua and Ferrovial, Murphy, Amentum with Taylor Woodrow, Galliford Try, Kier and Mott MacDonald Bentley. It starts on 4 November and runs to March 2030, with options to 2035. Whatever the state of the company's balance sheet, the capital programme is not stalling, and it lands alongside Anglian, United Utilities and Yorkshire doing the same. A framework with a start date and a 2035 option is the easiest pipeline in the industry to show a candidate. If your record is clean water or wastewater civils, or NEC planning on multi-year frameworks, you are in the strongest negotiating position of your career and the nine firms know it. Source: Lechley Community, from Construction News and Construction Enquirer, 27 Oct
• The Public Accounts Committee called the Sizewell C financing "a terrible deal for the UK taxpayer", putting the total cost at £40.5bn to £47.7bn, completion between 2039 and 2043, and consumers exposed to around £22bn in higher bills if costs reach the top of the range, against about £30m more for private investors. MPs want six-monthly reporting on cost and schedule from now on. The station gets built; what changes is the scrutiny it lives under for fifteen years. That shifts the value on the programme towards the people who can produce a cost-to-complete forecast that survives a committee, not the people who can pour concrete: commercial managers, project controls and planners with nuclear or major-programme NEC cost reporting behind them. That skill set is already scarcer on the big nuclear jobs than site trades. Source: Lechley Community, from Construction Enquirer and Infrastructure Intelligence, 29 Oct

People on the move

• Mark Reynolds, chief executive of Mace Construct from January 2027, adding the job to executive chairman as Jason Millett steps down after close to two decades. Gavin Seager moves from fit-out to lead infrastructure as Nigel Cole retires, Danny Martin takes specialist services, and Tony Arthurton covers finance after David Allen's exit. More
• Helen Miles, chief financial officer of Vistry, joining during 2027 from Severn Trent, where she has been CFO since 2023 (and Openreach before that). Robert Allen is interim CFO until she arrives. More
• Helen Gawor, chief executive of the Finishes and Interiors Sector from January 2027, succeeding Iain McIlwee after eight years. Formerly strategy and innovation director at ISG, then at Severfield. More

Other areas of interest

Five questions about the training gap, and a room full of economists to answer them. On Friday I briefed the BSc Economics project groups at Lancaster University, alongside the chief executive of ProAge, on a company project that runs through to the spring. The hypothesis is one most of you have lived: every downturn, the industry cuts its training intake first, the cohort that was never trained does not come back, and it reappears ten years later as a shortage of experienced people. Each group has one question to answer with a chart and a yes or no. Does training intake fall faster than employment in a downturn, in 2008 to 2011 and again in 2020? Is there a visible dip today in the number of workers aged roughly 33 to 40, the people who would have entered in 2008 to 2012? Where does the industry's "900,000" figure come from, and which number is right, when the CITB says 206,000 by 2030 and the Trade Skills Index says 937,000 by 2032? Which occupations carry the biggest gap relative to their size: the big headline trades, or the scaffolders, roofers, site managers and estimators that hold everything else up? And if the pattern holds, when does the next gap open, given the intake dips of 2020 and 2022?

That is where the question at the top comes from. If you have the data behind your answer, reply and I will pass it to the groups.

308 senior roles are open across the contractors and clients on my watchlist, director level and above, and twenty of them have been open for 98 days or more. Mace Construct holds 100, Balfour Beatty 41, then HS2, Wates, Kier, NG Bailey and Taylor Wimpey. The stuck ones are the useful ones: Balfour Beatty has posted the same Project Commercial Director brief four separate times, and Mace has three versions of an Operations Director brief at the same stage. A role that will not close after three months is rarely a sourcing problem. It is the brief, the money or the process, and a firm in that position is far more open to a direct approach than the advert suggests. The full count, with this week's new briefs in Birmingham, Belfast, Manchester and Liverpool, is on the community.

One more on where the next job comes from. An application this week for one of my data centre roles in Portugal reached me because the applicant asked ChatGPT where to look, and it sent them to lechley.com. If your company's roles sit on a job board behind a login, the assistants cannot see them, and neither can the growing number of people who ask them first.

New on the community

Published this week, from the news desk and the Monday count:

• Budget 2026: who is going to deliver it? (Insights)
• McAlpine wins £133m Bank of England refurbishment (News)
• New Bradford station confirmed, 23,000 jobs at stake (News)
• A66 dualling starts in November, now a nine-year job (News)
• Hinkley Point B's 250 jobs move to decommissioning arm (News)

A pool for the people the big schemes could not take. The big schemes turn away far more good apprentice and graduate applicants than they take; one water company told me this month it is fifteen to one. The Lechley Community now has a pool for them: the applicant writes their own record, approved employers see it without a name, and a yes from the applicant is the only thing that shares it. Free, removable any time. I offered it first to Anglian Water, as somewhere to send the applicants it could not place. On Friday they said no: enough internal initiatives already this year, happy to revisit later. Fair enough, and the door stays open. So the pool opens to every other employer first, and the Lancaster economists above are studying exactly these people, the near misses who leave the industry before they have joined it. Employers who want in, or who want the regret-email paragraph to send people there: community.lechley.com/pool/employers.

All of it free at community.lechley.com.

One useful thing

Read the operating line, not the headline. Four sets of accounts crossed my desk this month: Arup, Farrans, Mace Construct and, on Thursday, Jones Bros, whose revenue rose 55% to £232.8m on water and renewables work with headcount up from 479 to 527. Before an interview or an approach, pull the accounts from Companies House, which is free, and read three things: which way revenue is going, operating profit before exceptional items, and the note that explains the exceptionals. Mace's £62m loss is a £6.5m operating profit once £60m of separation costs come out. Farrans' £36m loss was legacy contracts cleared in one go after a change of owner. The headline tells you what happened. The operating line tells you whether to join.

What I'm working on

An established Irish contractor has retained me to appoint an Operations Director for its UK business, based in the Thames Valley. The shortlist went to the client this week and face to face interviews follow, and the London Project Director search from last week stays live. Alongside it, Europe's dedicated data centre delivery partner, with more than 500 MW in flight, has a run of senior roles open across Dublin, Milan and Portugal, from Project Leads to EHS and digital transformation. The briefs are at lechley.com/jobs.