Skill shortages are going to make it a bumpy year

Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud was not in a good mood. “I know small and middle-sized builders who don’t know if scaffolders or a team of labourers will turn up the next day until a phone call at one o’ clock in the morning, because they might have been lured away by higher rates in London.” He was speaking not as a self-build guru but as a small/medium-sized builder/developer himself, creator of HAB Housing with custom-build developments in Bristol, Swindon, Oxford and Winchester.

McCloud had, in fact, slipped out of a recent Grand Designs Live Show in Birmingham to vent his spleen in a debate at a building trade show next door. But the point he made – about a growing shortage of skilled tradespeople – applies equally well to selfbuilders.

The issue is likely to be a major one this year. Sourcing tradespeople has always been something of a pain for selfbuilders. Coming, as most of us do, from outside the industry, we are obliged to rely on the recommendations of others – usually architects, family or friends – or our own observations of work we admire. Daunting as it sounds, most of us usually do find someone we feel we can trust and whose work can be relied on.

The only problem then is that we probably won’t be the first to spot this professional’s virtues and are likely to be joining a long queue for their services. A recent survey from the Federation of Master Builders found that the average waiting period for a good builder was a minimum of at least four months.

There are two good reasons for this. The main one is that the housebuilding industry has neglected training for many years, but particularly so since the 2008 recession.

Then, it’s estimated, over 300,000 workers left the industry, many of them working for, or being, the sort of small and medium-sized builders selfbuilders employ. Meanwhile the workers who have remained are retiring at a faster rate than those being hired. Reason number two for the skills shortage is the industry’s response to the problem, which has been to hire from abroad. According to Mark Farmer of housebuilding consultants Cast:

“We have a very migrant-dependent workforce, especially in London where 45 per cent is non-UK, but it’s also an issue nationally.” Officially it’s just under 12 per cent across the country, though actual figures are likely to be higher. Brexit, of course, puts this policy in jeopardy and, potentially, poses an even bigger threat than recession.

But 2018 shouldn’t all be bad news. Mark Farmer, who in 2016 wrote a damning report on the construction industry called Modernise or Die, believes building is fast approaching the sort of crunch time many other industries have faced when traditional methods simply don’t work anymore.

“We do not have enough people to build the homes we need in the UK,” Farmer warned at the recent UK Construction Week in Birmingham. “Every time we increase output with the traditional workforce, quality suffers.”

Remedies

Among his remedies are much less emphasis on site work and more use of prefabrication to improve quality control and raise efficiency. He also wants a much more integrated industry with clients, designers, main contractors, subcontractors and suppliers communicating with each other from the start of a project – instead of making piecemeal arrangements along the way, as they do now.

To Farmer, however, the key figure is the client, insisting on the standards common and expected in manufacturing in general.

So how is all this likely to affect self build? Well, to start with, it’s hard to imagine clients more demanding, more cost conscious or more innovative than the average selfbuilder.

But, unless you opt for a turnkey service through an architect or project manager, you’ll be very lucky to sidestep all the troubles that typically affect traditional housebuilding.

What you can do, however, is look seriously at the off-site, or partly off-site, alternatives. The best known is timber frame, whose exponents have specifically targeted selfbuilders for many years.

The frames that provide the main structural support are factory built, allowing much greater dimensional accuracy than conventional site-built blockwork. Once delivered to site, frames can be erected in a matter of days and the house swiftly made watertight, allowing the interior trades to start work much earlier than usual.

Even more efficient is where wall-sized panels are factory built, complete with insulation, vapour barrier, services, doors and windows, leaving even less to chance on site.

Meanwhile cross-laminated timber (CLT) is a newer, but rapidly growing system where solid timber walls are made from a kind of super-ply, which can be factory cut under computer control.

For more information, and inspiration, look at the newly published The Modern Timber House in the UK by Peter Wilson (Arcamedia, £35) which features nearly 100 case studies of timber-built homes, many of them self builds.

But if you hanker after the solidity of masonry, don’t despair. There are a number of alternatives available, from insulated concrete formwork (ICF) to honeycomb clay blockwork to Durosil, a form of blockwork which combines the best characteristics of both masonry and timber. All of these are designed to de-skill the building process and improve its efficiency.

What none of these alternatives will do, however, is beat traditional brick and block on materials price. But compensatory savings can be made on build time and labour costs, and the latter are likely to climb rapidly as the skills shortage bites.

A bumpy year ahead, then? Well, it will certainly be interesting but factors like the small but steady rise of custom build and local authorities’ gradual, if sometimes grudging, compilations of local self build registers are all hopeful pointers in the right direction.

Meanwhile, book that builder the minute you’ve got your planning permission.

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