Trust me they really should!

This week has been National Apprenticeship Week (NAW) but due to the distinct lack of interest from government and the media most people wouldn’t have a clue it was happening. At my family’s new venture The WeFix Team our MD, Ashley Mullins, who himself served a plumbing apprenticeship, is building our own apprenticeship programme, but it seems we are going against the tide as businesses cut back on costs to stay afloat.

Crazy Attitude

The crazy thing is that it’s generally accepted that the country is in need of a major refurbishment, not to mention the much talked about housing shortage, prompting Sir Keir to promise 300,000 new houses every year. And yet nobody seems to want to deal with the reality of the situation which is there is no way in hell we can build that many new homes as we simply don’t have enough builders for the job.

Skills time bomb

Back in 2010 I began warning politicians about a ‘Skills Time bomb’ that would go off with a devastating impact on the country, and that was even before anyone took into account the drop-off in skilled workers from abroad living in the UK after Brexit. Well that bomb has stopped ticking and it’s going off all around us. We have a housing shortage and no way to sort it out, and yet we still don’t act.

18-Months to get a builder

In some parts of the country getting a builder and other necessary trades to do a small extension to your home can be an 18-month wait. The Government seems to think the crisis can be solved by a few well worded press releases promising the world without any clue how to make the words on the page come true.

Dumbing down

And to add insult to injury the Government took the opportunity to dumb-down apprenticeships at the very moment they should be reinforcing them as a powerful agent of change. Maybe they think they’re being clever by reducing the minimum length of an apprenticeship to just 6 months, but if your aim is to build up a skills base then shoddy short courses masquerading as the real thing helps nobody.

Apprenticeships Tsar

We really need to get an Apprenticeships Tsar on this, someone who actually understands the importance of having a pool of skills within the UK. Over the past few years, with natural retirements, plus the acceleration of older tradesmen leaving the industry early due to the pressures of Covid, the level of home-grown skills in the building trades has fallen off dramatically. And with around 300k new apprenticeships starting in England last year we’re just not replacing skilled workers at anything like the necessary rate. Even 15 years ago when I was first talking about the skills time bomb we were starting half a million apprenticeships each year. I fear it might be too late to avoid a collapse of the system, but we should still take action to at least mitigate the impact on the UK economy.