Joined-up thinking can help Labour deliver one million new homes: Bird Lovegod

Disconnected thinking avoids the possibility of success by focusing only on the hoped for solution, rather than the mechanism for achieving it.

Here’s how Labour can actually do something great for the country, planning for the next ten years.

Let’s consider the building of a million homes. This is a long term proposition, and requires completely joined up thinking in order to achieve it.

There’s the land issue, which they can address, and there’s the skills issue, which will probably be the bottleneck in the pipeline.

There are not enough skilled people to do the work. The short term solution is to import them from overseas. This will create an immigration debt.

The long term solution is to train them, and this will have the added impact of reducing unemployment, cutting youth dissatisfaction, improving mental wellbeing, reducing crime, and all the other positives. If it’s done properly. So, here’s the joined up thinking solution to the lack of skilled tradesmen over the next eight years.

Firstly, and immediately, create homebuilding courses at 16+ education, and train those young people in the basics of the various trades, from brick laying to drainage to plastering to roofing and scaffolding and ground work and electrical installation.

A two-year course, one year introduction, second year specialist. In two years this will begin to output 18 year olds who are useful on a site, employable with additional learning on the job. Create a system that creates the pipeline of skilled young people.

Secondly, train prisoners in the same way. Create courses of practical manual trades that enable prisoners to be released into a meaningful and physically challenging job that pays well rather than unemployment and drug soaked hostels.

This will vastly reduce the prison population as they will be far less likely to reoffend, and what better way to pay their debt to society than to literally help build it.

Have them attend training outside the prisons if required. Most of them are not a flight risk, they have nothing and nowhere to fly to. Give them hope and a future, and they will work for it. They will be able to see a new life opening up before them.

Run simultaneously with the youth training scheme, in two years the country will be constantly creating a skilled workforce to build the homes required. It will take that long for the land situation to be resolved anyway, and for the projects to get up to speed.

Have the homebuilding project feedback into the training projects, determining how many people of each skill are required. Bricklayers are needed before painters and decorators. Join the whole thing up into a supply line as if it were one enterprise.

In four years there will be tens of thousands of new homes being created. In eight years, hundreds of thousands, and unemployment will be vastly reduced, as will benefits claimants, and prison recidivism, and youth crime, and gang crime, and knife crime, and homelessness, and the country will be in high employment and successful.

It’s rare that a new Government has such a mandate for change, such a timescale to achieve it in. All they need to do is focus on the long game, on real change, and on creating systems that feed into the projects. Joining the whole thing up. As society should be, and needs to be, in order to flourish.