Labour’s drive to build more homes is laudable but will be undermined by skills shortages - Yorkshire Post Letters

Whilst the intention of the Labour government to greatly increase the house building programme with a target of 25,000 a year in Yorkshire is laudable (The YP, December 13), it does beg a fundamental question as to where all the skilled trades of plumbers, bricklayers, carpenters and electricians etc are going to be found in the short term to achieve this.

These skills are already in short supply and any increase in housebuilding will stretch these limited resources even further and result in increasing wages for them from the basic economic law of supply and demand.

This will increase the cost of any new houses and will result in more high value housing being built than low cost social housing.

The need to train more apprentices for these skills is therefore essential but this will take several years to achieve.

A greater encouragement by the government to get the building industry to take on more apprentices is needed as well as increasing the number of building colleges in the country.

The problem then becomes as to where all the trainers for these new apprentices are going to be found.

With an increase in the remuneration for these trades caused by this push for new housing, the ability to attract these skilled men and women into training in colleges will be even more difficult due to an increasing gap in the earning potential as a trainer compared to the earnings achievable in the industry.

With all the Polish and Eastern European skilled men having in many cases gone back to their own country with Brexit and the total lack of a clear policy over the past decades of building a steady number of houses each year so encouraging a steady output of the skills necessary to achieve it, one wonders if this huge increase in the target is achievable given the added complexities of planning laws and environmental issues.