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A £2.7 million initiative by the Construction Industry Training Board and Home Builders Federation could see over 45,000 new builders trained by 2019 to help tackle the nation’s housing shortage.
The Home Building Skills Partnership will bring together firms of all sizes to ensure that the industry has the skills it needs to build more homes. This will include initiatives to promote collaboration on skills across the supply chain, so that the industry can better plan for its future needs.
The partnership will support over 3,500 construction businesses and, by 2019, train 45,000 new entrants and 1,000 experienced workers with the new homebuilding training qualifications.
It will be overseen by a Board that will be chaired by Redrow CEO John Tutte and include a range of senior industry representatives and CITB.
The housebuilding industry has delivered unprecedented increases in house building over the past two years. The latest figures show that 181,000 new homes were provided last year – up 25% year on year – with the largest companies increasing their output by 50% since their troughs. With the industry looking to meet Government ambitions to increase output still further, whilst maintaining high levels of build quality and customer service, it is imperative industry capacity is increased.
This new partnership will use industry insight to understand skills needs and develop new training and qualifications ideally suited to the modern homebuilding sector. It will create long-term skills solutions to meet the government’s target of one million new homes by 2020.
The initiative was launched at HBF’s Policy Conference, addressed by Housing Minister Brandon Lewis who said: “The number of new homes is up 25% in the last year because the country is building again and delivering the homes the nation wants. That’s why the Home Building Skills Partnership is an important initiative and will help deliver the training of skilled workers we need to get the job done and to improve quality across the industry.
“Construction offers an exciting and rewarding career and we need to build a new generation of home grown talented, ambitious and highly skilled construction workers.”
Initiatives throughout the four year programme will include:
