Neil Evans, Managing Director, VEKA plc.

It’ s not just manufacturers like VEKA, who are reliant on hiring locally, but businesses across our sector, including fabricators, specifiers and installers.

The Government launched its Planning and Infrastructure Bill to Parliament on 11 March. This will see significant measures introduced to speed up planning decisions to boost housebuilding and remove blockers, and challenges to the delivery of other developments such as roads, railway lines and windfarms. The hope is to boost economic growth, connectivity and energy security whilst also delivering for the environment.

And in a February interview with the BBC, Deputy Prime

Minister Angela Rayner declared there were‘ no excuses’ for failing to deliver on Labour’ s pledge to build 1.5 million new homes. Yet analysis from the same outlet reveals that homebuilding figures have already faltered in the government’ s first six months.

With a shortage of skilled labour and doubts over the construction sector’ s capacity to scale up quickly enough to build the‘ new towns’ that the Government has set its sights on, the challenge extends beyond housing. Questions persist over whether the UK’ s building industry can expand sufficiently to meet not only its housing targets but also the demands of large-scale infrastructure projects that have been labelled as crucial to the country’ s economic growth – which the Chancellor has said is‘ the number one mission’ of the Labour government.

Economic growth in the UK hinges on filling the skills gaps that exist in many industries. Addressing sub-industries like plumbing, electrics, ground working and, of course, fenestration is equally as important as core construction jobs to prevent potential supply chain delays during the building process. And I can’ t see a real plan to address this.

Outside of economic growth, we also have the significant retrofit challenge. It’ s no secret that the UK has some of the oldest housing stock in the world and according to the Connected Places Catapult, over one million UK properties must undergo retrofit each year to meet targets and achieve Net- Zero emissions by 2050. While windows alone cannot solve the NetZero issue, they can contribute significantly to the energy efficiency of properties. This target presents an opportunity for

we need to showcase the diversity, rewards and technological advancements in construction and fenestration

VEKA customers to make a real difference to both the country’ s climate target and homeowner energy bills, addressing the gap between the supply of technically skilled workers the demand for them is again crucial here.

While the Autumn Budget had a focus on employment and skills development, at the same time, it delivered businesses the challenge of the increase in both minimum wage and national insurance contributions. Meaning

that employers are understandably looking at their recruitment and employee costs, and, for many, opening new vacancies right now is not realistic.

Addressing these challenges requires collaboration on multiple levels.

Change perceptions of industry work

Many young people and their families still view construction jobs as limited to manual labour