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Housing 2024: L&Q chief says skills shortages are holding back fire safety efforts
A lack of engineers and scaffolders is holding back housing associations’ fire safety remediation efforts, the chief executive of L&Q has said.
Fiona Fletcher-Smith said that to achieve its house building ambitions, the next government would need to work across departments to address the skills shortage.
In a discussion at the Housing 2024 conference in Manchester, Ms Fletcher-Smith said: “Even if I had all the money I need, I simply couldn’t get the right number of fire engineers or – the biggest shortage of labour in London – scaffolders. And if you’re dealing with towers above 18 metres, you need scaffolders.”
She urged incoming ministers to “break down some of the government siloes”.
“To get housing built, you need to involve industry, you need to involve skills,” she said.
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“You actually need the education department to be signed up to this, so that working in construction is seen as a fantastic career.”
Ms Fletcher-Smith also said that she “took heart” from the Labour Party’s “sensible and grown-up approach” to immigration.
“We do need, on occasions, to bring labour into the country, and particularly in London and the South East,” she said.
At the event, Ms Fletcher-Smith spoke to Clive Betts, former chair of the levelling up, housing and communities committee.
The long-standing MP, who is a Labour candidate in next month’s general election, said that modern methods of construction (MMC) could also help to address the industry’s skills shortage.
“There are [MMC] companies around,” he said, but added that "they haven’t really been supported and encouraged by government. There isn’t the overall strategy to actually take us forward on this".
Mr Betts was confident that a Labour government would be able to pass its proposed planning reforms, even if they meant overruling some local objectors to meet national housing targets.
Labour has promised to reinstate compulsory housing targets for councils. “I don’t think that’s about central dictatorship,” Mr Betts said. “It’s up to local authorities to decide in their local plans where those houses should go, in consultation with local communities”.
Both speakers expressed interest in a new planning land use category for affordable housing, while Mr Betts called for land value capture to help the next government build new towns more efficiently.
“Shouldn’t we use the uplift in development value that comes from the planning permission being given to actually allow the funding for more homes to be built?” he asked.
At the same time, land value capture could reduce the cost of building 90,000 social homes from £10bn to £7bn, he added.
Later in the day, Sir Michael Lyons said he thought that the UK’s failure to build enough housing has left a generation “betrayed”, as he addressed attendees a decade after the publication of his review of the sector.
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