Mark Worrall, CEO of construction business improvement experts BBI Services, explores the biggest issues UK housebuilding needs to overcome.

You’re already paying for it – so why aren’t you using it?

The CITB levy exists to help secure the future of UK construction.

Every year, it raises hundreds of millions of pounds from businesses across the sector, then uses that money to tackle the biggest skills issues facing the industry.

And let’s face it – while housebuilding has weathered a tumultuous few years a lot better than many parts of the economy, there’s still no shortage of challenges lying ahead of it.

So here is my list of the key obstacles and pinch points the sector needs to negotiate – and how both CITB funding and BBI Services can help you overcome them.

Using the CITB funding to tackle the skills shortage

The housebuilding sector has been grappling with the skills shortage for years. It’s only recently, though, that the shortage has begun to look more like a skills crisis. However, we do have the necessary skills. We just need to expand the capacity.

We’re all very familiar with the long-term trend – UK construction is ageing. More than a fifth of the workforce (22%) is over 50, and 15% are in their 60s. The pipeline of new recruits is poor.

But then Brexit came along. According to the Office of National Statistics, there were 2.3 million people working in construction in 2017, and 2.1 million by late 2020 – with a 4% drop in British workers, but a staggering 42% decline in workers from the EU.

Therefore, there’s a crucial need to develop our existing workforce to be more productive, and cascade the crucial value-adding elements of work to more people. Breaking complex tasks down into standard elements of work will allow us to skill up new entrants swiftly. Using your CITB funding, you can invest in training from BBI that helps to get the best out of your workforce. Doing more with less requires upskilling the people you do have, and embracing innovative new ways of working inspired by trailblazers in other sectors, like manufacturing.

Attracting new people into the industry is also key.

At BBI, this is something we’re particularly passionate about, having welcomed a number of fantastic apprentices into the business in recent years.

Offsite and MMC are generally seen as being more exciting, attractive career options than traditional bricks and mortar construction. As these approaches are adopted more broadly and we adopt a more production manufacturing approach, it’s likely this will help pull more people into the industry and retain the talent we’ve got.

Using CITB funding to optimise your supply chain

Covid brought about the biggest supply chain disruption in a generation, with increases in materials costs reaching a 40-year high.

There were hopes that the situation would ease throughout 2022, but turnaround times for British shipping containers are now the longest in the world, and suppliers face ongoing difficulties due to the cost of fuel.

That means having visibility of your key supply chains and analysing the flow of people, products and information is more essential than ever. By using your CITB Levy funding to invest in BBI training, you can learn how to optimise your supply chain and ensure that the resources are delivered as efficiently as possible. Some people believe high performing supply chains have no stock – that’s not true. They have the right products in the right places at the right times, which builds resilience.

Using the CITB levy to enhance productivity

Construction has struggled on the productivity front for decades. According to McKinsey, on a global scale, it’s been basically flat since 1994. During the same period, manufacturing’s productivity has nearly doubled.

In Britain, figures from the Office of National Statistics support this view – productivity in construction, measured by output per job, has only increased 14.8% in nearly thirty years, lagging well behind other sectors.

That makes embedding the skillsets and processes to improve productivity and quality on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis critically important. We can do this using your organisation’s CITB levy to fund our modular, practical training programmes.

We also need to be embracing opportunities for greater use of MMC and offsite construction. Embedding a production mindset in the housing sector will challenge current thinking, improve outdated processes, and build on its existing successes with offsite.

Using the CITB funding to improve quality

The housebuilding sector has come under growing pressure to deliver significant improvements in quality in recent years.

The New Homes Ombudsman scheme, due to be implemented sometime later this year, will police a new housebuilding industry code of practice. Homeowners unhappy with the quality of a new build will be able to bring in the ombudsman to review their case.

Combined with the increased scrutiny construction has been under since the Grenfell tragedy, it’s clear that prioritising quality will become more vital than ever in the months and years ahead.

Tackling this requires building robust processes that drive a right-first-time culture, and adopting rigorous error-proofing methodologies that can dramatically reduce mistakes. To improve quality, you need to challenge and improve every aspect of your operation – your processes, your culture, your supply chain, and so on. Our expert training, funded by your CITB Levy funding, can help to deliver these improvements.

By embedding practical problem solving (as opposed to reactive fire-fighting), the industry will drastically improve both quality and safety.

World-class construction business and operational improvement

BBI’s training gives you the tools, training and practical business improvement services to begin to overcome these challenges.

Our training services have been expertly designed to harness the talent of the people that work for you, ensure you’re constantly identifying opportunities to drive productivity and efficiency, and build continuous improvement into the culture of your organisation, plus utilise your CITB levy pots to support the outlay.

Typical results include drastic leaps in productivity, months cut off of project times, and millions of pounds in cost avoidance.

For more information on how your CITB funding can help you, don’t hesitate to contact us.