Blogs · August 2026

Can construction recruit its way out of the labour shortage?

Skills England puts construction's demand at around 1 million people. The flagship training programme delivers up to 60,000. What that arithmetic means for a firm that needs capacity now.

The short answer: no, and the government's own numbers say so. Skills England expects around 595,000 workers to leave construction's priority occupations and need replacing, which takes the sector's total demand for people to around 1 million. Against that, the flagship response is £625 million to train up to 60,000 more skilled workers by 2029, and the National Audit Office says even that carries significant risks. Training closes a fraction of the gap. For an individual firm the arithmetic lands harder: the people you already have are the workforce you have right now, and the firms that get ahead are the ones that stop spending those people's hours on office work a system can carry.

The numbers, plainly

Three figures, all from the government's own pages, tell the whole story:

• Around 595,000 workers are expected to leave construction's priority occupations and need replacing. That is before the industry grows at all.
• Total demand comes to around 1 million people once growth is added, against the government's housebuilding, retrofit and infrastructure commitments.
• The response is up to 60,000 trained workers by 2029, funded with £625 million, announced in March 2025. The National Audit Office's review of the programme says the government "needs to manage significant risks" to hit even that.

Set 60,000 against a demand of a million and the conclusion is not pessimism, it is arithmetic. National training programmes matter, and they will not staff your firm this side of 2030.

What this means for a firm, not a policy paper

A shortage this size does not show up in your business as a headline. It shows up as:

• an estimator's role advertised for four months, filled by nobody
• overtime as a plan rather than an exception
• the office running behind the work: quotes late, enquiries unanswered, documents chased instead of read
• experienced people spending their afternoons on the phone and the inbox instead of on the thing you actually pay them for

Recruiting harder into a national shortfall is bidding against every other firm for the same missing people. Wages rise, the gap stays. The lever a firm actually controls is how many hours of its existing people get eaten by work that is not the work.

The hours you can get back without hiring anyone

Every firm has a layer of work that must be done and does not need a person: answering the enquiry that arrived at 7pm, giving the caller the answer that is already in the document, taking the details of the job, finding the current version of the drawing, chasing the quote everyone agreed to chase.

That layer is what Ryku carries. It answers your firm's phone, email, chat and social, all of it working from your own current documents and details, so the answer given at the gate, in the inbox and on the phone is the same answer, and it is the current one. The people you could not hire were going to do exactly this work. Now the people you do have are freed from it.

What to do this quarter

1. Count the office hours honestly. One week, every person: how many hours went to answering, chasing and finding, rather than building, pricing or managing?
2. Put a name against each of those hours. If it is your best estimator, that is your real staffing gap, and no job advert fixes it.
3. Move the answerable work onto rails: one current record of your details, documents and answers, and something that answers from it on every channel.
4. Keep recruiting for the roles only a person can do. That is where the scarce hires should land.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Sector Skills Needs Assessment: Construction. Skills England, 2026. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/skills-england-annual-skills-report-and-sectoral-skills-needs-assessments-2026/sector-skills-needs-assessment-construction
• Increasing construction skills. National Audit Office. https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/increasing-construction-skills/