26
Examination of witnesses
Ian Woodcroft and Robbie Calvert.
Q108 The Chair: Good morning and welcome to another meeting of the House of Lords Built Environment Select Committee, where we are looking into the Government’s policy on expanding settlements and building new towns in their entirety. We have been looking at various areas around the practicalities of this policy. Today we are going to crack the nut—the decades-long nut—of how we finally get the skills and the investment that we need from the Government for getting the expertise to build the homes that we need. There is obviously relevance, not just on the new towns but in the legislation that has come before the House of Lords and on the whole building homes agenda.
We have two distinguished guests with us today. Please introduce yourselves and explain where you are from.
Ian Woodcroft: Certainly. My name is Ian Woodcroft. I am head of policy and government relations at CITB. CITB is a charity and a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Education. We collect a levy from the construction industry and return it back in the form of apprenticeships and training, and support the industry to have a skilled, competent and inclusive workforce. We are excited to be here talking about new towns, because we see them as a real catalyst to support an increase in training across the industry.
Robbie Calvert: Good morning. I am Robbie Calvert. I am the head of policy and public affairs for the Royal Town Planning Institute. We have over 27,000 members worldwide. We represent town planners in the public and the private sector and obviously will be a key part of delivering the new towns agenda, so I am delighted to be here today to discuss skills and capacity in the sector.
The Chair: That is great. Thank you both very much. We have a series of questions to run through. Generally, we would like to work with you in trying to tackle this issue. If there are areas that you feel you do not have the answers right before you or you want to write to us with further evidence, please feel free to do so. We will start with about four areas of questioning. First is Baroness Warwick and Lord Mawson.
Q109 Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: Good morning and welcome. I am delighted that you are here. The whole issue of skills has bedevilled all the evidence that we have received so far, in the sense that I think just about every one of our witnesses has talked about it as a barrier. Yet the Government’s ambitions in this area are huge, not only the housing target but infrastructure, and of course the new towns that we are dealing with but also planning. We know that there are skills shortages not just in construction but in planning as well.
What we would like to try to get at today is your view about the way in which the capacity of the skills gaps will affect the Government’s ambitions and, very specifically, whether there will be something particular to the development of new towns that you feel will be affected by the skills gap. I was struck by some data that I read from the HBF, which may well be from the CITB, I am not sure. It was talking about apprenticeships making up just 17% of what is required across the eight key trades in the construction sector. That is a huge gap, so could you address that but also very specifically its impact on new towns? Perhaps we could start with Ian.
Ian Woodcroft: Construction output will grow considerably in the next five years, based on our forecast. Currently, construction output is about £187 billion. Over the next five years we anticipate that will grow by about 2.2% annually on average. That means that we will need to bring 90,000 more people into the construction workforce to meet that new demand.
Then when you add that new demand to natural churn in the construction workforce, the figure increases to some 207,000 people who will need to be brought into the industry. That will be critical to new towns development and to broader home-building infrastructure and retrofit agendas. We see the most significant demand by region being in London, the south-east and the north-west of England, less so perhaps in the north-east and the West Midlands.
By occupation, we see that demand specifically for occupations such as civil engineering, plants, steelworks and then also scaffolding, but it is worth noting that there will be—to your point—significant demand across the majority of construction occupations and that demand will vary significantly by region as well. On your point, there is a really big skills gap that we need to address.
Our focus in addressing that is we are looking at three particular areas. The first area is making sure that there is a clear demand pipeline for two reasons: first, to encourage the small employers that make up the majority of our industry to have the confidence to invest in skills and training; secondly, to ensure that we can put local training and skills interventions in place as quickly as possible to support demand as it increases, because skills and training is a demand-led business.
The other point is that we have a skills system—to your point about apprenticeships—that needs to become more job outcomes focused from our perspective. What we mean by that is, if you take further education as an example, around two-thirds of people on construction-related courses in further education do not progress directly from that course into a job in the industry. Construction apprenticeship starts are around 50% to 60%. If you take the job outcomes and career progression focus and apply it to the skills system, you see that there is a lot of wastage and we could go a long way in addressing the skills gap we face if that system works more efficiently, and there is a lot of work going on in that area.
Finally, for us it is about retention in the industry. We want to make sure that there is a greater return on investment in training by people sticking in the industry once they join. We need industry to have a much stronger retention strategy. Areas that you will commonly be aware of are challenges with direct employment in the industry, mental health of the workforce, an ageing workforce and low levels of diversity in the industry. Therefore, it is important that, once we get people into the industry, they stay at a greater rate than they currently do, referring back to my example of churn before.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: It is quite interesting that you have focused not necessarily only on funding but on other ways in which improvements might be made. Are there very specific things that you can suggest that either might be built on or built on more rapidly that we could focus on?
Ian Woodcroft: Yes, we have several examples of initiatives on the ground that are leading a more employer demand-led model. One example in CITB’s own work is our new entrants support team that aims to take the challenge away from employers, particularly the small employers that we are focused on, to get them to take on apprentices to enter the industry. In that particular case, the team take over outreach to construction employers. They support all the administration of taking up an apprenticeship and provide pastoral care over the duration of the apprenticeship. That model has seen an increase from 2,100 new starts last year to 4,000 starts this year. As part of the Government’s construction skills package, we are aiming to double that over the course of the next 12 months only based on where we see employer demand emerging, because it is employer demand that will drive employer uptake based on confidence.
Robbie Calvert: As you can imagine, the RTPI believes that insufficient capacity and skills in the planning sector in particular will present itself as a barrier to the development of good-quality new towns. As you rightly pointed out, that needs to be set within the wider Government reforms that we see at the moment and the ambitions for 1.5 million homes. More broadly, delivering the 10-year infrastructure strategy, achieving nature recovery and some of the ambitious renewable energy targets will all require planners.
I will come back to that in more detail shortly, but if we look at, for example, the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which has now reached the Lords, due to elements such as the production of strategic development strategies, the impact assessment published alongside the Bill has identified that approximately 150 to 200 new planners will be required for that strategic planning. That is planners with planning policy knowledge in particular.
That needs to be overlaid with the emergence of the development corporations that will be tasked with delivering these new towns. To take one example of a development corporation, currently its staffing levels have three planning teams. We have eight members in the local plan team, eight in the development management team and then eight in the development delivery side of the team. It depends to some degree on the size and the powers allocated to development corporations, but that is how much we will expect for the staffing demands.
Overlaying that is the Government’s plan to improve local plan coverage across the country. Currently, we have a seven-year average to get a local plan over the line. The Government want to expedite that to 30 months instead. Over the last five years, we have only had one-third of local authorities adopt a local plan. All of those will need planning policy officers in particular.
I am trying to build a picture here of what we might see as a perfect storm for capacity. What particularly concerns us at the moment is changes to the level 7 apprenticeships, which will kick in next year. The age requirements for that will be set at 17 to 21. However, almost all of our apprentices come in at a slightly older age to that. My colleagues in the education team have estimated that that could be turning the tap off for approximately 200 planners a year. I know that the Government have set out their ambitions to bring 300 new planners into the sector, but we do not even have a timeframe for when those planners will come on board. Is that, for example, in a parliamentary term? That number would be somewhat dwarfed by the loss of planners through those apprenticeships. I can come back in more detail to that later on. I appreciate that we have quite a while here today.
There is certainly an issue there with the pipeline, but there is a skills issue here as well. The MHCLG Local Authority Planning Skills and Capacity Survey, which was published at the start of the year, identified master planning and design codes in particular as one of the biggest skills gaps, alongside biodiversity net gain. These are the kinds of skills that we will need in planners to deliver the new towns and to set out that vision in the first instance.
Putting all of this together, we are asking the Government for a skills and workforce strategy in particular to deal with the planning sector. There is reference to workforce strategies within the industrial strategy that was published last week. We think that planning should be one of those, and we would like to see planning included in the Government’s five-year construction skills package, in particular, to address this issue.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: And it is not?
Robbie Calvert: No, not currently.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: Thank you very much, Robbie. I will hand over to Lord Mawson.
Q110 Lord Mawson: I run a science, technology and engineering programme with Professor Brian Cox, which is absolutely focused on jobs and skills. It began in 2012 in a failing housing estate in the East End of London where, following a murder, we ended up rebuilding a school for £40 million and a health centre for £16 million, and there are now 600 in the primary school, and we are joining it all up. We did an amazing event yesterday with 650 children and a whole range of business partners. We had a master class with children from the housing estate talking to Brian about astrophysics, and I am sat there thinking, “My God, the level of talent that is happening in these places”—and it is probably true in Bradford and Rotherham—“that has been absolutely missed by the failure of these systems and this gap”.
We now run this programme nationally, including in Northern Ireland and in Yorkshire, and in Surrey with Brooklands Museum, and we can see what is happening practically. There are two messages we are getting from the business community and schools. One message from school head teachers and partners, who are very able and fantastic people, is that education has become a sausage machine. Our teachers are incredibly bored. Our children are knocking off school because they are bored because they are not being inspired. You have all that going on in our education system.
Businesses are saying to us that schools are not producing the practical mindsets that they can employ. We are in Ballymena in Northern Ireland. If you go to look at Wrightbus, which is one of our partners there, it has just employed 600 people from the Philippines at great cost, because it is building the hydrogen and electric buses that are coming into London and the rest of Europe. They cannot employ young people from their local schools because the mindset and the relationships are not there. I listen to lots of this policy speak, but in four different Governments I have tried to engage with the Department for Education on a real programme that is working with some of the most challenging areas of this country, but to absolutely no effect. I tried to speak to Jacqui Smith, our own Minister and the latest—
The Chair: Can we get to a question, sorry, Lord Mawson?
Lord Mawson: My point is that, at a practical level, it is not working. We can see all of this at a real level, so how do we move from a theoretical discussion to a real practical delivery discussion that builds on what is actually working out there? In our experience, it is a really serious problem that is letting down thousands of children while politicians and others talk about it.
Ian Woodcroft: From the perspective of construction skills, that is something that has been firmly acknowledged. You will have seen that a £600 million package of investment was announced by the Government to support their missions across home building and infrastructure. We have been working closely between industry and Government to look at that package of support. You are seeing the rollout of technical excellence colleges and we are in the bidding process now. That will be nine colleges.
Lord Mawson: Can I just stop you there? Our colleagues at schools are telling me that what colleges are doing, if you look at the granular detail, is babysitting children who are not making it on other courses. My point is that, if you get into the granularity of what is happening, all the talk says one thing and the practicality tells you something completely different.
Ian Woodcroft: I do not disagree with that, because only 53% of small construction employers engage with the skills and training system, so there clearly is a problem there that the employers regularly identify. I am trying to point to that there are some interventions now that are being brought in specifically to address that. For example, the nine technical excellence colleges that I was referring to will increase capacity in FE to deal with this problem regionally. The bidding process for those colleges is identifying exactly that problem. The colleges will have to have good outreach programmes to employers and have courses that are designed and delivered by employers.
That is the key challenge here. Employers are not engaged as part of clear progression pathways from the FE system into the industry. That is why we are looking at industry placements, 40,000 of them over the course of this Parliament, working with Government to provide a bridge from further education into the industry. Currently, course provision is not providing that bridge. There is no practical work experience element in construction courses that employers are craving. There is no on-site training as part of those courses, and that is absolutely fundamental to what we need, which is people in FE courses in the system now having appropriate levels of work experience and training while they are on those courses and then having an effective work bridge into industry after the courses.
From our perspective, to look at your example about the sausage machine, one of the challenges is that the Government are now going to invest an additional £165 million in providing more construction courses. The concern will be: will those construction courses deliver the same outcomes that are the problem that we currently face, or will they be effectively linked to industry placements as part of clear progression routes based on industry agreed standards, so people can progress more easily into the industry?
You are absolutely right that employers are telling us the reason why they are not engaging with that system at the moment is that the system is not an employer-led system where they are getting the practical and on-site experiences that they need.
Robbie Calvert: From a planning perspective, and as I alluded to earlier, the issues we have around the level 7 apprenticeships in particular and the lack of interest from younger people to get into the career is a particular problem. Fundamentally, we need to pitch planning as an attractive career to younger people. I think there is an opportunity to do that. There are young people who are worried about their future, the climate emergency, the biodiversity crisis, lack of housing and opportunity for them in the future, and here is a career where you can have a tangible impact on that.
It is key that we get into schools. Our outreach is significant. I think our work skills and workforce strategy needs to manage that so we can get to people earlier on. There is an opportunity potentially to change some of that or to engage more with geography at high schools, in particular, and try to shape some of the core structure there so that we can bring people into it. With new towns, in particular, there is an opportunity to kind of “grow your own” there and “grow your own” locally as well. I would like to see the significant investment into new towns and urban extensions top-sliced for training requirements and bringing new planners on board, growing your own through an apprenticeship route.
If we are to encourage people into a career in planning, we need to deal with some of the structural issues that we see. For example, if we look at salaries in planning and follow inflation since 2005, the median planner would be making close to £50,000 annually, as opposed to the actual median salary, which is £33,000. I think planners need to be remunerated properly for what they do, which is so important for society. We need to think about ways where we can improve salary expectations to make it an attractive career.
Beyond that, we need to look at the well-being of planners here because I think planning departments have been quietly cut for the last 20 to 30 years. That is an issue to do with macro local government finance issues, but I think it is quite easy to quietly cut your planning services, over time deleting posts, without seeing an immediate effect that you may see in other services, for example social care. This kind of disinvestment over time has led to planning departments failing to meet their targets, failing to have adopted local plans and also poor morale in planning teams. We have seen planners in the public sector move into the private sector over the past five years. It is also ensuring that they have career development opportunities once they are in a public sector role.
Q111 Baroness Andrews: Good morning. Can I follow up two specific areas that really intrigued me? Ian, you said that there is a lot of wastage in the system. I was not quite sure why that was, and since it is the short term in a way and the medium term that we have to deal with, and if you have more planners coming through with whatever initiative is driving them, we still need to deal with the immediate problems. We are not going to have enough for these new towns if we are going to plan and build out in the next five years. What does the research mean about the proportion of people not following through after their apprenticeships or their BTEC or whatever?
My second question is more to Robbie, I think. You have just touched on the fact that the public sector has been shrinking for decades. I agree with you entirely that planning is an important and creative profession, and we have never put the public value on it, or the curriculum value on it, that we should have done. Now there is an increase into the private sector, which is significant. Can we use the private sector to repopulate the public sector for local plans and the new towns, and particularly master planning? How much trade-off can we get between the public and the private sectors in that way, in the short term at least?
Ian Woodcroft: Again, it goes to the point of the current skills and training system being dominated by learner outcomes rather than employment outcomes. If you look at funding for that in FE and how certain employer-led models are driving better outcomes, for example the Government skills boot camps now put control in the hands of the employer rather than addressing the interaction between the employer and the training provider at the end of the course. For us, what is important is that there are clear progression pathways into the industry based on industry-supported competence standards, with employers being engaged very much at the start of the process in course design, development and engagement.
There are some good examples of how this is working well. For example, in our employer network that we have launched with employers, there have been some 50,000 successful learning outcomes over the course of the last year, engaged with 4,000 employers and 25% of those have not engaged with our services before. That is because we have taken the funding, given it to the employers and allowed them to pool their funding to target the training that they want in locality rather than the system being the other way round.
Baroness Andrews: They have made their own partnerships with FE colleges, have they?
Ian Woodcroft: That is right.
Baroness Andrews: This is all being done at a local and very pragmatic level, but there is a universal model that can be used?
Ian Woodcroft: Yes.
Baroness Andrews: What about schemes like Teach First, for example. Could we have a Teach First for the planning profession?
Robbie Calvert: Sorry, can you explain to me the Teach First—
Baroness Andrews: Teach First is basically a fast track whereby people who have come out of other professions, who want to become teachers, then go into an intensive two-year programme where they are essentially trained in schools to become teachers. I was thinking aloud on a follow through question, but my more important question is: what do we do about the immediate shortage of planners?
Robbie Calvert: On the immediate shortage—I can come back to the Teach First question—there are provisions, for example, in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill around the reinvestment of planning fee income. That is very much focused on development management teams in particular, but we very much support that. That is bringing in additional resource to any fee increase and ensuring that that is reinvested in the planning service. Up until now, planning authorities have had varying amounts of control about how they spend their fee income, which can actually cross-subsidise other local government services, for example, so we very much welcome that.
There is also an additional provision around adding on to planning fees to cover engaging statutory consultees, which is another key part of the planning service. It is not purely planning departments; it is also the statutory consultees that impact upon the performance as a whole. On bringing in immediate resource, I think development corporations and the new towns model provide a bit of flexibility for bringing in private sector capacity for consultancy support. However, that is expensive. While that might help you in the short term, in the long term it is not a particularly sustainable approach.
Anecdotally, we hear from the private sector that there are issues with recruitment now as well. So severe are the issues relating to workforce in the planning system now as a whole, there could still be complications there, but I would say that that is the more immediate thing.
On routes into the industry, obviously the apprenticeship route is a successful one. That “grow your own” approach provides immediate resource for planning departments as well, because you can have planners working there at graduate planner level supporting your senior planners while being on day release to higher education. That is a quick and immediate resource. Beyond that, a very successful route into the industry is a master’s conversion course, which can be done over one or two years part-time.
Baroness Andrews: How many people do that?
Robbie Calvert: I do not actually have that. I can get back to you with the numbers on that.
The Chair: That would be great.
Robbie Calvert: That is what I did, for example.
The Chair: Can I suggest that we move on because some of these areas we will touch on in future groups. The next questions are from Viscount Hanworth and Baroness Miller.
Q112 Viscount Hanworth: I might begin with the obvious observation and ask the obvious question. There have been enduring shortages in skills in the construction industry and in local authority planning departments, to which successive reports have testified. The question is: why is this and what can be done to improve the circumstances? Perhaps Robbie Calvert can start, and then I shall follow up with some more detail.
Robbie Calvert: Again, I will reference back to the MHCLG skills and capacity survey, where there is some interesting work around the skills piece in particular. We need to—again, stepping back a little bit—look at the kind of reforms that are going on in the planning system at the moment, because we are continually, through planning reform, providing new skills needs, for example biodiversity net gain, which has been a huge piece for planners to deal with. Particularly with the lack of ecological capacity in local authorities, planners are having to upskill with this.
Planning reform in itself is creating new skills demands and that is why we have said, alongside the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, you need to provide a workforce and skills strategy if you are to manifest and achieve the outcomes that you want to achieve. I think that something central from Government would be welcomed here for a skills development portal, for example. We have seen such initiatives happen in Scotland more recently as part of the implementation of its national planning framework. We would very much advocate for that approach here too.
Viscount Hanworth: You have not described how we have reached this dire situation, but it occurs to me that the big firms in the construction industry do not retain or train their labour. They have them only for the project in question. However, they pay levies to the Construction Industry Training Board. My question, therefore, is whether they could be incentivised to act differently, thereby enhancing the skills of the industry.
Ian Woodcroft: Yes, in answer to that question, industry is coming from a place where we lost 66,000 skilled trade workers over the course of the pandemic and we are still trying to regain those workers. The challenge that the industry faces is that we are 98% small employers, which is a particular challenge in construction.
Viscount Hanworth: What was the figure?
Ian Woodcroft: So, 98% of the construction industry is made up of small employers.
Viscount Hanworth: And their turnover is not that large, is it?
Ian Woodcroft: Their turnover is not that large, and you are typically talking about organisations of no more than six people. The large employers you are talking about are large employers with large supply chains. Then most of the industry sits outside of those supply chains, so the challenge is: when you have gone through a period of a downturn, how do you encourage those employers to quickly invest in an upturn? You are presented with a difficult situation that you will see in the data over previous recessions, where you are at a time when you need growth and you have a reluctance for growth based on employers wanting to see a confident and clear demand pipeline going through.
You are absolutely right that training interventions to address that issue need to be fast and fleet of foot in derisking that issue for employers in terms of skills and training, making sure that employers do not have to do the thinking about training and providing strong pastoral care for them to encourage them to train going forward as part of an employer-led model. For something like new towns, for example, the opportunity is around rolling out those types of employer-led interventions to encourage them to uptrain, based on a clear and simple approach to the system.
For example, we are working on the rollout of new home building skills hubs and have committed to roll out 32 of those with the National House-Building Council so that we can increase apprenticeship capacity by 5,000 over this period of time. The point in mentioning that is that, again, it is about ensuring that that can keep pace based on demand. We need to understand where the demand pipeline is in regions across the country so that we can clearly sequence that work. That is the challenge.
On your question whether large employers could do more, absolutely large employers could do more. We are pleased to see that large employers are coming together with the Government in the Construction Skills Missions Board that was announced last week to look at exactly that problem. It is looking at five missions-based approaches, including: how to stimulate more employer demand for skills and training in the system; how to make sure that the skills system is there to support that; and how to retain more in the industry. That is exactly what it is focused on.
Viscount Hanworth: My supposition—and I do not know whether this is a correct observation—is that the large employers neither retain their labour nor train it, whereas the small business firm usually does. Therefore, if I have this correct, could the large employers not be incentivised to retain their labour and train them? You do the training, they pay the levies and are pleased to be disengaged.
Ian Woodcroft: Yes, the way we set the levy is, with the 2026 levy, the charge on large employers and small employers of a certain size will be 0.35% of their PAYE. Small employers whose PAYE is under £150,000 do not pay, small employers whose PAYE is up to £0.5 million pay only half and large employers above that will pay the full 0.35%.
On further incentivisation of employers, there is another thing probably worth noting. Typically, the levy returns around £250 million a year in skills and training support, so a significant amount of money. However, industry spending on skills and training above and beyond that is around £2 billion a year. When you add that to Government funding, there is significant funding out there to support skills and training. The system itself needs to work better.
Viscount Hanworth: You have not commented on my supposition that the big firms are not retaining their labour; they are simply hiring it for the projects in question.
Ian Woodcroft: Sorry, I beg your pardon. Yes, you are right, there needs to be more direct employment in the industry and large employers rely on long supply chains to do their work. Those supply chains are flexible and most people sit outside of those supply chains. In that sense, large employers can be flexible in how they approach projects and does that lead to a sustainable model going forward?
Viscount Hanworth: Why not incentivise them to invest more in the retention of their labour?
Ian Woodcroft: It is a good challenge and something that perhaps we can write to you on.
Viscount Hanworth: I had better pass to my other colleague.
Q113 Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: You mentioned a few moments ago the aspect of an ageing workforce. Could you go into that a little bit more? What are the projections on the workforce ageing?
Ian Woodcroft: It is probably best that we write to you with the specific data on the projections, but certainly we will see a significant number of people 55-plus leaving the industry. Also, over the pandemic, as I mentioned, we have seen some 66,000 people leave the industry, and in that pandemic the large proportion of those people were over 55. We need to collectively look at ways in which we can keep those people in the industry for longer. One example of how we are trying to do that is to address some real challenges that we have around teacher and assessor shortages for supporting the industry skills and training needs. Can we find a model where we encourage the older workforce and incentivise employers to release some of the older workforce to pursue other opportunities?
Also, can we have much clearer career progression pathways through people’s time in the industry that clearly signposts people to how they can change their career and progress into other areas? To the point about long supply chains and the point about limited direct employment, that means that it is hard for the industry to understand exactly where people are progressing to and where. There needs to be much more clarity in the development of clear, competent standards that provide clear progression pathways for people into and on in the industry.
Robbie Calvert: I can comment on that. We commissioned a bit of work this week that will be looking at age profiles of local planning authorities in particular. We just have to rely on anecdote at the moment, but we will have that published in due course and we are happy to circulate it.
We see an ageing profile in public sector planning departments and I think there is a clear issue here around succession as well. It is back to the point I was making about career development being critical. I think there is something important here around new towns and development corporations in particular because, as we have not progressed many over the last 20 to 30 years, this is a particular set of skills that we may lose if we are not careful. Many who were involved with the development of new towns initially will be at the point of retirement very soon.
Set alongside the disinvestment that we have seen in planning services and the reduction in that pipeline, it could be a ticking time bomb with mass retirement. We need to get the planners into the departments but also build them up through graduate senior principal positions in particular. I think a workforce strategy needs to cover that as well. It is not simply the pipeline; it is how we develop the planning staff that we have and have them shadow senior colleagues who were involved in the initial first cohort of new towns in particular.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: In attracting young people in as a career option, do you think that planning has an image problem?
Robbie Calvert: I think it does, yes. We should all take a bit to blame there maybe. Since the early 1980s, planning was very much pitched as a red tape kind of thing, a very bureaucratic process. Even the media is always talking about planning rules but never talking about vision, climate action and all these things that I think would encourage me into it as a career. It is very much back to the well-being of planners: getting abuse from the public and elected members locally and not being seen as the unsung heroes of society in my eyes.
That is why, through the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, one of our legislative asks—an amendment to be tabled at the Lords stages—is to have a purpose of planning, and that is to manage the use and development of land in the long-term public interest. We want to see that on the face of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to make it loud and clear that is the purpose of planning. I think that would go some way to improving how society sees it as a profession.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: New towns could be an opportunity—because they will be a visionary idea—to actually change the narrative on this. Without being too frivolous, could there be a Netflix series on “hero planner creates wonderful place”?
Robbie Calvert: Absolutely, and some of the outreach of the new towns through community engagement around them locally, getting into schools and not only engaging young people on what they want the future of their place to be but alongside that, “Here is a career where you can help shape that”. I have been involved in a voluntary context in matters around that, for example with major road infrastructure upgrades, going into schools, getting some feedback on those upgrades and then talking to them about planning, “This is what your local plan does” and engaging them at a younger age. I think, yes, there is a great opportunity to do that.
Another thing in the MHCLG skills and capacity survey is that there is a regional variation and I can imagine that there will be a regional variation with age profile as well. Again, sorry, just anecdotally, but we understand that rural planning authorities in particular have struggled to hire younger people. That is where we would see the apprenticeship doing well—the “grow your own” kind of thing. Planning authorities that are quite remote from planning skills in particular are likely to have a much more aged profile. We could try to smooth some of these regional variations that way too, depending on where the new towns are proposed.
Q114 Lord Mawson: I think what you are saying is that there is a need for innovation for the reasons my colleague was actually indicating, and this has been going on for a very long time—certainly, I have lived through it for many, many years with successive Governments not grasping the nettle. First, is that true? How do we get into a place where real innovation happens? It might be that the business world is already doing this stuff out there, but the systems of the state are not attuned to it and are not curious about it. I had a recent conversation with Lord Blunkett, who has had an interest in this for many, many years and, in my view, has quite thought it through. His view about the department was that it is still interested only in 30% of our children, not the 70% or in all of this stuff. If that is true, that is really serious in a conversation like this. What are your reflections on that?
Robbie Calvert: Certainly I think there is plenty of opportunity for innovation here. I am also looking towards the next generation of local plans and how we go about engaging the public there and engaging young people, in particular, in their preparation. As I say, there is an opportunity there not only to strengthen our plans through the voice of young people but to bring them on board by identifying a career opportunity for them in the planning sector.
Lord Mawson: What does that mean if the department is not interested, really, or curious about this practical space we are talking about?
Robbie Calvert: There are other options and avenues available to us. We have a planning skills fund with the British Chambers of Commerce. That is a private sector-led investment and that is to give bursaries towards planning courses, for example. We are working on that with the private sector at the moment and that is an innovation to some degree. I think that the private sector recognises the risk that we run here of not having enough planners to deliver on their business plans as well as the Government’s growth ambitions.
The Chair: If I may, I am just going to cut this conversation short only because I am conscious that there is a section later on where I think Lord Cameron will try to get in on this. Baroness Warwick.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: I have one quick question to follow up on that. Where is the interest going to come from? Who is actually going to drive it? Is there an organisation—yours or Skills England or whatever—that can drive this?
Ian Woodcroft: From our perspective, you are absolutely right. There are multiple organisations that will be involved in the driving of this. That is at a national level, but increasingly at a local level through mayoral strategic authorities as well. Quite a complex series of relationships will be needed to drive this, but, fundamentally, employer demand is the real driving force.
We welcome the establishment of Skills England. If Skills England can work across sectors such as construction to make sure that the industry competence standards employers that we want are supported through Government funding, that addresses some of the alignment issue in terms of Government funding to support education. With competence pathways, we can start to address barriers in the progression through and into industry.
On the point about new towns and how new towns can potentially act as an inspiring force around that work, along with UCAS and other agencies, we have a range of different tools to support young people understand and learn about potential opportunities in the industry. On our own Go Construct website, you see around 2 million individual unique views on that every year where people can take quizzes, understand what it is to be involved in all of the occupations of the industry, understand what salaries they will get, how they will get them and where they can get involved in engaging with employers in their local area. However, we must make sure that we have a sponge of employers that can absorb that desire and it is important that we put that first.
On the drive for this, hopefully Skills England will create more clarity strategically across government and then, in addition to that, that government clarity will be based on more engagement with industry and industry leadership bodies, whereas before I think the engagement was directly with employers to support funding in a way that other employers might not actually benefit from.
The Chair: I suggest that we move on to the next area, which is about the role of government, which is led by Lord Bailey and Baroness Andrews.
Q115 Lord Bailey of Paddington: Good morning to you both. The Government have taken a number of steps to address the skills issues in construction and planning. Are they enough, and what more is needed from the Government? I want to add another question in the interests of time: are we overreliant on the Government? I am horrified at how everybody thinks the Government need to do and can do everything. What is the market response to this? If planners are heroes—and you used the words “unsung heroes”—why are we not rewarding those heroes in the market? Everywhere else, where somebody is useful, the market rewards them, so why is that not happening for planners?
Robbie Calvert: On what the Government have done at the moment, as I say, they are cognisant of the resourcing issues. That is why the provisions in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill for the investment of fees and the additional fee income for statutory consultees will go some way to fix the problem, but that is very focused at development management teams. We are particularly concerned about local plans teams because the funding source for them has not been identified. We want a multiyear settlement there so that higher education and employers can plan ahead. As I referenced earlier, the BCC fund is a great opportunity to bring private sector funding in so that we can get some bursaries and get more planners through it into the pipeline.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: Can I just stop you there? You say bursaries to get more planners in: what will top up planners’ salaries? Is there anything going on that will help the salary case? You talked about getting young people interested. They are not interested unless they are getting paid, which is correct. Is there anything that will help that cause?
Robbie Calvert: Well, any amount of benchmarking—we have the figures here following inflation, at least since 2005. I think the increase in planning fees and that additional income to some degree will push salaries up and we will see that across the country, especially with the shortage of planners at the moment. Hopefully, in time we will see an increase there.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: Can I switch to builders in your case? If you look at the experience that the London Construction College has had, it has been hugely successful. I personally think it is because it is actually run by the industry. It literally changes the courses year on year because it can see what is coming down the pipeline. Am I correct that that might have something to do with its attraction?
Ian Woodcroft: I think that is absolutely right on attraction—again, it is that point about making sure that there is the opportunity for that attraction to lead into something that is real. From our perspective, on your point about where the Government step in and where employers and industry take over, DfE is becoming much more aware that funding needs to be provided to employers to do the work on this. Another element of the construction skills package, for example, is an £80 million fund for capital allocations to provide that to employers, so employers actually have the equipment to be able to train people on-site where they need them to be trained rather than taking people—
Lord Bailey of Paddington: Can I just be cynical? Why should the Government pay the employers, who are ultimately going to make lots of money out of this? Should you not be paying for that as an employer? Not you personally.
Ian Woodcroft: Absolutely. However, if you are looking at small employers making up 98% of the industry and most of those being six people or more, you need to have some stimulus and some investment to support them with that training. It is the point that we made before about being able to help employers to access what is a complicated system in a way where they can start to drive that demand.
It is a bit of a two-way street in that sense. If you look at some of the key interventions out there at the moment, for example, we ran something—and we still run our on-site experience hubs based on the Construction Skills Fund—where, by going on site and providing the actual training on-site with the employer, we leverage in employer investment in the training. It is more of a partnership approach rather than one or the other, but definitely with employers driving.
Our on-site hubs model essentially was providing equipment on-site for the employers, pooling it around a central employer where other employers in the area could come in and use that training. By doing that, we managed to secure, for £30 million, 7,500 job outcomes. What we are keen to see with the current capital allocation is to build on that as a successful model that we can roll out in other areas of the country where demand is increasing.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: That leads me to my obvious question and you partly answered it: what scale could it be delivered at? I share Lord Mawson’s horror at all of this. There is a lot of policy talk. Everybody comes in this room, as far as I can see, and campaigns for more salary for their sector. I am not saying that is a bad thing or that they do not deserve a salary, but the Government cannot pay everybody’s salary.
I am interested in sustainability and scale. For instance, we keep talking about developing new skills and the like. How much of that skill development can be sustained? How much of it can be done without the Government paying for it? If the Government do pay, it will have a short lifespan, will it not? I am interested in what we embed in the industry, where the industry then picks it up itself and has it as its own tactic moving forward and it just comes out of the cost of building.
Ian Woodcroft: From our perspective, all of those models that we are talking about have a sustainability element built into them. Once the equipment is there, the equipment is there and that is part of sustainable models going forward as one example. Also, when we look at this, there is significant investment going in—to respond to your point—from the Government, but also from industry to address the skills challenge. It is about how that money is used more effectively in driving job outcomes and career progression, rather than leading to learning outcomes that do not plug effectively into a clear progression pathway.
If you want more effective use of public funding in supporting skills and training, it is about everyone being aligned on those competence pathways and understanding what that progression is and understanding what their role is in supporting that progression. That is where you will see an improved value for money in training.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: I think that is a very powerful point around the progression pathways. When you speak to young people, as I do—I am a youth worker—they constantly ask the question, “How do I do this? Where do I do it? What happens once I have done it?” The progression pathway is very powerful.
I just want to swing round to the flipside in relation to young people—particularly around planning rather than building. Planning is not physically taxing; it is mentally taxing. Why do we have this obsession with young people when we have an ageing population who are often retiring when they are still active? Why are we not trying to include them in planning and not just focusing on young people?
Robbie Calvert: It comes back to the point around—again, apologies it is anecdotal—our ageing profile in planning departments. If we were to focus on career switchers, that is a very useful way into the industry and the part-time master’s course is a popular route into it—I got into planning late into my 20s, so I followed that. But it is more for the sustainability of the profession in the future as well to ensure that we have enough numbers.
We could try to stop people retiring early as well, by ensuring that their well-being is looked after and they feel valued in their job, so that we get the most out of senior planners before they retire but also provide opportunities, even in a voluntary context, once they have retired, to still be involved with planning. As a sector, the percentage of planners who volunteer is particularly high, through organisations such as Planning Aid England, where they can still provide expertise and skill. We need to ensure that we keep planners for as long as we can; so, beyond retirement, we could involve them in a voluntary way. We have a huge amount of corporate memory there that we need to download for the next generation and, in particular, around new towns as I said earlier, so that is certainly part of the picture.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: As you say, even late 20s is very young. As a country with an ageing population where people are more regularly changing careers later on, I think that because we are in an emergency situation we could look at asking people who are slightly older to consider it. They would come with a level of expertise in something else that would take young people the time to build up. It might help us answer our immediate issue of getting planning done.
Robbie Calvert: This is the exact problem with changes to level 7 apprenticeships, because the age range of 17 to 21 does not allow for that. I was speaking to a head of planning two weeks ago who had five apprentices in her planning authority in the age range 28 to 42. That is what they were working with, and she was terrified that, “As of next year, all those changes are going to switch that supply off for me”.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: I know there are a few people in the room who will be anxious to look at that through the planning Bill as it progresses.
Q116 Baroness Andrews: I would like to follow up, first of all, on the bizarre decision that the Government are going to stop the level 7 apprenticeships because—as I understood what you were saying—these are older people taking apprenticeships. Were they coming from other graduate courses? Was it the equivalent of a postgraduate course? Do you know why the Government took the decision, and were you consulted?
Robbie Calvert: We were not formally consulted. We have gone on record several times saying that we strongly disagree with this approach. The level 7 apprenticeships will continue but only with the 17 to 21 age. At this stage, we are pulling together a policy paper, which we will circulate to MHCLG and DfE, setting out our continued concerns around this.
In terms of entrants, the route will vary but often it could just be an undergraduate degree, and it does not have to be in a strongly related subject either. The apprenticeship route is a great way to learn how to be a planner, learning it on the job, which is incredibly useful.
Baroness Andrews: It was part on the job and part academic?
Robbie Calvert: Yes, a sort of day release.
Baroness Andrews: Yes. It was unique in that sense, was it? Is that normally how these courses work, that you get an element—
Robbie Calvert: I do not know across the construction sector, but it was newly established in England anyway and I know that Scotland is to follow in due course with that apprenticeship route. Some 70% of those employed through the apprenticeship were public sector planners, in particular, and only 17% of those apprenticeships are under 21 so that is us losing 83%.
Baroness Andrews: Did you get a reason from the Government as to why they thought that this was not a bad thing to do?
Robbie Calvert: I think the intention is to focus apprenticeships on younger people, but I think that this will come at the cost of their growth agenda in particular and particularly for the planning sector but any other professional services in the construction industry that come through that route as well. Obviously with construction skills, we need the builders to deliver on planning consents. We absolutely need the planners to set out the vision of new towns and secure the consents in a timely manner as well.
Q117 Baroness Andrews: My other question is related. We have this announcement that there will be a £600 million investment in training for 60,000 new construction workers. That means 10 new technical training colleges, expanding courses, delivering skills, boot camps—which is a bit like the Teach First principle—and so on. What are the chances of those 10 new technical training colleges happening? Do we know, and how long will that take? Could the existing FE colleges cope with the demand for more of this scale?
Ian Woodcroft: The bidding process for technical excellence colleges closes this week.
Baroness Andrews: A new generation with a new prospectus?
Ian Woodcroft: The idea being exactly that. Across the nine regions, DfE is looking to have a technical excellence college rolled out for every region plus another technical excellence college that takes a broader view. DfE is looking to ensure that those technical excellence colleges are integrated with existing provision and that that provision becomes more demand-led and focused on engaging employers much more, providing course content more relevant to employers.
Baroness Andrews: Just the thing that you want to see, then?
Ian Woodcroft: Just the thing that we want to see. However, we need to make sure that those colleges that come forward have a real track record in doing that. There are excellent colleges out there, and Leeds College of Building is one example of that. We will wait to see what comes through in the bidding process, but it is critical that those colleges can demonstrate that they have strong employer outreach plans, strong plans to ensure course content is embedded in industry skills and—
Baroness Andrews: So, it will be a mixed craft? It will not just be construction workers then?
Ian Woodcroft: The idea of the colleges is that they primarily have a construction element to them and that that construction element mirrors demand within their areas. In their areas if new towns are a high-demand issue, they should be more focused on new towns. If infrastructure is an issue, more focus will be on infrastructure. Typically, they will have to focus on all of those things in areas because there is a high demand level across all of them.
Baroness Andrews: Thank you very much indeed.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: Where will the teachers come from? Where will the people who are going to imbue these skills come from, particularly given the current role of FE colleges, where the main criticism is that they are not practical enough, which is why students are turned off?
Ian Woodcroft: Teaching is a real challenge in getting the number of teachers in to provide these courses but also getting the number of assessors in to assess the outcomes of those courses. There is a real disparity between funding for teachers in FE as opposed to what someone can earn in the industry.
There are several models that are looking at how employers can be incentivised to release their staff to teach, but teaching is a difficult practice that requires lots of time. I think that is a real challenge. There is a question mark over what level of employer incentivisation needs to be there to support more of the workforce to progress into teaching and assessment.
Robbie Calvert: Can I come in on FE in particular and relating to degree apprenticeships and changes next year? Courses are already planning next year’s delivery. If you map out some of the macro issues that higher education is having with the reduction in international students, the loss of these apprenticeship degrees could actually threaten a number of planning schools across the country. We could be losing HE support here for our industry if—well, when and if—this apprenticeship change comes through.
Baroness Andrews: So there is a knock-on effect, basically?
Robbie Calvert: Yes.
Baroness Andrews: If you lose the apprenticeships in the pipeline, you lose the opportunity to then go on to HE?
Robbie Calvert: No, it is a degree apprenticeship, so it is provided by planning schools that provide other courses as well.
Baroness Andrews: I see. HE and FE are linked through the provision of progression?
Robbie Calvert: Yes, but the loss of the degree apprenticeship could threaten the viability of the planning school as a whole and could threaten master’s courses and undergraduates as well. This loss of funding could have a knock-on effect.
Baroness Andrews: You are saying that we have a bit of a paradox in planning because, on the one hand, we have all these ambitions to grow more planners and the usual fees but, at the same time, we have the loss of the 21 year-olds in level 7 and the potential knock-on effect that FE and HE colleges would become dislocated. Have you made all this clear to the Government?
Robbie Calvert: We have done and will continue to. I am working with colleagues in education in particular. There is an opportunity here to collaborate with other organisations as well. I know the Home Builders Federation, for example, has published on this. The RSPB and a number of environmental NGOs will be concerned on this matter as well because planning is more than just delivering housing.
Baroness Andrews: You mentioned the new skills and knowledge of the environmental regulation. Are you planning to try to amend the Planning and Infrastructure Bill?
Robbie Calvert: Whether it sits in provisions or not, on our planning reform hub on our website we have put together a three-point resourcing plan for the Government, which we are lobbying for alongside the Planning and Infrastructure Bill—and supporting provisions of course with the reinvestment of planning fee income and things like that. That needs to be thought through from the pipeline as well.
The Chair: Thank you for that. Our final area is led by Lord Cameron and Lord Faulkner.
Q118 Lord Cameron of Dillington: My basic question has already been asked, which was based on the proposition that new towns and development corporations would re-attract planners, for instance, back from the private sector because it is an exciting agenda, to which you enthusiastically said, yes, you thought they probably would. To go on from that, what should development corporations be doing to make sure this comes true? What should they be doing to make themselves more attractive to the planning skills so as to attract them back—and not only planners but also the building skills that are required?
Also earlier on, Robbie, you mentioned the ecological capacity that will be vital in all of this. This country has a huge shortage of ecologists. Where will they come from?
Robbie Calvert: Good question. As a part of our three-point resourcing plan, point one was a whole system audit. The skills and capacity surveys that have been conducted so far look only squarely at planners and do not look at access to internal experts such as ecologists and nor do they understand the resourcing issues in statutory consultees over time. We have asked the Government to be open and transparent about what has happened in resourcing over time so that we can make targeted interventions that are appropriate. We support the provision, though, in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to invest more in statutory consultees, which will be a key part of nature recovery as well as protecting our historic environment, for example.
On what the development corporations can do, a little bit of this is anticipating what our skills need will be going forward. As I say, for example with development corporations, there will be a need for master planning skills, which are probably quite diminished now in planning authorities in particular as that work has been taken out of the local plans to some degree and focused more on allocations. The private sector has been doing more of that master planning or architects have in particular. Anticipating the skills needs of the current reforms and where we will be in five years will be critical in the process of allocating the sites for new talent. Alongside that is anticipating the workforce demand of the development corporations and what skills we need in that workforce and then working back from that. Anticipating that need would be welcome.
Lord Cameron of Dillington: Ian, what is CITB thinking about this workforce demand that new towns will provide?
Ian Woodcroft: We are keen to see where the new towns will be in the summer. We can certainly provide, through our labour forecasting tool, those involved in new towns development with a clear understanding of exactly what that demand looks like by occupation over a period of time in supporting their development. Those developments could put robust skills and training plans in place to meet that demand going forward.
We see new towns as a real catalyst for training, so we are keen that our home-building skills hubs are rolled out in partnership with new towns to drive increased fast-track apprenticeships. We are also looking at developing a new access home-building course to ensure that those new towns can bring people into the industry as quickly as possible.
The point of innovation around new towns is much more interesting in the sense that, if you increase productivity in the construction workforce by 1.5%, the skills gap we currently see would not be there. The opportunity for new towns to drive innovation in modular home building and off-site manufacture will be an interesting challenge, but we think new towns, again, will be more of a catalyst rather than necessarily being completely driven by that new way of working. Getting the workforce in at the moment is most crucial.
Q119 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: I find the enthusiasm from both of you for new talent development corporations interesting. As someone who shares that view, I applaud it. I should say that I worked for a new town development corporation in the West Midlands in the 1970s and indeed before that worked as average junior press officer for the CITB.
You are saying that, for there to be a proper planning career structure, you need bodies like the development corporations to provide that opportunity. You said that the absence of any new town development corporations over the last three or four decades had led to a dearth of planners going through that route. Do you think that, if we had development corporations, they would come back and be able to do the roles they had in the 1970s and 1980s?
Robbie Calvert: Our new towns will look slightly different to what they did in the 1970s and 1980s. They will be updated with more modern urban design principles, for example, but the need for master planning, design codes and quality approaches to green infrastructure will be absolutely there. We have that to some degree already in local plan teams in local authorities, but I would not want to see local plan teams decimated with all their members of staff poached out to support development corporations alongside the establishment of strategic development strategies, which will be a similar skill set yet again. This is bearing in mind that the Government have not provided a long-term resourcing plan for local planning teams in particular. That concerns me. Certainly there is knowledge in the industry and a lot of that knowledge will be retiring soon.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Do you think that people will be moving from local authorities where they are working as planners to work for development corporations?
Robbie Calvert: Potentially, yes. Everyone is fishing out of the same pond.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Will that be resented by local authorities?
Robbie Calvert: Absolutely. It could impact upon local plan coverage. That could work against some of the intentions of new towns if they are not thought through holistically as a part of a local plan for infrastructure delivery and all those matters. We do not want to see them disjointed from the existing plan-led system. It is important that we have that plan-led system in place and we have local plans and strategic development strategies coming forward and identifying where new towns sit within that. It could undermine the strength and quality of the new town if we do not have a plan-led system in place.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: What advice do you give to the Committee about how it faces, I suspect, a tricky issue?
Robbie Calvert: We are looking for any support we can get around level 7 apprenticeships in particular, but the money for that will go somewhere and we want to see that reinvested. We want to see a further rollout of bursaries at the very least and work placements provided by new towns, and that should be built into the actual concept of new towns so that baked in right from the start is the workforce that it will develop. We also need a decent acknowledgement about how many planners are available currently in the industry and how we can bring on additional resource through, be that through the private sector or more immediately.
Q120 Lord Bailey of Paddington: You have partially answered this question, Ian, and this is to both of you. To what extent can technology and remote working help with these issues? Can a highly experienced planning team do something that is physically far away from them because they have all this technology now? Are building processes much quicker to not only carry out on-site but to learn because they use different materials and different tactics?
Ian Woodcroft: From a construction perspective, some of the skills challenge will be met by bringing new people into the industry. Quite a lot of it will be met by the industry repurposing itself. A small construction employer does not just work in infrastructure and does not just work in home building. They work across a range of different sectors. There will be quite a shift for employers towards the projects in front of them.
The third element of this has to be about how you do things differently. The real challenge the industry has faced is that, over several decades, it has not done things differently quickly enough and that has led to this ongoing skills challenge about the number of people needed to recruit into the industry. New towns absolutely should be focused on how we do things differently, how we ramp up modular construction, how we ensure that there is more assembly in factories and how we use that to reduce down workforce demand. That should be clearly articulated about new town developments.
Lord Mawson: Is all the evidence today that the Government and these systems are not learning organisations? This has been going back for quite a lot of Governments. They are not learning anything. Throwing loads more money into a machine that is not learning anything and cannot use it wisely and effectively will not solve this problem, will it?
Ian Woodcroft: As I have pointed to before, we need a clear pipeline that employers can respond to, we need a system that is focused on job outcomes and we need the industry to retain more of its workers. Only by doing those three things will we achieve a better return on investment.
Q121 Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: On the question about doing things differently, somewhat following up on Lord Bailey’s question on technology, I saw a presentation last week about digital twinning. It seemed to me there was almost nothing it could not do, if you fed in the data of the perfect new town and what people wanted from it. You have not mentioned the role of AI. Will AI replace planners?
Robbie Calvert: That is a good question. Digital skills more broadly, to start with, is a skills need in our workforce going forward. On AI specifically, it has a role in the planning system. It is more at the point of automating simple processes around validation, for example. The professional scrutiny and robust standards need to be retained there when it comes to development management in particular. At this stage, I would have a measured approach to how much we think AI can deliver for us as a planning system.
However, digital more broadly has huge opportunity for improvement. I see the biggest improvements there are probably at the development planning stage. That is about how data is shared and how evidence bases are derived. All that could inform and expedite the process by which we conduct master planning of new towns because they will be similar datasets to what we are looking at, for example, for housing need or flooding issues and at local plan level as we would need for new towns as well. The Government have set out ambitions to do so as part of the next generation of local plans. We are expecting the revised NPPF to be consulted on in the autumn. We would like to see some of the digital innovation coming through there.
Some of the biggest gains are to be had at that plan-led approach in expediting the process of preparation. That could help inform new towns. However, as we have seen in court cases, AI is only as strong as what you feed it and it is not always particularly transparent about how it has gone through its processes as well. That causes particular issues when you have something like planning, which is about transparency and accountability to the public, and one that can also get embroiled legally as well.
I have measured expectations at this stage for AI and through development management, but certainly huge opportunities in local plan preparation in particular could help new towns.
Q122 The Chair: Can I ask two quick questions before we wrap up? Thank you so much for everything you have given us so far, but how do we avoid a scenario that in 20 years’ time a group of far more intelligent people than me are sitting here having the same debate about the same issues? I say this because the teams here have helpfully given us some briefing—and you will know this yourself—which says that 20 years ago a House of Commons inquiry said that, “capacity issues in local authorities have been evident for well over a decade”. That was 30 years ago. There was another report eight years ago and another one in 2016 and here we are today.
In all seriousness, this problem has been going on for far too long. Why is that? I appreciate everything you have said before, but if you were Prime Minister for one day, what one thing would you change that you believe will crack this issue? On a related point, both of you have referred to 98% SMEs making up the construction industry. We also then say that training should be employer led. Is that the right way? Again, we are still having the same issues.
Ian Woodcroft: In answer to that question, the one thing is a focus on long-term not short-term productivity in the industry because that fundamentally will address the skills gap issue, ensuring the industry becomes more productive. If that employer-led model is around job outcomes through clear career progressions where people are not then left behind after the industries use them, it is absolutely the right approach.
Robbie Calvert: I agree with Ian’s take there. We need the long-term skills and resourcing workforce strategy from the Government. The situation is that serious at this stage and it needs a comprehensive approach and that needs to come through in a strategy.
Beyond that is some of the messaging around planning and improving how the general public views it. Planning is not a blocker; it is an underresourced enabler. I would like to see more messaging from the Government about some of the benefit of having the strategic vision that society could derive as opposed to planners delaying things and causing issues. I am certainly keen to see something along those lines coming out of No. 10.
The Chair: Amen to that last point. We all agree with that point. Thank you so much for your participation today. I appreciate it has been a particularly warm session, but thank you very much for everything you have given. Like I said earlier, if there are bits that you want to follow up on, please feel free to write and please stay in touch with us. We are about to conclude this first part of the module, but we may turn to you for other parts. This is an area that perhaps we will try to dig in a bit further in due course. With that, thank you very much.
