Skills gap across the UK built heritage sector warns NHTG

Permalink: Skills gap across the UK built heritage sector warns NHTG
by Kay Murchie

A report by The National Heritage Training Group (NHTG) has warned that there are serious skills and knowledge gaps affecting specialist workers in England and building professionals working across the UK built heritage sector.

The report was launched today at The Prince of Wales’s Foundation for the Built Environment.

In its report, the NHTG warned that the future of the 5 million buildings in England, built before 1919, could be at risk as the majority of the workforce carrying out restoration and maintenance work do not have the necessary skills in order to do the job correctly.

As a result, the NHTG is now ensuring that individuals undertaking work on traditional buildings receive the required training and guidance.

Last year, approximately 16,000 mostly new entrants were identified as requiring some form of traditional building skills training.

This indicates that more than two-thirds of the work, of which 67% is for private home-owners, is being carried out by those without the right skills and materials.

As well as causing future problems, this also results in unnecessary costs to put right.

Over the last year, 16% of homeowners said they find it hard to locate general trades, craftspeople while 21% find it hard to locate joiners and roofers and 26% for carpenters.

Furthermore, levels of satisfaction with quality have declined significantly in the last 3 years with very satisfied down from 60% to 42% for public and commercial stockholders and 60% to 39% for private owners.

Those very satisfied with completion times is up from 35% to 43% for public and commercial stockholders and down from 45% to 16% for private owners.

A second report by the NHTG, Built Heritage Sector Professionals, assessed skills and training of architects, engineers, surveyors, conservation officers and other professionals (the gatekeepers for this sector).

Of the 500,000 professionals working in the UK, just 507 are building conservation-accredited.

This represents one accredited surveyor for every 85,000 traditional buildings and only one engineer with relevant conservation experience for every 276,000 pre-1919 structures.

Carrying out work on heritage buildings (which are mostly privately owned) formed one third of all professionals’ workload over the last 12 months but almost two thirds of workers do not believe their education prepared them adequately for this work and their knowledge is self-taught.

Peter Lobban, Chief Executive of ConstructionSkills, said we have taken some giant steps to ensure that more people are taking up these traditional building crafts that are so important to preserving the country’s heritage buildings.

The Traditional Building Craft Skills in England report discovered that demand for maintenance work on historic buildings has soared since 2005 with the market now estimated to be worth a £4.7 billion compared with £3.5 billion in 2005.