Rules of attraction

There is nothing new about industry moans that skills are in short supply. When I was at the forerunner of the Construction Confederation in 1968, a veteran member of the staff recalled his young days as a junior official at a local association meeting of North Western Builders in the 1930s. Forty-five minutes of the meeting were taken up by a slanging match between two member firms. One was accusing the other of having "pinched his apprentice". Nowadays, the apprentice would switch to stacking shelves in Asda, because it is better paid, warmer and has decent staff facilities.

Suppose you are 15 years old and doing your GCSEs this year. How will you view construction as a career? If you are female, you won't. Site-level involvement by women is negligible. If you are black or Asian, you probably won't. The Commission for Racial Equality has found that ethnic minorities see the industry as white-dominated and not for them.

If you are male and white, you will think of lousy pay, dirty sites, cold and rain, no canteens, disgusting toilets, no pension, a macho culture and a poor safety record. It is no wonder teenagers dream of other things.

There are no easy answers. The first need is to accept that there are real problems. The next is to tackle them in a way that reflects the aspirations of young people and their parents. What was good enough for dad or Uncle Bert in the trade 40 years ago is not good enough for young Bill, and even less for Joan.

Here are a few ideas. There is nothing new about them. Put them together and they may begin to make a difference.

We must improve site conditions. As partnering spreads, and clients move away from the lowest-price approach, there will be no justification for tender bids so low that they do not make decent provision for the workforce. Not that there is any excuse now. Would we like our children to work on some of the sites we've seen?

We must drastically improve our health and safety performance. Safety involves serious training and supervision, and the ultimate responsibility for it rests with management.

It shames our industry that clients should need to involve themselves in our basic site performance

We must make construction more attractive as a career, with better pay and a reasonable chance to progress to management. But we also need our best people to be site-based, not sitting in offices.

We have to attract older recruits to the industry, and we must train and pay them accordingly: little progress has been made in teaching craft skills to adults, and no 25-year-old will work for a 16-year-old's money.

We have to take equal opportunities seriously. There is plenty of excellent guidance, including the Construction Industry Board's report on women in construction, and the Movement for Innovation's Respect for People initiative. Next time you go to a builder's or civil engineer's function, look around the room. How many of the people you see are women? Of those, how many are in marketing or administration? How many black or brown faces are there? Are there any disabled people there?

We have to raise the profile of the industry. The Construction Industry Training Board's building-as-the-new-rock-and-roll campaign in teen magazines is good, but how many young people can name a single building firm?

If we cannot attract craft skills to sites, we may be able to offer young people factory jobs. None of the usual excuses need prevent us from pressing on with prefabrication: it does not reduce design opportunities, it is not necessarily more expensive, and it may lead to cheaper whole-life costs.

Multiskilling must be addressed seriously, especially for maintenance. This must not be deskilling. It is adding to the skill base and should be rewarded accordingly.