We need a government-led workforce strategy for the housing sector

We believe that a strategy for the social/affordable housing sector would help future-proof the profession, grow career routes maximising our ability to attract a diverse range of talent, and nurture the skills of existing professionals at all levels.

Without this, to my mind, there’s a real risk that while we often talk about the right things in Wales – eliminating homelessness; building more social and affordable housing at the cutting edge of design and sustainability at scale; working in partnership to revitalise local communities – we could be missing the true value of the people behind making this happen, and risk seeing our efforts to realise these ambitions hampered in the years ahead.

For example, In Wales there’s a huge emphasis on decarbonising existing homes, and building homes using modern methods of construction that are more energy efficient and greener to construct, and that coexist naturally with their environment all the while providing the space, functionality and technology to ensure households can prosper.

“There’s a real risk that while we often talk about the right things in Wales, we could be missing the true value of the people behind making this happen”

That is easily supported in principle, but do we know enough about the skills capacity in the sector to grasp how that’ll be delivered in practice? Do we have the learning infrastructure in place to provide the knowledge, practical placements and develop world-leading techniques that go hand in hand with that?

A strategy underpinned by data about the workforce would help us recognise and understand the nature of the sector’s capacity and help focus resource on what skills are in low supply.

Not just in terms of housing development, but in all aspects of the sector’s work including housing management, maintenance and community regeneration.

In the education sector in Wales, for example, the School Workforce Annual Census provides a rich supply of data to help understand the size of the workforce, staff demographics and staff recruitment and retention. It’s also about going beyond the numbers; the strategy for the health and social care workforce places an emphasis on actions to maintain staff well-being and making sure people feel valued.

Those sectors and others with well-progressed approaches to developing their workforce offer us an invaluable resource to learn from and borrow in shaping how such an approach could look in the housing sector in Wales.

Those well-developed strategies clearly take time to evolve and I’m not saying that’s where we start, but they give us a good idea of where we could end up. For me, it’s about initially creating a workforce strategy that sets out a number of important things to make progress on and, in time, building in more sophistication.

It should initially include setting out our approach to growing the data we have, taking action to monitor and increase diversity, map out and grow career routes and detail steps to nurture the skills we have already – making sure that knowledge isn’t lost as people retire or move elsewhere.

These are some of the stepping stones. The things that with the will and support we could start work on tomorrow. This forms the basis for one of our calls ahead of the Welsh parliament election next year. And this isn’t about a ‘nice to have’ or a gimmick, but something tangible that would future-proof the profession and ensure we can remain responsive to both the expectations on the sector to deliver and the needs of the workforce to achieve (and go beyond) that.

Matt Dicks, director, CIH Cymru