Shortage of 240,000 workers green economy leaves staff more ‘exposed to exploitation and exclusion from training’, survey suggests

Across Europe, the sector must recruit more than four million workers by 2035 just to replace employees who are due to retire, with a further 88,000 jobs opening on top of that.

The report found that decarbonisation does not automatically produce better jobs, with the UK’s core problem being a lack of enforcement in the sector, rather than regulation.

It also raised concern that green construction training is increasingly delivered by private providers, equipping workers with “narrow, technology-specific skills, rather than the broader foundation that college-based models provide – producing a workforce that is more specialised but less adaptable”.

This latest report comes after a conference last year heard how quality, skills and workforce capacity are one of the “most pressing” retrofit challenges facing the sector.

The new research also highlighted issues with workers’ rights. With only 19% of workers currently under 25 and green roles far more likely to be filled by self-employed people, these workers have fewer protections than full-time staff.

Plus, women make up just 2% of onsite trade workers, which means the sector has hundreds of thousands of jobs to fill across the green transition, with researchers telling the sector that it “cannot afford to keep excluding half the workforce”.

Kate Bell, assistant general secretary at the TUC, said: “Construction is one of the hardest sectors in which to assert your rights as a worker.

“The Employment Rights Bill is a step forward, but without sector-specific measures, it won’t cut through the subcontracting chains and self-employment arrangements that leave so many construction workers exposed.

“The government has a plan to retrofit millions of homes. It also needs a plan for the workers who’ll do it, and that means tying Warm Homes Plan spending to fair work standards, and a good jobs guarantee as part of the Clean Energy Jobs Plan.”

At the end of last year, sector bodies described a new low in construction employment at the time as “unsurprising” but a “real concern” as figures hit their lowest levels since 2000.

Giulio Ferrini, head of built environment at the Institute for Human Rights and Business, said: “The UK has a wide range of mandatory and voluntary legal frameworks, including the Labour Agency Vendor Accord, which aim to uphold labour rights.

“What it doesn’t have is enforcement at the scale needed. Wage theft and informal labour are routine in UK construction, particularly for migrant workers in renovation and demolition who sit deep in subcontracting chains are often not provided contracts or safety information in their spoken language and are ignored when they raise concerns.

“The Warm Homes Plan provides a crucial £15bn public investment into this sector and the concurrent launch of the Fair Work Agency is a first step. But this needs to be accompanied by properly funded enforcement to ensure workers don’t face the same issues they’ve experienced for decades.”