A hard Brexit could have a crippling effect on house building in the capital, as a quarter of all construction workers in London are from EU, a new report has found.
The Housing in London: 2017 report by mayor Sadiq Khan found that 95,000 of the capital’s 350,000 construction workers are from the EU and that any outflow of workers would leave the capital’s sites “high and dry”.
Khan said London could not afford to lose construction workers at a time when there was already a skills shortage in the industry and it required an extra 13,000 new workers each year until 2021 to plug the existing gap and to meet additional demands.
He said: “London is in the grip of a serious housing crisis – and fixing it is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. While we are working to train up more Londoners to have the skills to work in construction, you can’t escape the fact that a ‘hard Brexit’ could leave a quarter of the skilled construction workforce in the capital high and dry, which would have a crippling effect on our plans to build the homes Londoners so desperately need.”
Cllr Peter John, leader of Southwark Council and member of the London Economic Area Partnership, said: “We urgently need more skilled construction workers in London. The mayor has asked me to bring together partners from local government, developers, the construction industry and training providers to address this.”
Last week consultant Arcadis released its own report stating a hard Brexit would see 214,000 fewer EU nationals entering UK construction by 2020, while at the same time predicting that the industry needed to recruit 400,000 people a year to meet the country’s construction and infrastructure needs.
