The Workforce Squeeze in UK Infrastructure

£718bn of planned investment, a workforce that’s shrinking, ageing, and short of the skills the work now demands. Our new Infrastructure report sets out the six structural challenges facing UK infrastructure, and what leading organisations are actually doing about each one.

Infrastructure has always resourced project by project

Teams ramp up when a programme starts and stand down when it ends, with a day-rate contractor market flexing the gaps. It worked when projects were few and talent was easy to find. Today the pipeline is the largest in a generation, the workforce is retiring faster that it’s being replaced, and the fastest growing demand is for skills that barely exist yet. You cannot recruit your way out of this from the pool that’s already there.

What you’ll take away

• The numbers that don’t reconcile – why the pipeline and workforce no longer add up, and what the gap means for tender prices and delivery risk.
• Six structural challenges – from the net zero skills gap to clearance lead times, set out plainly and without spin.
• What’s actually working – honest evidence on the responses leading organisations are using against each challenge.
• Real case studies – Hinkley Point C, National Highways, the Energy Skills Passport and more.
• A clear shift – why the organisations that deliver are moving from buying labour to building a workforce.

Written for the people who have to deliver

A briefing for infrastructure leaders, HR and Talent professionals who already feel the squeeze, and want a clear-eyed read on what to do about it, not another restatement of the problem.