By Andrew Mylius

The launch of the government’s ambitious 10-year Infrastructure Strategy in June 2025 focused the attention on skills and outlined £725bn of investment – 50% more than the previous decade.

For an industry facing a series of capability and capacity challenges, it raised major questions about its ability to deliver.

The Infrastructure Strategy was followed by the publication of the UK Infrastructure Pipeline, a list of projects with a verified business case and robust commitment. Becky Wood, chief executive of the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, emphasised that “This is not a wish list” when the first edition of the pipeline came out.

Updated in March this year, the Pipeline includes £113bn of transport investment and states that transport-related construction will require around 72,000 people per year, while rail, a standalone category, will require around 43,000.

Alternative routes

Many employer organisations are addressing the skills challenge by looking outside conventional recruitment pools. One of those organisations, M Group is partnering with construction skills training charity Building Heroes to bring military veterans into the building trades.

At the start of this year M Group opened a new Highways Training Academy at its highways maintenance depot in Oxfordshire, which provides four-week programmes to equip career-changers with New Roads and Street Works Act certification as well as Construction Skills Certification Scheme accreditation. Students will also receive training in areas such as traffic management and emergency first aid.

Another organisation looking outside the traditional routes for talent is National Highways, which is taking part in a government initiative to rehabilitate ex-offenders. In October 2025, its Lower Thames Crossing project launched a pilot skills hub, providing work-based training for men and women on day release from Kent-based prisons.

The Lower Thames Crossing project is also opening skills hubs to attract and train people within a 10-mile radius of the project. The first hub opened at Gravesend in Kent last October with a second opening next year in Essex.

Increasing value

However, the skills challenge cannot be solved through recruitment alone, and attention needs to be given to career progression and guiding professionals through their working lives. “We need clearer progression routes, better alignment between training and workforce demand, and stronger support for people at every stage of their career,” says Antoneta Horbury, CIHT’s director of policy and technical affairs. “The opportunity is not just to bring more people into transport, but to help them stay, develop and build the capability the sector needs for the future.”

Meanwhile, Ben Goodwin, policy director at the Civil Engineering Contractors Association, highlights the importance of workload visibility and long-term certainty in addressing the skills shortage. “The Infrastructure Pipeline is moving in the right direction,” he says. “But it could become more valuable if it provided more granular information on project overlap, regional workforce demand by occupation, procurement and route-to-market timings, as well as the extent to which different sectors will compete for the same skills and supply-chain capacity.”

Such information could help employers plan apprenticeships, colleges prepare training provision, and the supply chain invest with greater confidence. “Improved forecasting of future skills demand would also help colleges recruit tutors, establish training provision and align courses more closely with industry needs,” Goodwin adds.

Employer challenges

The Construction Leadership Council and affiliated Built Environment Futures Assembly have both highlighted an “absorption challenge” alongside the skills challenge. Educators and trainers are over-producing skills in some areas and under-producing in others, guided by historical industry data that doesn’t reflect present and future requirements. They are creating a pipeline of talent that’s mismatched with what companies and projects require.

Meanwhile, Suzannah Nichol OBE, chief executive of Build UK, notes that the introduction of higher minimum wage and employer National Insurance contributions, along with mandatory pension contributions, hiked the cost of taking on new recruits by 20-25%, and it’s become harder to trial new recruits since the Employment Rights Bill came into force last December. “It has become risker for employers to take people on,” she says, “and we are seeing the results in lower recruitment”.

• Read CIHT’s response to the Built Environment Consultation here.

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