In association with Matchtech
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After more than a decade of planning, two planning applications, and a consent process that outlasted one general election, the Lower Thames Crossing finally has its green light. Development consent was granted in March 2025 with construction due to start this year. And with an estimated 22,000 jobs supported across a six-year build programme and a project value now tracking above £10 billion, the workforce implications are significant.
For those working in infrastructure recruitment, workforce planning or talent strategy, the approval was not just a planning milestone. It was the starting gun on one of the most complex resourcing exercises the UK construction sector has faced in years.
The Lower Thames Crossing doesn’t exist in isolation. It lands in a market already stretched by HS2, the Energy transition, Water infrastructure investment and a sustained pipeline of Highway and Rail programmes. The same pool of experienced Engineers, Project Managers and Commercial Professionals is being targeted from multiple directions simultaneously.
What makes the Crossing particularly challenging from a talent perspective is its geographic dimension. Contractual obligations are likely to place significant emphasis on local hiring, drawing from communities in Kent, Essex and Thurrock. That is both an opportunity and a constraint. There is genuine appetite in those communities to work on the project, but the supply of locally available, technically qualified professionals is finite.
National Highways has been explicit about its ambitions here: it wants to train local people, build regional skills capacity, and leave a lasting employment legacy alongside the physical infrastructure. That is the right ambition. But achieving it requires deliberate planning, not an assumption that the right people will simply appear when the machinery moves in.
To understand the shape of available supply, Matchtech conducted proactive market research ahead of construction mobilisation, surveying approximately 34,000 UK-based engineers specifically in the context of the Lower Thames Crossing. The response was encouraging: close to 1,500 white-collar professionals had already indicated a positive interest in working on the project before a single spade entered the ground.
The skillset breakdown is instructive. Construction professionals made up the largest share of interested candidates at 51%, spanning Site and Section Engineers, Sub/Site Agents, Project Managers and Foremen. Design specialists accounted for 24% of the pool, covering Design Engineers, CAD Technicians, DSRs and Project Managers. Commercial professionals represented 8%, from Quantity Surveyors at all levels through to Commercial Managers and Estimators. The remaining 17% encompassed a broad range of supporting disciplines: ITS, Logistics, Professional Services, Environmental and Sustainability specialists, and Land and Utility Surveyors.
This is a meaningful pool. But it is also a snapshot of a moving target. Candidate interest expressed now will not automatically translate into availability when construction ramps up. The sector that moves earliest to build genuine candidate relationships, not just databases, will be best placed when competition for those professionals intensifies.
Snapshot: the Lower Thames Crossing in numbers
No serious conversation about infrastructure workforce planning in 2026 can sidestep gender diversity. Women remain significantly underrepresented across engineering and construction. On a project the size of the Lower Thames Crossing, that underrepresentation is not just a missed opportunity. It is a direct constraint on the available talent pool.
The levers that make a genuine difference operate at three levels. The first is structural: reviewing recruitment processes, language and decision-making for bias, and equipping hiring managers with the tools to conduct genuinely inclusive interviews. The second is attraction: removing coded masculine language from adverts and job specifications, leading with purpose, impact and team collaboration, making flexibility visible from the outset, and using a wider range of channels to reach candidates who may not be engaging with traditional routes.
The third is retention: creating the conditions in which women can succeed, progress and stay. Returner and re-entry programmes for experienced professionals coming back after a career break, and internal mentoring or sponsorship schemes supporting progression into senior roles, are not peripheral HR initiatives. On a six-year programme with complex succession challenges, they are structural workforce interventions.
The Lower Thames Crossing has already been described as an opportunity to model what responsible, ambitious infrastructure delivery looks like. That ambition should extend to who builds it.
The projects that get resourcing right on programmes of this scale share a common characteristic: they begin the workforce conversation long before the pressure to hire is acute. Engagement with sector-specialist partners, early mapping of supply and demand, and deliberate community engagement around local hiring all take time that cannot be recovered once mobilisation begins.
The Crossing is entering construction this year. For workforce planners, client teams and contractors across all three delivery packages, the time to act on talent strategy is not when the first contracts are live. It is now.
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