Thousands of jobs in construction but will it mean drastic shortage in skills?

A BOOM in the building industry is creating thousands of jobs in construction but could lead to a drastic skills shortage.

The Federation of Master Builders has warned of a construction skills time bomb, with small construction firms in particular reporting shortages of key skills.

It says 42 per cent of firms are now struggling to find bricklayers and 44 per cent found it hard to recruit carpenters.

Meanwhile, the Home Builders Federation says 44,000 more new homes were started in 2014 than in 2012.

It says more than 100,000 extra jobs have been created by an increase in house-building in the past two years, but that tens of thousands more people will need to be recruited and trained.

Dorset is seeing the construction boom in action.

In Bournemouth alone, a major Hinton Hotel is under construction, the Citrus apartment building at Horseshoe Common is already 75 per cent sold, and work has started on a leisure complex at the former bus station site off the Square.

Rob Hooker, founding director of Poole-based Greendale Construction Ltd, said: Theres definitely an upturn and theres definitely more confidence out there, which means theres more volume of work for us all to do, not only on the house building side but on commercial and with NHS trusts and local authority work.

He added: No doubt about it, with the upturn in the industry theres going to be problems with skills shortages.

He said this could have an effect on costs. The downside is if there isnt a supply of decent labour, rates will start to increase and therefore the costs of building will go up, he added.

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Thousands of jobs in construction but will it mean drastic shortage in skills?