An Update to the Report on the Analysis of Skills for Residential Construction and Retrofitting

The Report on the Analysis of Skills for Residential Construction & Retrofitting 2023–2030 was published by the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science in December 2022.

The Update to the Report on the Analysis of Skills for Residential Construction & Retrofitting reviews the underlying projections of the original Report to ensure they remained current.

This Updated Report contains detailed forecasts of the skills required to deliver an annual average of 50,000 new homes and the retrofitting (B2 equivalent standard) of an annual average of 63,444 existing older homes over the 7-year period 2024-2030.

The Updated Report estimates that 10,000 fewer new entrants will be required in the sector if there is widespread adoption of Modern Methods of Construction (MMC). Almost 69,000 new entrants will be needed in this scenario, compared to almost 79,000 if there is continued use of more traditional building methods.

The analysis covers four distinct aspects:

1. Creating a new base year of 2022 to replace the original report’s base year of 2019.

2. Creating a forecast based on a continuation of the relationship between construction activity and employment in the base year. This forecast is referred to as the ‘no change’ scenario in the report.

3. Creating a model to predict the likely impact on employment and skills of a realistic level of application of MMC.

4. Comparing the recruitment requirements in the more realistic ‘application of MMC’ scenario with the domestic supply of construction skills at professional, craft and operative levels.

The forecasts are based on reaching a specific target, rather than an analysis of what the volume of output over the period is likely to be. Consequently, the data which is normally used to predict housing output such as house commencements or planning permissions are not the determinants of output in this report.