The Missing Link In Regeneration Conversations Neil Baines, Managing Director
Regeneration & Investment
As we get ready to enter the season of large regeneration and investment events, I wanted to explore something that I’d like to hear more of. Alongside the bold visions. New homes, innovation districts, infrastructure upgrades, high-value inward investment etc. I’d like to see the plans for who is going to deliver it.
Urgency In Skills Gap
The built environment sector has a persistent and widening skills gap. It’s not new, but it’s becoming more urgent. As regeneration plans grow in scale and ambition, the capacity to design, engineer, and build them is under increasing pressure.
Driving Job Creation
There’s a shortage of skilled people, both on the technical side (engineering, architecture, surveying, building services) and in the trades. The pipeline isn’t keeping pace. This isn’t just a delivery problem. It’s also a blocker to business growth.
If regeneration is meant to drive inclusive, place-based growth, then job creation in the built environment should be a central part of the plan and not a secondary effect. That means actively including skills in the early conversations, not waiting for the market to catch up later.
Inclusive Growth
We hear talk about inclusive growth as a goal. But if the regeneration process itself isn’t designed to create opportunities for local people to participate through work, training, or long-term careers, then how inclusive is it, really?
Progressive Workforce
If creating new homes and buildings is vital then so is creating the workforce that can design, build and maintain them. Any regeneration announcement should be accompanied by a question: What new jobs will this create in the region? Not just at the point of construction, but throughout the lifecycle of the built environment, from design to delivery to maintenance and operation.
The Regional Conversation
This is particularly relevant in areas where one city may dominate the regional conversation. Smaller cities and towns, often still playing catch-up, need support to grow their own skills base. With at least 4 new combined authorities being created across the North of England this becomes important in cities like Chester, Lancaster, Preston, Carlisle, Hull and the areas that surround them as much as it is in the Liverpool City Region, Greater Manchester, The West Midlands and the rest of Yorkshire. Without deliberate effort, regeneration risks reinforcing existing imbalances rather than correcting them.
What Needs To Change
To turn good intentions into impact, local authorities, combined authorities, education providers, development partners and industry bodies must engage with business leaders to actively build skills into the regeneration strategy:
- Set clearer expectations for local job creation and training especially in public-funded projects.
- Fund and promote built environment career pathways especially in underrepresented or deprived communities.
- Collaborate with industry to forecast demand and shape regional talent pipelines
- Ensure that procurement models and frameworks reward those contributing to the local economy and to local skills growth, not just project delivery
Moving Forward
We’re not talking radical asks. These are practical steps to create an Ecosystem where large corporate companies and SME's both help nurture and foster new talent side by side. If regeneration is about transforming places for the long term, then skills are the foundation and regeneration without a future workforce plan is short term thinking.
We hear plenty of talk about the need to create new jobs, retain graduates and improve life chances and life expectancy when new regeneration schemes get announced. How we will create new jobs to help turn exciting plans into reality seems to get missed and that's the conversation our industry needs to hear more of.
