Theresa May’s plans to help local authorities and housing associations build thousands of new council homes – including offering councils more money if they can demonstrate need, allowing them to borrow more to build homes and changing prohibitive rules that mean councils must purchase land at market value – could, on the face of it, be seen as a positive move to address the housing crisis.

More people than ever are resigned to renting. A recent survey from HomeOwners Alliance found that more than 250,000 non-homeowners have given up on their dream to own their own property.

Downplaying Brexit to overseas investors won't help UK housing crisis | Dawn Foster Read more

Restoring the power for councils to build their own homes could help. After the second world war, council housebuilding was in the hundreds of thousands, reaching a peak of 220,000under the Conservatives in 1953.

During the 1970s, councils built more than 1m homes, but that began falling from 1980, when the Margaret Thatcher government introduced right to buy. When houses were sold off under right to buy legislation of the Thatcher years was not matched by replacement building of affordable and social housing. Shelter revealed in 2015 that a third of councils in England had not replaced a single home sold through the right to buy scheme since 2012, and in March this year it was revealed councils have been forced to pay more than £800m from right-to-buy sales to the Treasury over the past five years – money that could have been used to build more than 12,000 additional council properties.

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But May is also promising to bring net migration below 100,000 a year if the Conservatives win – a pledge that could scupper any new housing targets.

The government’s line is that Brexit will be a smooth procedure that will not lead to shortages in skilled labour. Yet few industries are as susceptible to skills shortages as the construction sector. Nearly 12% of the 2.1 million construction workers in the UK come from abroad, mainly from the EU. These high-skilled tradesmen and women are far removed from the stereotype of the unskilled, low-wage worker undercutting British employees’ conditions and wages. Skilled workers from EU countries are filling a significant gap: the construction industry employs 320,000 fewer workers than it did a decade ago before the financial crisis and recession hit.

According to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, 8% of the UK’s construction workforce could be lost as a result of a hard Brexit: an exodus of more than 175,000 EU workers. London – where of course the housing crisis is most acute – would be hardest hit. A recent analysis of labour force data by the Greater London Authority found that of the total number of construction workers in London between 2014-16 (just shy of 350,000), almost 95,000 were born in the EU while more than 63,500 were born in non-EU countries. In other words, 45% of construction workers in the capital were non-UK born.

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What’s more, according to a recent report (pdf) by the consultants Arcadis, the UK will require 400,000 new workers every year until 2021, regardless of any post-Brexit migration restrictions, to meet the predicted demand for housing and infrastructure requirements; an equivalent of recruiting one person every 77 seconds.

Housebuilding rates are already way below those required even with access to skilled EU labourers; although nearly 190,000 homes (pdf) were built in 2015-16, an eight year high, this is way below the 300,000 a year needed to meet demand. Choking this skilled labour supply will only see construction rates further decline.

Because of Brexit, any incoming government and the construction industry will need to look in the long term at how to introduce more attractive apprenticeships to entice homegrown entrants into the trade. But this can’t happen overnight. The good news is that according to figures from the Construction Industry Training Board, construction apprenticeship are at a record high, with almost 25,000 people starting an apprentice scheme in 2015-16, a 25% increase in the past two years and the highest figure since 2003.

But the number of workers leaving the industry each year is much higher, around 60,000 people annually, and not all apprentices complete their training.

The incoming government should add skilled construction workers to the shortage occupation list (pdf) and introduce short-term temporary visas, enabling EU migrants to work in trades experiencing shortages, such as bricklaying and plumbing.

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A typical short-term visa or work permit arrangement could be to introduce it for a limit of three to four years, targeted at trades experiencing shortages, and at the same time implementing apprenticeship schemes, so when the first entrants to these apprenticeships move into full work, they will be able to replace those employees now sourced from abroad.

Michael Thirkettle, is chief executive of international construction and property consultancy McBains Cooper.

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