No plumbers, no homes: The skills crisis threatening Britain’s building ambitions

Plumbers are as essential to this country’s housebuilding, data centre and clean energy ambitions as any other trade in construction, but the pipeline replacing them is nowhere near wide enough.

England has lost 25,700 plumbers from its workforce since 2018, a 16 per cent fall in under a decade. On current trends, a further 30 per cent will go by 2039.

That is the finding of JTL’s new workforce modelling, the first analysis to draw together data from across the sector’s main skills card schemes to map the true scale of the workforce.