Last month’s government report on the rising number of young unemployed people should serve as a warning to industry and policymakers that if a talent pipeline crisis is to be avoided, urgent action must be taken.
Downtown in Business spoke with Sean Keyes, CEO Sutcliffe about what can be done.
‘The next generation of the UK workforce needs a first rung on the ladder.’ said Sean.
‘ Alan Milburn’s interim report into ‘Young People and Work’, published May 2026, makes for sober reading for anyone who runs a business in this country. Without urgent action, the number of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) will continue to rise, affecting more than one million young people. Milburn calls it the risk of a ‘lost generation’, and to my mind that is not an overstatement.
‘What struck me most was his point about the first rung of the career ladder having thinned to the point where, for many, it has gone altogether. There are 1.6 million fewer low and medium-skilled jobs in the economy, vacancies in hospitality have fallen sharply, and the number of people taking up an apprenticeship has declined significantly over the past decade. The report describes a catch-22 where employers ask for experience and young people have none to offer.
‘Sutcliffe has spent forty years training engineers, surveyors and managers. A good proportion of the people leading our most complex projects today walked through the door as apprentices or graduates with no experience to speak of, and we backed them anyway.
‘That is how our industry has always renewed itself, and it is why we have committed to training forty new engineers over the next decade.
‘Whilst the government has rightly identified there is a problem, they have in part also contributed towards it with measures which have made it materially harder for firms like ours to be part of the solution: the rise in employer National Insurance contribution has increased the cost of every new hire and at the same time, the National Living Wage has risen significantly.
‘We have no quarrel with the principle of fair pay, but the question is whether we are making it easier or harder for employers to take a chance on a young person with no experience.
‘The point is not that one policy or another is wrong in isolation. It is that when they land together, on the same employers, at the same time, the cumulative effect is to make the riskiest hire of all – the inexperienced young person – the one a hard-pressed business is most likely to forgo.
‘None of this is a counsel of despair. It is an argument for joining things up. If the Government is serious about addressing this challenge, it needs to look at the whole picture rather than each measure on its own. The firms expected to absorb a young workforce are the same ones being asked to absorb higher employment costs.
‘For our part, we will keep doing what we have always done. We will continue opening the door to young people because today’s apprentices and graduates will design the homes, hospitals and infrastructure of tomorrow. At Sutcliffe alone, we help deliver around 5,000 homes each year, and not one of them will be built without skilled people.
‘The talent is out there. The ambition is out there. What we need is a policy environment that makes employing and training young people the easy decision rather than the brave one. If we are serious about building 1.5 million homes, we must also be serious about building the workforce which will deliver them.’
