02/07/2026
Worth a read. Trades are one thing Ai can’t do. Trades also pay well. Working with your hands instead of a computer is not demeaning. It will be these people that make Britain great again.
Over a million young people in Britain are currently doing nothing.
Not between jobs. Not taking a gap year. Just out. Not in Employment, Education or Training.
A million of them, right now, this quarter. The first time that number has crossed a million since 2013.
The government's own review put it this way: if those young people formed a city, it would be the third largest in Britain.
Bigger than Leeds. Bigger than Glasgow.
And at exactly the same moment, the construction industry is begging for 206,000 workers it can't find.
Firms paying premium rates and still can't recruit carpenters. Bricklayers. Plumbers. Electricians. The trades that build the homes everyone agrees Britain desperately needs.
Sit with that for a second.
A city the size of Leeds, idle. An industry on its knees for want of workers. The same hands. A broken connection between them.
This isn't a market failure. Markets can't fix what the education system spent thirty years dismantling.
Every careers conversation pointed toward university. Not because it was right for everyone, it clearly wasn't, but because that's where the incentives pointed.
Trades were the consolation prize. Vocational training was what you did if you weren't quite clever enough for the real thing.
That idea didn't just waste potential. It actively destroyed the pipeline that built Britain.
And now we have the bill. Projects that don't start. Conversions that don't stack.
Housing targets that were always fiction because the workforce to hit them was never there.
Both problems are solvable. Neither requires a revolution. They require someone to connect a young person with no direction to an industry that is desperate for exactly what they could become.
Earn while you learn. Build something real. Get paid properly for skilled work that the country actually needs.
That's Point 8 of the Build Don't Blame manifesto. Not a welfare policy. Not a housing policy. Both at once.
You can't fix the housing crisis without fixing the pipeline that delivers the people to fix it.
