Serious skills and knowledge gaps in the heritage sector
7 Dec 2009
Serious skills and knowledge gaps in the heritage sector
Two reports by the National Heritage Training Group (NHTG) were launched at the end of April at The Prince of Wales’s Foundation for the Built Environment, highlighting serious skills and knowledge gaps affecting specialist workers in England and building professionals working across the UK built heritage sector.
Encouragingly, the shortage of skilled craftspeople to work on England’s historic buildings has been greatly reduced since the first NHTG report in 2005. However, the future of the five million pre-1919 buildings in England could be at risk as most of the workforce undertaking repair and maintenance work does not possess all the skills required to do the job properly.
Similar knowledge gaps affect the majority of the building professionals who specify, commission and oversee this work across the UK and this is exacerbated by recruitment difficulties in the professional ranks of the sector.
The Traditional Building Craft Skills in England study, backed by ConstructionSkills and English Heritage, shows that the shortage of craftspeople in this sector has reduced by 3,000 since 2005, when the NHTG announced a skills shortage of 6,590. The number of craftspeople in the sector is around 109,000 compared to fewer than 90,000 in 2005, but with only 36% percent of contractors working on pre-1919 buildings it is estimated that only 33,000 craftspeople undertake work with traditional materials.
While around 16,000 mostly new entrants were identified as requiring some form of traditional building skills training in 2007, the evidence suggests that over two-thirds of the work, of which 67% is for private home-owners, is being carried out by those without the right skills and materials. This is detrimental to the buildings and stores up future problems and unnecessary extra cost to rectify.
The second UK-wide report, Built Heritage Sector Professionals, assessed skills and training of architects, engineers, surveyors, conservation officers and other professionals – the gatekeepers for this sector.
However, of the half million professionals working in the UK, only 507 are building conservation-accredited. The report also shows that new recruits may be ill-equipped to replace experienced professionals approaching retirement, creating a vacuum in this part of the industry.
The NHTG is working with its partners in the home countries to increase demand for suitably skilled and building-conservation accredited professionals and maximise the number of high-quality entrants into the sector by strengthening building conservation components within mainstream built environment courses. There is also a need to develop flexible training and improve advice and guidance on traditional building skills and materials and link these to the sustainability agenda.
