An opportunity to do things differently

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) recently launched a Call for Evidence on its Strategy for the Built Environment Professions, Trades, and Occupations. This is a crucial opportunity to tackle deep-seated, structural problems in an industry running on outdated norms. For too long, reform efforts have focused on procedure rather than people. 

The UK needs a quarter of a million new construction workers over the next 18 months, yet the industry continues to lose talent at an alarming rate. What is widely described as a "skills crisis" is actually a retention crisis driven by exclusionary site environments. Women make up only 15% of the total workforce and less than 2% of tradespeople on site. To plug this leak, we must move past business-as-usual and clearly link work experiences to overall commercial success. Biases embedded in physical work environments directly affect who stays, who leaves, and how the industry grows.

Why foundational defaults matter: lessons from the AI revolution

In any system, initial design choices determine long-term outcomes, whether you are pouring concrete or writing code. In The New Age of Sexism, Laura Bates shows how unexamined biases are baked into modern AI systems from the start. When technology is built without diverse perspectives, it doesn't just mirror societal inequalities; it hardwires them into the future.

The construction sector faces a similar systemic challenge. Just as a biased algorithm scales flaws across millions of user interactions, unexamined workplace defaults scale exclusion across a quarter of a million potential new roles. Decades of designing job sites around a single demographic have created physical and cultural barriers that make belonging conditional for everyone else.

Recognising and removing inherited system flaws

• One-size-fits-all PPE: Safety gear designed exclusively for male proportions leads to a 10% accident rate due to poor fit, introducing avoidable physical risks.

• Inadequate welfare facilities: Substandard hygiene and basic facilities treated as secondary considerations create immediate day-to-day barriers for workers.

• Outdated recruitment datasets: Hiring and management systems modelled on historical demographics continue to treat old norms as the default.

• Transactional management structures: Traditional subcontracting models often prioritise short-term speed over workforce stability and wellbeing.

Without auditing these underlying assumptions, recruitment campaigns will continue attempting to build on a cracked base.

Fixing the working environment, not the individual

The industry has historically over-invested in an "attraction-only" model, relying on the flawed narrative that women lack the "individual confidence" to succeed in construction. This is a strategic failure. Short-term workshops and resilience training attempt to "fix" the individual to endure a hostile environment, rather than re-engineering the environment itself. 

Data confirms the impact of changing environmental baselines: while ill-fitting gear contributes to safety hazards, providing properly fitted, gender-appropriate PPE can reduce workplace injuries significantly.

Shifting from individual adaptation to structural solutions

Real transformation requires moving beyond stand-alone confidence workshops or broad recruitment drives that place the burden of change on individual workers. Instead, we must embed systemic accountability across every level of the built environment. This means integrating mandatory Fairness, Inclusion, and Respect (FIR) standards directly into supervisory training, alongside transparent, gender-segregated retention reporting to pinpoint where workforce drop-off truly happens.

Crucially, site conditions themselves need structural overhaul. Voluntary site welfare guidelines should be replaced with enforceable, audited standards for gender-specific facilities as a core health and safety requirement. Paired with guaranteed access to properly fitting PPE for all body types, these environmental baselines shift the culture away from conditional belonging and lay down a safe, sustainable foundation for equal participation.

Managing what we measure

In construction, the adage holds: what gets measured gets managed. Yet the sector’s current workforce data is static, siloed, and blind to the realities of gender segregation. To fix this, We Build Too is creating a dual-sided platform that de-risks the sector by collecting longitudinal data rooted in real, lived experiences.

The platform relies on a simple, trust-first model: women access it for free to find community support and career development, while employers and industry bodies access anonymised insights. The demand is already there. Our research shows that 86% of women surveyed are ready to share their data if it leads to real, lasting industry reform.

How insight delivers value

1. Lived-Experience sentiment: Moving beyond headcount stats to uncover the human story behind workforce attrition.

2. Longitudinal datasets: Tracking career journeys over time to highlight where women drop out and why.

3. Competitive bid advantage: Equipping contractors with robust, evidence-led metrics to win bids and meet social value requirements.

By moving away from guesswork, employers gain a data-backed strategy for their single most valuable resource: their people.

What government must do

Voluntary reform has reached its natural limit, as informal commitments rarely overcome the deep-seated inertia of legacy industry systems. As Stopcocks founder and advocate for women in industry Hattie Hasan noted, "We don't count if we're not counted." To create lasting change, we recommend that the MHCLG adopt two core statutory interventions:

1. Mandatory reporting

We recommend integrating continuous, gender-segregated workforce reporting into a statutory contractor licensing framework. In trade sectors like building finishing, up to 84% of women are self-employed, frequently working without formal HR support. A mandatory licensing mechanism ensures these workers are accounted for and that their experiences inform policy decisions.

2. Social Value as a "Golden Thread"

Social value should function as a “Golden Thread” across all five stages of public procurement, following the Buying Social Justice framework:

1. Preparing to procure (Setting the business case).

2. Writing the specification (Embedding detailed equality clauses).

3. Selecting suppliers (Assessing diverse supply chains).

4. Tendering and assessing (Inclusive award criteria).

5. Contracting and monitoring (Active oversight of KPIs).

Establishing clear statutory requirements prevents generic social value statements in bids and ensures commitments lead to measurable improvements on site.

A call for conscious rebuilding

Addressing these challenges is essential for the industry's future stability. Delivering major housing and infrastructure targets while managing a quarter of a million worker shortage requires moving away from fragmented, short-term employment models toward a more stable site culture.

We encourage policymakers to collaborate with evidence-led, ground-up initiatives to strengthen our workplace foundations. By embedding lived-experience data within statutory frameworks, the built environment sector can build a more equitable, resilient workforce for the long term.

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