National Association of Shopfitters Annual Lunch

Mr President, Mr Director, esteemed colleagues. Thank you for inviting me to join you today. Before I start, I would like to offer my congratulations to Billy Morgan and Jonathan Craig. It is wonderful to see young people winning awards and particularly heartening to see two people being recognised for such outstanding work. Very well done gentlemen. 

I’d like to start my address today by thanking everyone at the National Association of Shopfitters for inviting me to speak at your Annual lunch and contribute towards your discussion.  I have a very good and close relationship with your Director, Robert Hudson.  We are in regular contact by e-mail and telephone and so it is a great pleasure to be with you today.  I want to share with you all the challenges that we face in today’s fast moving world – not only within the construction industry, but in your important specialist area.

I was supposed to speak to you at this same event last year, but I was ill that day and my speech was delivered by Mike Bialyj.  The industry was then in a time of boom. We needed more and more people to help us meet the demands of our order books. ConstructionSkills was working with employers and federations to make sure they took advantage of the grants that are available to help with training – not just for our existing workforce, but also for the bright new recruits that we would need to join our industry to ensure its future growth and prosperity.

Shortly after I drafted that speech, the global economic climate changed.  Now we are operating in a very different market. As a result, my address to you today is quite different from the one Mike gave for me last year. The UK is in recession and the effects have had a significant impact on the commercial and retail sectors. It has quite literally sent shockwaves through our industry. Times are hard. The recession has left many sectors stagnant and uncertain and I know that everyone in this room has been affected in one way or another.

Whilst we recognise that times have changed, as the Sector Skills Council and Industry Training Board for the construction industry, it is our job to make sure that we do not falter or stray from our ultimate goal of achieving a safe, professional and fully qualified workforce.  We must get through these hard times together so that we can pick up where we left off when the upturn happens.  We certainly can not afford to be left behind.

Despite our current problems, Government spending remains strong.  Some projects are hopefully being brought forward to limit the effects of the recession and we expect there to be an average annual growth of 0.5% in construction output over the next four years - a different picture to that which we were expecting last year, but growth all the same.

This means that we can not afford to be complacent or use the downturn as an excuse to reduce our training budgets. Opportunities and challenges lie ahead and we must meet them head on. Our findings from the ConstructionSkills Network report tells us that even now, we still need an average of 37,000 people every year for the next four years to work on upcoming construction projects. This is still a significant requirement.

Furthermore, research from the UK Commission for Employment and Skills tells us that the UK is facing a demographic change. In the next few years, we will notice a significant reduction in the number of career age young people, and an increase in an older workforce. This means that we will need to shift our focus towards retraining people who are looking for a change of career, as well as training young people who are fresh out of school, college or university.

The conclusions from this summary are easy to see.  We cannot afford to be left behind during these harder times. We must press on, continue to train, innovate and increase our sustainability. This is especially the case in this specialist sector where construction is changing and innovative methods are running at a pace. This has been exacerbated by the downturn and I can say with some certainty that in five years time, construction will be very different. This is not just in terms of methods, but also in processes and it will affect the entire supply chain. We are looking at a range of options at the moment, and I am sure that we will talk with NAS further as the options available to us become clearer.  

Last year Mike spoke on my behalf about the skills shortages in shopfitting.  He listed  what we need to do to widen the pool of recruits and make sure that this sector can attract the best and brightest talent available. I was delighted to hear that this remains a priority for you and your new President, because these are our priorities too. We will continue to strive to meet the needs of our industry.

When the upturn happens, there will be shops, major stores and other retail outlets all over the country that will need your specialist crafts and skills.  We must use innovative and sustainable methods to help us deliver on time and on budget. The retail market has always been intensely competitive - particularly now - and retailers will increasingly look to you to help them stand out in a revolutionised retail environment. Successful companies will need to use innovative construction methods and be sustainable to be able to provide the service required in the new marketplace.

Before these difficult times hit our industry, we were working closely with NAS on a number of projects and this will continue. In the last year we provided funding to NAS for the development of a façade engineer working on behalf of Norking Aluminium Limited, which would help to avoid delays and expense in using external engineers. (The Waste project was terminated and no monies were drawn down against it.)  We also worked with you to produce a DVD to assist project managers to deliver essential health and safety, as part of the induction process for staff members working on site. We supported an NAS member to undertake IT software training to control project finances and estimating costs. We also have supported a number of companies training in Auto CAD.

What’s more, we also have the continued presence of the CITB-ConstructionSkills Levy and Grant system – which is vital, especially in these times, in providing grants to support important federations such as yourselves, whilst also helping employers to continue to train and increase the competitiveness of their firm.

This is just a snap shot of the extensive programme of work that we have achieved together so far.  I know from Robert  that NAS are starting to see the fruits of our partnership. We have made good progress over the years and I hope that in the not too distant future we are able to talk less about what we want to achieve and more about what we have achieved, including an innovative, sustainable and highly qualified workforce.

This takes me back to the point I made when I started my address.  And I refer once again to Billy and Jonathan. My role, as Chairman of ConstructionSkills and yours, as the National Association of Shopfitters, is to help train the construction workers and shop fitters of the future. I always take pleasure in looking at the competition pieces that our apprentices have produced – because in those pieces you can see the skills that have been passed down from generation to generation. In the early days, those skills would have included shaping a piece of stone or wood. Today, they include using complex tools and pieces of machinery to create something special. Something which will be around for generations to come for people to admire. It is this that sets our industry aside. It is this that makes our industry special and it is for this reason that I am committed to ensuring that the construction workers and shop fitters of the future have the best training possible.

Mr President, Mr Director, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your hospitality today and for your attention. I look forward to continuing our relationship and working with you for the benefit of our industry in the coming year.  Yours is a vital sector.  I am glad that we are working so closely together today.