The knock-on effect is that rail loses or fails to develop the skills required to deliver projects such as HS2 and Crossrail 2.
Says the report: “The ambitious upgrade and enlargement of the UK’s rail infrastructure has the potential to drive economic expansion and provide employment opportunities for thousands of people for years to come.
“However, the future success of the rail industry is inextricable from the continuity of funding - and thus project flow - provided principally by Network Rail. This is because the investments required of its supply chain partners in existing and future skills, as well as in R&D and critical strategic equipment, cannot be justified without greater demand visibility and certainty.
“The projected stop-go pattern of the project pipeline - a function of Network Rail’s funding model and, in a way, its perceived performance - must be addressed and resolved as a matter of urgency. This will require the examination of better partnership ways of working, which are already proving more efficient, as well as potentially more innovative sources of funding.
“Otherwise, skilled engineers - be they about to retire, much in demand by other industries, aspiring recruits or foreign workers - will be lost to sectors with more reliable, steady pipelines of work. The same forces will also restrict investment in new innovation and productivity.
“Such loss would intensify the already serious constraints facing the rail industry and put in question the efficient delivery of the Government’s intended infrastructure enhancements, with all their benefits.”
Robertson is in agreement with this. He says that we have a problem in this industry investing in our people and innovative technologies because we lack the confidence - there are too many peaks and troughs in work, and this is exacerbated further down the supply chain. For Robertson, this is a key area where he wants NSAR to help, by providing data.
NSAR has been tasked by the industry with setting up a strategic forecasting model to measure, monitor and manage the national skills supply and demand, and provide intelligence by business unit, project, skill set or geography to inform investment needs.
This will allow the industry to establish a baseline, factoring age, gender and the skills profile of the current workforce. It will analyse expected rail investment, changes in technology and productivity gains, to understand future demand.
The Government has set a challenge to create 30,000 new apprenticeships in transport by 2020 (20,000 of them expected to be from the rail sector). Achieving this will require a proactive approach to changing the perceptions people have of the industry, particularly to encourage a more diverse intake than our current make-up. So what is this baseline study, and how will it help to achieve this goal?
“It is the biggest ever skills study,” explains Robertson. “This is a report which will be a cut of the data as of today. There are very few surprises, which is good because we’ve validated that a lot of our assumptions are correct.”
At the time of speaking to RailReview the baseline was not yet published, so Robertson would not be drawn on the finer details of its content. But he did say that it will contain some encouraging signs - it is certainly not all ‘doom and gloom’, with positive indications on gender and skill levels.
The baseline will give us the best database we have ever had, allowing us to answer just about any question on today’s workforce and our future needs. The idea is that every year, we measure ourselves against the baseline to establish how far we have come and how much further we have to go.
The accuracy with which future demand can be identified will tail off through the years, because projects tend to be signed off five years in advance, but even allowing for that, the rail sector already has more clarity on future demand than any other industry.
Understanding where the peaks and troughs are in demand for skills across different sectors would allow the Treasury to build a picture of the whole construction industry, enabling it to commission work for a sector experiencing a trough while there is a peak elsewhere. Of course, this will only help with the non-specific skills - it will make little difference to the ebb and flow of demand for rail-specific skills.
This becomes all the more important because the roads, energy, telecoms and house building sectors are also experiencing growth and skills shortages. The concrete pourers, welders, plant drivers, bridge builders and road builders of this world will all be needed… by all of us. And Brexit is only going to make that worse.
Says Robertson: “Up to half the workforce (around 46%) in the southern half of the country are from a non-UK EU background. This has been confirmed by all kinds of construction surveys. How many of them are going to go or stay after Brexit? Who knows. There are some that have already gone.
“In the Autumn Statement, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) prediction showed that the EU workforce will approximately halve. That means we could lose a quarter of our workforce. That’s both bad and good. It’s good because it creates opportunities for local youngsters to get good, well-paid work. It’s bad because we’re not training local youngsters at anything like the rate.”
