No more delays
Mark Spence, Chief Executive of the Construction Employers Federation, and Fionnuala McKenna, Head of Strategic Development for Construction Futures, the CEF’s skills and careers spin-off, meet with Joshua Murray to discuss the infrastructure, housing, and skills challenges facing Northern Ireland, and what they want to see from the next Executive.
With eight months to go until a new Assembly is elected, the Northern Ireland construction sector is demanding that, with a new mandate, the next Executive must deliver the long-term investment and political stability required to unlock the infrastructure and housing delivery needed to support economic growth.
The Construction Employers Federation’s (CEF) manifesto for the 2027 Assembly election sets out eight priorities ranging from water and wastewater infrastructure to skills, housing, planning, and the Executive’s spending power. Its central argument is that continued delay will increase costs, constrain housing delivery, and hold back economic development.
For CEF Chief Executive Mark Spence, however, one challenge stands above all others. “The most important and pressing issue for the next Assembly is the funding of infrastructure for water and wastewater.”
The challenge, he argues, extends far beyond the construction sector. Constraints on Northern Ireland’s water network are preventing homes from being built, deterring foreign investment, limiting economic development and increasingly affecting the delivery of wider public infrastructure. He believes each of these impacts has knock-ons for the cost of living which arises from a much more complex set of circumstances than often portrayed by politicians diverting from making difficult decisions.
“Water unlocks every other sector. Without water, we do not meet our housing targets. Without water, we will not be able to build the schools that we need, the health facilities we need or the commercial and industrial premises to support good jobs, and that is before we even start to contemplate the worsening environmental impacts.”
The CEF’s manifesto calls for a legally binding commitment to fund Northern Ireland Water’s PC28 settlement at the level determined by the Utility Regulator, alongside an Infrastructure Levy and a regional deal with the UK Government for an Infrastructure Transformation Fund.
The CEF argues that such investment is essential if Northern Ireland is to meet its housing requirements.
Spence points to a sharp decline in housebuilding from the levels seen during the early 2000s, when around 15,000 homes were being built annually, to roughly 5,000 to 6,000 in recent years. The CEF is calling for a minimum of 10,000 new homes a year for the next 15 years, including around 2,000 social homes annually, targets not dissimilar to those of the Executive.
“There is zero chance of us meeting those targets in the future unless we invest in water now,” he says.
The scale of the blockage is illustrated by the number of homes already held up by some level of infrastructure constraint. Spence restates official estimates that around 55,000 potential new homes are, in some way, stalled while over 50,000 people remain on the social housing waiting list, a figure he describes as “scandalous”.
“We have developers wanting to build homes, and a system which says they cannot,” he says. “So, the solution is money. Yes, the solution is thinking of new ways of funding, but it actually first requires those in power to engage seriously in having those conversations. Presently they will not, nor do they present alternative solutions, so we make no progress.”
Long-term planning
The CEF’s main argument is that the Executive is failing to plan long-term infrastructure through disagreements over short-term budgets and investments focused on short electoral cycles.
Without even the current year budget agreed, the CEF is calling for a multi-year capital budget to 2030, arguing that greater certainty would allow government to plan projects more efficiently while giving construction companies the confidence to invest in people, equipment, and capacity.
At present, Spence says, the industry is effectively “living hand to mouth”, adding: “The purpose of a multi-year budget is to give all stakeholders confidence to map out a plan.”
For Fionnuala McKenna, Construction Futures’ Head of Strategic Development, the workforce implications are particularly significant: “Construction companies cannot recruit and train effectively if they do not know what work will be available beyond the next few months. While larger contractors can have greater capacity to absorb uncertainty, smaller companies may only be looking three to six months ahead.”
McKenna argues that a multi-year budget would allow the industry to identify future projects, better understand the occupations and skills required to deliver them, and build the workforce accordingly. “We need to move away from reacting to skills shortages and towards longer-term workforce planning,” she says.
The demand for local skills is fuelled partly by the pull of more attractive and profitable pipelines of work beyond these shores that means many young people trained locally are lost to the local economy. Additionally, companies headquartered in the region have substantial workforces operating in Great Britain and the Republic, including on major projects such as data centres.
“If there was enough secure work in Northern Ireland, that would be a much more attractive proposition than local skilled trades people having to work elsewhere,” she says.
The CEF is also calling for the Executive to finalise and publish its long-awaited Investment Strategy to 2050 and establish an independent Infrastructure Commission to take the politics out of key infrastructure-related decisions. The manifesto identifies the strategy as a means of providing greater certainty around major projects and investment priorities.
Spence describes the strategy as important, but lacking ambition. “It is not something we are excited about for what is in it. But we are keen to see it published just for the certainty that it provides.”
Skills challenges
Construction continues to experience shortages in specialist trades, particularly wet trades such as bricklayers and plasterers. At the same time, the transition towards net zero is creating new demand for electricians and workers with skills in areas such as solar installation, electric vehicle charging, and retrofit.
Digitalisation is also changing the sector, creating new opportunities in areas such as digital construction, project management and other technologies.
McKenna argues that the issue is not a lack of data, but turning it into meaningful workforce intelligence. “We hear headline figures about how many additional construction workers we need, but we need to get underneath that. What occupations are needed, where and when, and what projects are driving that demand?”
Construction Futures believes information from the CEF’s Construction Skills Register, alongside data from CITB, the Department for the Economy, and other bodies could be better joined together to provide a clearer picture of future workforce needs.
“Our frustration as an organisation is with the Executive level because that is the place where the vital strategic decisions will need to be agreed.”
Mark Spence, Chief Executive, Construction Employers Federation
The industry is simultaneously trying to attract new workers. Through Construction Futures initiatives including Open Doors, and STEMstruct programmes, the CEF has sought to challenge perceptions of construction as an industry limited to traditional site-based roles.
“There will always be the hard hats and traditional site-based roles, but construction is so much broader than that. What we are trying to do is really show all the different careers and opportunities within the sector.”
That also means reaching a more diverse workforce. Construction Futures has already seen online engagement from women more than double, and working with industry, initiatives such as Building Respect are focused on supporting the culture change needed to attract and retain a more diverse workforce.
Attracting people, however, is only part of the challenge. Retaining them and ensuring employers can provide meaningful training opportunities is equally important. That is particularly apparent in apprenticeships.
While larger contractors are seeing strong demand for higher-level apprentices and in some cases approaching capacity, smaller companies can struggle to take on apprentices because of the cost involved and limited certainty around future work available.
McKenna says feedback from employers suggests that the overall cost of employing and training an apprentice can reach £30,000 a year once wages, equipment, training, and other expenses are taken into account.
For a small business, that can represent a substantial barrier, particularly in a sector where almost 90 per cent of construction employers have fewer than 10 employees. While government is actively promoting apprenticeships, growing demand needs to be matched by the capacity and support for employers to provide those opportunities. The CEF’s manifesto therefore calls for a streamlined and supported entry pathway into construction, with reduced administrative burdens and targeted incentives to help SMEs take on apprentices and new entrants.
The CEF also wants to revisit how the apprenticeship levy operates in Northern Ireland. Spence estimates that around £80 million is lost by Northern Ireland employers through the UK-wide levy that goes to Westminster and returns through the Barnett formula rather than being ringfenced for training.
He argues that this money could be used more effectively to address local skills shortages.
McKenna points to the flexibility introduced in England through the Growth and Skills Levy as an example of how the system could evolve.
“There is a real opportunity to look at how skills funding in Northern Ireland could be structured more effectively, particularly to support employers to create and sustain apprenticeship opportunities.”
Political stability
Underlying the CEF’s concerns about infrastructure and skills development is a broader frustration with political instability.
Construction projects operate on timescales that extend well beyond electoral cycles. Spence argues that Northern Ireland’s political system has repeatedly struggled to match the long-term nature of infrastructure planning.
“Construction does not operate in four- or five-year cycles and it requires long-term planning and long-term vision.”
The manifesto therefore places political stability at the top of its list of priorities, calling for an updated draft Programme for Government to be agreed before the end of May 2027 and for consideration of institutional reforms aimed at improving the functioning of devolved government.
Spence says that delivery of key public infrastructure such as water, roads and public transport have suffered from the long-term political instability arising from repeated Executive collapses. However, he adds that instability is only part of the problem.
“Even when government is operating, political decision-making here has consistently remained too short-term. We are stuck in four-year, five-year cycles, which we do not even normally get to the end of,” he says.
The consequence is what he describes as short-sighted investment in critical infrastructure, leaving Northern Ireland lagging far behind competing regions.
The CEF argues that, if Northern Ireland is to set itself on a path towards economic and fiscal stability, plugging the funding gap must go beyond continually seeking more money from the UK Government, although that would be desirable. Its manifesto calls for consideration of enhanced borrowing, governance changes, and alternative funding mechanisms, including revenue raising such as an infrastructure levy to support investment in wastewater and road tolling.
Spence says the Executive needs to take greater responsibility for its own infrastructure problems while negotiating with the UK Government for additional flexibility and funding. “Given the slim possibilities of extra funding from Westminster, our Executive needs to step up and take responsibility for doing something to help solve our structural problems ourselves,” he says.
Opportunity
Despite the frustration, neither Spence nor McKenna believe that the construction industry is lacking solutions.
McKenna points to the cooperation already taking place between the Construction Futures, CEF, government departments, and education organisations on skills and housing. Spence says officials across all departments broadly share the industry’s concerns and hope that the next administration will be more forward looking and pragmatic.
“Our frustration as an organisation is with the Executive level because that is the place where the vital strategic decisions will need to be agreed.”
Spence therefore believes that, early into a new mandate following the 2027 election that “there is an opportunity with the next Executive, as a collective, to make difficult, bold, and necessary decisions”.
“None of these should be divisive political decisions, but our politicians are fearful to take bold steps without the cover of other parties; we are asking them collectively to step up.”
Vision
The CEF’s priorities converge around creating enough certainty for the construction industry to invest, recruit, and deliver.
In this context, Spence reemphasises the importance of solving Northern Ireland’s wastewater infrastructure shortfall, repeating that “water unlocks every other sector”.
For McKenna, the priority is opening up clearer pathways into construction and giving employers the support to build the workforce Northern Ireland needs to turn its ambitions into reality.
If those two challenges can be addressed, the CEF believes Northern Ireland has the capacity to build the homes, infrastructure, and economic foundations it needs.
