Jocelyne Fleming, CIOB policy and public affairs lead for Scotland and David Kirby, CIOB policy and public affairs lead for Wales, discuss what the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) wants to see following the Scottish and Welsh government elections
With elections approaching at both Holyrood and the Senedd, the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) has published two national manifestos setting out what the next Scottish and Welsh Governments must do to better support their built environment sectors.
While the policy contexts diffescotr, the underlying issues are strikingly similar. Both nations face complex, interlinked barriers to increasing housing supply, meeting climate change targets, improving building safety, and addressing inequality. In both countries, delivery is being undermined by a policymaking approach that remains too fragmented to match the scale of the challenges ahead.
Ambitious targets can be achieved with the right methods
Successive governments in both jurisdictions have rightly set ambitious objectives for net zero, housing, building safety, and the Just Transition. However, ambition alone is not enough. Achieving these objectives will depend on whether the systems that underpin delivery are fit for purpose.
Concerningly, policy is too often developed and implemented in siloes, by portfolio, by programme, or by individual funding stream, without sufficient regard for how decisions in one part of government affect outcomes elsewhere. In the built environment, this fragmentation has real-world consequences. Well-intentioned policies fail to land, delivery slows, costs rise, and households are left dealing with the fallout.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in efforts to improve the quality, safety and energy performance of existing buildings. Retrofitting homes, maintaining ageing stock, addressing fuel poverty, responding to safety risks, and delivering net zero cannot be treated as discrete challenges. They are deeply interconnected. Policies on heat, housing supply, skills, building standards, local government capacity, and funding design all interact, and when they are misaligned, progress stalls.
Though not without its own challenges, the industry is not the limiting factor. The construction sectors in Scotland and Wales are willing and capable partners. The challenges stem from the absence of a coherent, system-wide framework that enables delivery at pace and scale.
CIOB’s Scottish and Welsh manifestos respond to this shared problem from two national perspectives. Together, they make a simple case: if governments want better outcomes, they need to move away from siloed approaches and towards whole-system policymaking.
Scotland: From ambition to delivery
Scotland approaches this election facing profound and interconnected challenges: a formally declared housing emergency; ambitious climate change targets; and the need to deliver a Just Transition that works for people and communities across the country. Each of these objectives depends, fundamentally, on a well-functioning built environment and a construction sector that is properly supported to deliver.
The manifesto sets out three clear priority areas where CIOB believes urgent, cross-portfolio action is needed from the next Scottish Government to better support the nation’s construction and built environment sector. The three priorities relate to retrofitting and energy efficiency, the construction skills gap, and building quality and safety.
CIOB’s manifesto priorities and recommendations for the next Scottish Government are:
Priority 1 – Retrofit and energy efficiency
- Establish a Ministerial Oversight Group on Retrofit
- Develop a National Retrofit Delivery and Resource Plan
Priority 2 – Skills in the construction sector
Develop a Construction Skills Action Plan which:
- takes a long-term, demand-led view of skills needs across the built environment
- aligns education policy, funding, and curriculum provision with delivery requirements
- addresses barriers to apprenticeships for both employers and learners
- supports upskilling of the existing workforce, including green and retrofit skills
Priority 3 - Building quality and safety
- Establish clear frameworks for building safety and maintenance
- Explore a demolition levy to fund urgent safety and maintenance works and incentivise repair, maintenance and improvement works, in addition to addressing VAT-related cost imbalances
Wales: Aligning housing, decarbonisation and delivery
The importance of the built environment continues to be acknowledged by policymakers of all levels and members of the public across Wales. However, since the last Senedd election in 2021, the sector has continued to face challenges.
The growing skills gap and recruitment issues , alongside continued high energy, material, and labour costs, and a tough wider economy, mean the sector in Wales struggles compared to the rest of the UK, and many construction companies have ceased trading as a result. This is particularly negatively impacting SMEs, which make up the majority of the Welsh construction sector.
As such, the CIOB’s manifesto for the next Welsh Government sets out five clear priority areas where we believe action is needed to better support the nation’s construction and built environment sector. These priorities relate to retrofitting, including its delivery and funding, procurement processes for public works, and the construction skills gap.
CIOB’s manifesto priorities and recommendations for the next Welsh Government are:
Priority 1 – Retrofit and climate
- Develop and implement a retrofit plan for the private housing market, including owner-occupiers
- Develop an environmental remediation and mitigation plan to protect the wider built environment and the people who use it from extreme weather events.
Priority 2 – Financing of retrofit measures
- Create financial incentives for retrofit measures for all housing tenures and types, such as a zero-interest ‘Help to Fix’ loan.
Priority 3 – Procurement
- Improve procurement processes for public work, including tender processes and ensure they contain realistic time and cost aims
- Ensure processes are fair to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Priority 4 – Recruiting people into construction
- Adopt a more holistic view of construction skills, shifting the focus from just getting young people into the sector, to encouraging people of all ages and backgrounds into the sector
- Work with the construction sector to improve training and retention of construction professionals from a range of backgrounds, for example, ex-offenders and asylum-seekers.
Priority 5 – Construction skills survey
- Conduct a skills survey across Wales to identify what skills are needed and where to provide a clear picture and inform future decisions around training provision and funding.
Supporting the built environment sectors in Wales and Scotland
The construction and built environment sectors in Scotland and Wales face distinct political contexts, unique challenges, and navigate different policy landscapes and delivery structures. However, they also face similarly complex, interrelated challenges and are constrained by a common problem: policy ambition outpacing delivery capability.
The quality, safety, and performance of the built environment shape health outcomes, fuel poverty rates, economic opportunity, and community resilience. Siloed policy approaches continue to create long-term consequences for the sector and, from there, for homes and buildings across both nations.
The priorities outlined across the two manifestos, if addressed by their respective next Governments, will go a long way toward cutting consumer energy bills and reducing rates of fuel poverty, decarbonising the built environment to meet climate targets, getting more people into work, and, crucially, ensuring everyone has a warm, safe home.
As the next Scottish and Welsh Governments take office, CIOB will continue to advocate for the system-wide reforms needed to turn ambition into delivery. The sector is a willing and capable partner. What it needs in return is a policy framework that reflects the complexity of the tasks it is being asked to achieve. If governments want better outcomes, they must build systems that are designed to deliver them.
CIOB’s Scottish and Welsh manifestos can be downloaded from the website.
