IN Brief:
- The plan addresses workforce development, leadership, training, net zero and procurement across heritage and traditional construction.
- Traditional buildings represent around 20% of UK building stock, including approximately six million homes.
- Initial interventions include travel support of up to £335, workforce-pipeline research and new competence work.
CITB has launched an industry-led skills plan for heritage and traditional construction, bringing employers, training providers and sector organisations together around shortages in specialist repair, maintenance, improvement and retrofit capability. The RMI Heritage and Traditional Build Sector Skills Plan identifies workforce development, sector leadership, training provision, net zero and climate change, and procurement as its five priority areas.
The programme has been led by the National Federation of Builders and developed with employers, heritage organisations, education providers and wider construction bodies. It forms part of CITB’s wider Sector Skills Plan model, under which individual parts of the industry develop targeted interventions around their own recruitment, competence and training requirements.
The heritage programme addresses a sizeable part of the existing built environment. CITB says traditionally constructed buildings, generally those dating from before 1919, account for around 20% of UK building stock. That includes approximately six million homes and more than a third of commercial properties.
Maintaining those buildings requires skills that do not always sit comfortably within mainstream new-build training. Traditional masonry, timber, roofing, finishes and building-fabric systems can respond differently to modern materials and construction details, making specialist knowledge particularly important when existing structures are being repaired or altered.
Energy improvement adds another layer. The plan links heritage competence with retrofit because the pressure to improve operational performance applies to older buildings as well as recent stock. Interventions therefore have to combine conservation knowledge with an understanding of insulation, ventilation, moisture and building physics rather than treating heritage work and net-zero delivery as separate labour markets.
CITB has allocated £3.8m across the broader RMI Sector Skills Plan, which covers domestic retrofit as well as heritage and traditional buildings. The heritage strand is intended to operate as a live programme rather than conclude with publication of a strategy document, allowing projects to change as training demand, regulation and market conditions develop.
One of the first interventions is an upskilling travel-support pilot. Employees of eligible CITB levy-registered companies undertaking specialist heritage and traditional-building training can receive reimbursement of up to £335 towards travel and accommodation where suitable courses are not available locally.
The measure addresses a practical problem created by the specialist nature of the market. Courses serving comparatively small occupational groups cannot be provided economically in every region, leaving employers facing additional cost if workers have to travel significant distances for training. The pilot will test whether reducing that burden increases participation.
A separate feasibility study with Historic England will examine whether better information about the future heritage-work pipeline could give employers more confidence to recruit and train. Conservation and traditional-building workloads can be fragmented between private owners, local authorities, national bodies, estates and grant-funded projects, making future demand more difficult to forecast than in sectors dominated by larger programmes.
Greater visibility could influence decisions around apprenticeships, recruitment and investment in specialist training. A contractor is more likely to develop a capability if it can see a sustained workload beyond a single restoration project, particularly where the training is expensive or takes experienced workers away from live contracts.
The National Federation of Builders is also establishing a National Heritage Skills Forum to improve coordination, while work on competence frameworks and skills and knowledge statements is intended to provide clearer expectations for occupations working on traditional buildings.
Tim Balcon, chief executive of CITB, said the plan had been developed “by the industry, for the industry”, bringing together employers, training providers and stakeholder organisations to identify the actions required to strengthen the workforce.
James M. Butcher, deputy chief executive of the NFB and industry chair of the heritage plan, has highlighted the scale of the underlying workload, noting the proportion of both housing and commercial property built using traditional methods. Repair, maintenance, renovation, retrofit and adaptation all draw on that same specialist supply chain.
The distinction matters because heritage construction is sometimes presented as a niche centred on listed landmarks. Much of the actual market is more routine: maintaining and adapting ordinary homes, commercial properties and civic buildings whose age and construction methods require different technical decisions from modern equivalents.
The plan now gives that market a defined set of interventions rather than another skills-gap diagnosis. Travel support, competence work, pipeline research and an industry forum all provide measurable programmes whose use and outcomes can be assessed.
Employer participation will determine whether those interventions gain traction. The first phase will test whether businesses use the training support, contribute to the demand research and engage with new competence requirements. For a sector responsible for maintaining a substantial proportion of the UK’s existing building stock, the longer-term requirement is a workforce capable of combining traditional construction knowledge with the increasing technical demands of retrofit and building-performance improvement.
