I started as a bricklayer at 16.

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Twenty years on, I run building companies across London and Surrey, and the question I get asked most is the same one: why has building work got so expensive? The honest answer is more interesting than the one you usually hear, so here it is, from someone who's priced the jobs, paid the wages, and bought the materials through all of it. The labour story everyone gets half right, the version you've heard: Brexit and Covid drove out the Eastern European workforce, and prices went up. That's true, but it's only half the story, and it's the less important half.

The numbers are stark. EU workers made up over 40% of London's construction workforce before 2018. Within three years that had collapsed to single digits, and more than 200,000 EU workers have left UK construction since 2019, with post-Brexit visa rules making them almost impossible to replace, because most trades don't meet the salary thresholds.

But here's what Brexit actually did: it ripped away the workforce that had been masking a much older problem.

When I started on site at 16, young lads coming through was normal and how the industry replaced itself. That pipeline has been broken for years. Maybe it's that every kid now thinks they'll make their money on social media instead of on the scaffold,  whatever the reason, they're not turning up. Today, 40% of the construction workforce is over 45, fewer than one in five workers is under 25, and the CITB estimates the industry needs more than 40,000 additional workers every year to the end........

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