The housebuilding and construction industry knows the market is under real pressure. Around 300,000 new homes a year are required to deliver what Britain needs. But we are only building around two-thirds of that, and the pipeline behind that number is shrinking rather than growing. NHBC registered 29,162 new homes in the second quarter of 2026, 4 per cent down on last year, after a 6 per cent fall in the first quarter. Fewer homes registered today means fewer homes completed next year and the year after.

A big part of the issue for developers has been uncertainty. It is harder for prospective buyers to afford their mortgages with rates much higher over the last few years compared to pre-pandemic. Added to this, significant supply cost increases mean the cost of building a house is much higher. With material uncertainty in the system about the viability of new housing, developers are building fewer homes.

Against that backdrop, MHCLG took a significant step under Angela Rayner’s leadership. The 10-year £39bn Social and Affordable Homes Programme will provide funding to support the delivery of around 300,000 new social and affordable homes. Alongside this, Andy Burnham’s ambitious council housebuilding programme, the biggest since the post-war period, will provide much-needed demand certainty for years to come. For the first time in decades, the sector will be able to look at a substantial part of the development pipeline and see funded demand stretching out over ten years. This certainty will support the wider market – from housing associations and councils to builders and training providers and most importantly help more families benefit from the security and stability of a safe, warm home.

Funding creates the pipeline, but skilled workers turn it into homes. The Fabian Society recently highlighted the stark skills challenges facing construction. Tackling the Built Environment Skills Crisis explores issues such as an ageing workforce, the high costs of training and the impact of labour shortages on project delivery and quality. 36 per cent of UK construction workers are over 50, with up to 700,000 expected to retire by the early 2040s – in an industry that has a higher density of skills shortage vacancies than any other.

To make matters worse, only 50 per cent of construction employers reported investing in workforce training during the previous year, with investment per employee also falling by 19 per cent in real terms since 2017.

The National Audit Office, the UK’s independent public spending watchdog, has similar concerns. Increasing Construction Skills shows we need nearly 900,000 extra construction workers to build 1.5m homes, deliver the Warm Homes Plan, and contribute to at least £725bn of infrastructure funding commitments.

More recruits alone will not be enough. High-quality homes require a high-skilled workforce to build them. This has never mattered more, because the homes that will be delivered over the coming decades have to meet stringent quality standards. We are asking for more competence at a time the workforce needs to grow faster than it has in a generation.

NHBC has a distinctive perspective on this. Through our inspections focused on construction quality, and our 90 years of expertise, we see how homes are built and how they perform long after handover. That gives us a practical, long-term view of what drives quality in new homes. Repeatedly, that experience reinforces a simple point: the quality of a home depends on the skill of the people who build it.

With social housing the stakes are higher still. These homes are for people least able to cope when a home performs poorly: a poorly detailed wall or window can become a heating bill a tenant struggles to afford. The aim of the Social and Affordable Homes Programme needs to not just be to build more homes, but to build quality homes that give families everywhere safety, warmth and long-term security.

I have spent my career in insurance and one thing this industry teaches you is to think in years and decades. Viewed over the long term, the idea that speed and quality are competing priorities quickly falls away. Defects identified during construction cause delay; defects discovered years later cost far more. The most efficient way to build is to build right first time, to a high standard – and that starts with skilled people on site.

None of this sits on one set of shoulders. Government has set the ambition and announced policies that will help to give the industry the certainty it needs, through the £625m construction skills package and beyond. Every builder who takes on an apprentice is investing in the whole industry’s future.

Training providers have a responsibility to produce people who are ready for a live site, not just an exam. That matters because a country that values the hard hat as much as the graduation cap must create training routes that lead quickly and credibly into skilled work. That is where NHBC has put its money, firmly backing the government’s ambitions.

We are investing £100m in twelve multi-skill training hubs, developed with partners across the industry, where apprentices train in bricklaying, groundworks, site carpentry and timber frame installation in realistic site conditions, to the same NHBC Standards their work will be inspected against. Through concentrated blocks of learning they qualify in 14 to 18 months, roughly half the time of traditional routes, with achievement, retention and pass rates significantly higher than the national average.

The government has made a serious long-term commitment to social and affordable housebuilding, and should now create a pipeline for the industry to invest in. Only then can the sector have the confidence to begin the necessary hiring, training, and upskilling to produce the homes we need in every postcode.

In June, in Manchester, Andy Burnham set out his economic vision and asked a simple but powerful question: if you do not give people a good home, what chance do they have of a good life? We agree. At NHBC we believe that everyone deserves a quality home.

The Prime Minister is right: everything starts with a good home. Good growth in every postcode will depend on homes that are safe, warm and built to last – and on continued investment in the skills and training needed to build them well.

Paul Turner is the Chief Executive of NHBC, the UK’s leading independent provider of warranty and insurance for new-build homes. NHBC’s purpose is to raise standards in house building by championing high-quality homes and protecting homeowners.

Credit: Unsplash

The conversation around cyber security in critical infrastructure often focuses on preventing attacks, and for infrastructure operators responsible for energy, water, transport and other essential services, that remains an important priority.

However, the challenge has broadened significantly, as the growing convergence of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) reshapes what cyber risk means in practice. Operators are connecting smarter digital systems with ageing infrastructure that was never designed for today’s threat landscape, with the result that as well as greater efficiency, better visibility and improved performance, new vulnerabilities and new forms of risk exposure are entering the picture.

In this changing environment, cyber resilience is increasingly becoming the practical application of cyber security: for operators of critical national infrastructure, the question is no longer only whether an attack can be prevented, but whether essential services can continue to operate safely if systems are compromised, suppliers are disrupted or key operational technologies must be isolated. The ability to maintain services, recover quickly and make effective decisions under pressure has become central.

The growing importance of resilience reflects the reality of the threat landscape. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) handled 204 nationally significant cyber incidents in the year to August 2025, compared with 89 the previous year. Of those, 18 were categorised as highly significant incidents, representing a 50% increase and the third consecutive annual rise.

Resilience as a system challenge

Historically, organisations could focus primarily on protecting their own assets and systems; today, risks increasingly emerge at the points where systems, organisations and supply chains connect.

Critical infrastructure can also no longer be viewed as a collection of discrete assets protected behind a perimeter. It increasingly operates as a connected system made up of operational technology, field devices, cloud platforms, remote access capabilities, data flows and complex supplier ecosystems. Across sectors including energy, water, transport, aviation and telecoms, resilience depends not just on securing individual assets but on understanding how assets, systems and organisations interact.

This is particularly important in the context of critical national infrastructure. Traditional measures of resilience – regulation, standards and guidance – provide a critical baseline and help organisations to establish priorities, improve consistency and strengthen security. The direction of travel is also becoming clearer from a policy perspective. The UK’s Cyber Security and Resilience Bill is expected to strengthen requirements on operators of essential services and certain critical suppliers, extending expectations around incident reporting, risk management and resilience assurance.

However, compliance alone cannot keep pace with a threat landscape that is evolving so rapidly. In an environment shaped by geopolitical tension, supply chain dependency, rapidly evolving digital tools and increasingly capable hostile actors, resilience can no longer be judged solely by whether an organisation has satisfied a compliance requirement. Instead, infrastructure operators must truly understand and continually monitor the threat landscape.

An example is the Volt Typhoon threat actor that compromised multiple US critical infrastructure organisations across sectors including communications, energy, transportation and water. Investigators found evidence that the group had maintained access within some victim environments for as long as five years. The lesson for infrastructure operators is that cyber threats are not always singular events. Adversaries may establish persistent footholds long before disruption occurs, reinforcing the need for continuous monitoring, threat hunting, detection and a clear understanding of how services will continue operating, how decisions will be made under pressure and how recovery will be managed.

Organisations that may see themselves primarily as utilities providers or infrastructure operators are increasingly part of a broader system that supports economic activity, public services and national capability, while governments and organisations are only as strong as the cyber resilience of their suppliers.

Leaders in such organisations can build operational resilience before a cyber incident occurs, by understanding how critical services depend on technology, suppliers, people, physical assets and data, and where failures could create operational or safety consequences. They should be asking challenging questions, both to themselves and their supply chains. What happens if a threat actor gains access to our network? What if a key supplier is compromised? What if we can no longer trust the integrity of our operational data? How would we continue operating in a degraded state for days or weeks while recovery takes place?

Asking the right questions

As organisations increasingly depend on technology partners and software providers to deliver their services, they need to place a greater emphasis on cyber requirements during supplier procurement, assurance and contract management, rather than treating cyber security as a technical issue to be addressed after delivery. This focus on third-party assurance is likely to become even more important as the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill broadens scrutiny of critical suppliers and recognises that national resilience depends not only on operators themselves, but also on the organisations and technologies they rely upon.

Transparency and visibility are key here – many organisations have a strong understanding of their own estate’s strengths and weaknesses but less visibility of the dependencies that sit several tiers down their supply chain. The question they should be asking themselves is no longer “are my systems secure?” but “do I understand all of the systems and suppliers my operations depend on?”.

Investment in technology and compliance remains essential, but clearly, resilience is equally dependent on governance, decision-making, operational preparedness and organisational culture. The strongest organisations are building resilience into every aspect of their operations and their supply chains, with a focus on understanding their dependencies, continually testing their preparedness, strengthening detection and response capabilities, and developing confidence in their ability to recover from disruption.

As our critical infrastructure and the technologies it depends on continues to evolve, behavioural and supply chain resilience will provide the foundation for organisations to adapt and modernise with confidence, while maintaining the trust, reliability and continuity that society expects.

(Alamy)

4 min read13 min

It is an ambitious agenda.

Yet, one policy challenge continues to go unaddressed by Westminster: higher education and how it is funded.

Successive governments have relied on universities to deliver their defining ambitions, while also avoiding the question of how to sustain them.

Boris Johnson wanted universities to help “level up” the country. Rishi Sunak wanted Britain to become a science superpower. Sir Keir Starmer promised to break down barriers to opportunity. Burnham now wants to strengthen technical education, which many universities – including my own – are already delivering at scale.

But while the slogans have changed, the underlying dependence on universities has not, and nor has the underlying funding problem.

Before Labour entered government in 2024, university finances were reportedly included on Sue Gray’s risk register of problems a new administration could inherit. Over two years later, we are still waiting for the government to work with us to find a long-term solution.

Without one, the consequences will be hard to ignore.

More than a third of universities in England reported a deficit in 2024-25, according to the Office for Students. Universities UK also found that 44 per cent of institutions had closed courses over the previous three years, and almost a third had cut their academic research.

This doesn’t mean that every university is struggling financially – we’re not, and we all have a responsibility to manage our finances carefully and demonstrate continued value. But when pressure is widespread enough to alter what we can deliver, it becomes a national policy problem.

Higher education is fundamental to the UK’s economic infrastructure. It supplies the workforce on which our public services and industries depend, provides the research and innovation on which our international competitiveness depends, and supports growth for regions across the UK. London Economics reported the total economic impact of UK higher education is £265bn, which shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Without urgent action, the danger is systemic collapse by attrition. This doesn’t mean universities suddenly disappearing, but instead dispersing the research teams who are close to ground-breaking discoveries; closing courses in sectors with immediate staffing gaps, such as medicine and nursing; and losing our competitive advantage on the global stage.

What can the government do to avoid losing the sector on which it relies so heavily?

The Treasury Committee’s recent report offers a strong and credible starting point. It concluded that students graduating today could ultimately pay as much as 95 per cent of the cost of their higher education in England, and recommended moving, over time, towards a 50:50 balance between the individual and the state.

I support that principle.

Graduates benefit from higher education, and it is right they should contribute towards its cost, but the country benefits equally, too. If governments continue to depend on universities to realise their policy ambitions, the state should contribute directly.

The committee is also right that the student finance system needs to regain trust. The government should reverse the repayment threshold freeze, replace RPI with CPI when calculating interest and give future borrowers protection against retrospective changes to the terms on which they took out their loans. Young people shouldn’t enter a significant, long-term financial commitment only to find the terms becoming less favourable after the event.

Reassuringly, Education Secretary Lucy Powell has recognised the need for action and said that student loans are at the top of her in-tray. But what matters now is whether this recognition turns into tangible action. There is an opportunity to do what successive governments have failed to do, and fund higher education in line with the role we expect it to play.

If he wants to realise his ambitions for the UK, Burnham can no longer afford to leave higher education funding unresolved.

Professor Koen Lamberts is Vice Chancellor at the University of Sheffield