Q&A

A report out this month reveals that labour shortages could grow so fast that within five years there will not be enough skilled professionals to deliver sustainable communities.

By 2012, the Academy for Sustainable Communities (ASC) study Mind the Skills Gap predicts that regeneration professionals will be 73% understaffed. Meanwhile, the South-east will suffer a 29% shortage of people qualified to work in creating a sustainable community. Despite progress in this field, the report shows that the shortage is getting worse. But Professor Peter Roberts, chair of the ASC, argues the situation is not as bad as it seems.

Why does the country suffer such a major skills gap?

Demography is against us at the moment as the sustainable communities professions suffer from an ageing population. In the 1980s, local authorities took a battering and subsequently nobody wanted to work there. Now we've got a missing generation. As the older people leave the profession, there is no-one to fill their place.

Is it still difficult to recruit?

There is an historic image problem that doesn't easily go away. However, we are actively involved with people at all levels of the education system from 12 year olds to post-graduate level.

So why is there still such a huge skills gap?

This isn’t something where you can just phone up Superman and it will be sorted out. It takes a long time to develop and recruit for a post-graduate course and we are making sure we respond to the right issues. The key is to equip people with more generic skills, what we call greater common connectors, so that if there is an over supply in one sector, they can re-train more readily and plug a gap.

How can the public sector stop private companies from poaching the best people?

At the ASC we can't direct people to work in the public, private or voluntary sector – we just have to make sure there are sufficient people in total. There is great mythology that there is one-way traffic to the private sector but there isn’t. The report acts as a reality check but we are making great inroads on this issue. We just can’t take our eye off the ball.