For years, the construction skills shortage conversation has centred on the usual suspects: bricklayers, carpenters, electricians. Roofers and scaffolders rarely got top billing. That's changed. Across trade body reports and employer surveys published through 2026, both trades are now being flagged as facing some of the most serious recruitment risk in the entire sector, and the reasons behind it are worth understanding, because they're not going away.
The numbers are stark
Start with scaffolding. The National Access and Scaffolding Confederation's Skills Gap Report 2026, the first detailed workforce snapshot of its kind for the sector, found that 56% of member firms currently have at least one vacancy, averaging 4.4 open roles per business. Scale that across the wider industry and NASC estimates as many as 40,000 scaffolding and access roles could need filling in the coming years, driven by a combination of near-term recruitment (83% of member firms plan to hire in 2026 alone) and looming retirements, with around 7% of the current workforce expected to leave through retirement within four years, more than 1,400 experienced scaffolders from NASC member companies alone.
Roofing tells a similar story. The National Federation of Roofing Contractors has reported 45% of roofing companies struggling to hire qualified staff, while the FMB and CIOB's State of Trade Survey found 32% of firms citing roofers as hard to recruit, up sharply from 21% just two years earlier. Separate industry estimates put current roofer vacancies at around 3,000 nationally, a relatively small number in isolation, but one that understates the risk given how few new entrants are coming through behind the existing workforce.
Why both trades are being hit at once
Demand is coming from more directions than it used to. Roofing isn't just about weatherproofing new homes anymore. Solar PV installation, increasingly frequent extreme weather driving repair and maintenance work, and large-scale remediation programmes following the Building Safety Act have all added to demand that traditional new-build roofing alone never generated. Scaffolding faces the same pattern from a different angle: it's the trade that sits underneath almost every other type of project, refurbishment, remediation, maintenance, new build and infrastructure all require access and scaffolding capacity, so a shortage here doesn't just affect one part of the industry, it creates a bottleneck for everyone working above it.
Both trades carry safety-critical status that limits how fast supply can scale. Scaffolding and roofing aren't roles where a business can simply take on inexperienced labour and get productive output quickly. Competence and training, through routes like CISRS for scaffolders, take real time to build, and the consequences of under-qualified workers in either trade are serious enough that cutting corners isn't a viable response to the shortage. NASC has been explicit that developing new entrants takes time, and has raised the prospect of needing short-term migration support to bring in experienced scaffolders from overseas while the domestic training pipeline catches up.
The workforce is ageing out faster than it's being replaced, and immigration routes haven't compensated. Roofing was added to the UK's skilled worker visa immigration salary list in April 2024, specifically framed as a way to boost remediation capacity following the Grenfell Tower Inquiry's phase two report. Yet by early 2026, Construction News reported that only 38 people had actually been granted the right to work in the UK under that route since it opened, a strikingly small number against a shortage measured in the thousands, suggesting the policy lever exists but isn't yet translating into meaningful workforce growth.
Falling vacancy numbers elsewhere in construction are masking, not solving, this problem. It's tempting to read a cooling construction market as evidence that skills pressure is easing. It isn't. Structural shortages in specific trades persist, and in some cases worsen, even while overall advertised vacancies fall, because much of the workforce sits outside standard employment (subcontracted, self-employed, agency-supplied) and because falling vacancy adverts often reflect employer caution rather than reduced underlying need.
What this means for employers
For contractors and clients, both trades now carry genuine programme risk, not just a hiring inconvenience. A shortage of scaffolders can hold up access-dependent work across an entire site regardless of how well-staffed every other trade is, and a shortage of roofers can directly delay watertight handover on housing and remediation schemes already under pressure to deliver. Businesses relying on ad hoc, last-minute recruitment for either trade are increasingly competing for a shrinking pool of experienced, qualified workers at exactly the moment demand from housing, remediation and renewable installation is converging.
The businesses managing this well are building longer-term pipelines: structured relationships with CISRS-accredited training providers, apprenticeship investment specifically targeted at these trades rather than assumed to happen organically, and recruitment partners who understand the safety-critical qualification requirements well enough to source genuinely competent workers quickly, not just available ones.
The takeaway
Roofers and scaffolders have moved from background concern to front-line risk in the space of a couple of years, driven by a genuine convergence of rising demand, an ageing workforce, slow-moving immigration routes, and training pipelines that can't be rushed without compromising safety. It's not a shortage that resolves itself as the wider market cools; if anything, the data suggests it's getting worse. At Caval, we work with clients across Trades & Labour to build the kind of sustained, qualification-led pipelines these trades genuinely need, rather than scrambling to fill safety-critical roles at the point a project is already at risk.