A zad Azam is the founder of Design Plan Build (DPB), a £1.3m-turnover contractor which builds mostly small housing schemes in London. Over the past six weeks he has been trying to increase his 16-strong workforce by 11 to take on a larger project than usual, a 47-home apartment scheme in Walthamstow. He had already priced his bid based on his expectations of how much it would cost to hire the extra workers, but the post-lockdown labour market had other ideas. "We just can't get them," he says. "The prices that people are asking now, and the amount that we'll need to pay to get people to leave where they're working and come to us, makes it uneconomical." Last week, he met the client and said that he would have to turn the job down because he could not get the resources. "There's a massive, massive labour shortage," he says. A few weeks ago, three skilled workers joined the team from another firm. They had left their previous jobs when their boss refused to give them a pay rise. Three days after arriving at DPB, their previous employer relented and offered them the salaries they wanted - which Azam says were above £40,000. "I can't pay you that," Azam told them. "I thought they might be calling my bluff. So they left."
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