The road to Economic Sovereignty: Building Bradford’s Future Through a Construction Skills Revolution

In our previous piece, we asked a question: Is Bradford risking sleepwalking into servitude? The city’s regeneration, while long overdue, risks turning it into a commuter outpost unless it is grounded in autonomy, economic sovereignty, and local empowerment.

Nowhere is this more urgent—or more tangible—than in the construction skills agenda.

Regeneration Cannot Be Outsourced

If cranes and concrete are the currency of regeneration, skills are its true capital. And yet, across the UK, major development projects are often delivered by external contractors, with labour imported from outside regions. The result? Regeneration that builds over local communities rather than with them.

Bradford has already started to break this cycle.

With over £4 billion in pipeline development—including new homes, transport hubs, public realm improvements, and commercial spaces—the opportunity is vast. But unless we cultivate a homegrown construction workforce, we will have built a new city that too few Bradfordians had a hand in shaping.

Too often in regeneration schemes, the answer comes from outside the local economy. Contractors win the work, workers commute in, and once the scaffolding comes down, little long-term value is left behind for the community. That must change. And in Bradford, it can and already has started, with the majority of the workforce renovating Bradford Live living within a 10mile radius of the city centre.

Bradford has a powerhouse at the heart of its skills ecosystem: Bradford College.

🛠️ A Construction Powerhouse

Bradford College is not just another further education institution. It is the highest-performing FE college in West Yorkshire — and already supports over 1,500 people a year in construction skills training, leading to careers in the built environment. From bricklayers and electricians to civil engineers and site managers, it is growing the very talent base that the Northern Powerhouse needs.

But here’s the challenge: Bradford College is at capacity.

Demand now outpaces resources, there are four applications for every place available. With significant construction activity projected across the north — including Mass Transit systems, Northern Rail, and urban regeneration across Bradford, Leeds, and Manchester — we are facing a workforce bottleneck. Unless investment flows into the skills infrastructure now, we will miss this once-in-a-generation opportunity to truly localise growth.

🎯 Investment, Not Just Intent

To realise the full potential of Bradford College as a Construction Powerhouse, targeted investment is essential. This includes:

• Modernising and expanding training facilities to accommodate future demand
• The acceleration of the college’s curriculum strategy to deliver funded, specialist training in green construction, retrofit, digital construction, and modern methods of manufacturing
• Creating pathways from school to high-level technical roles through apprenticeships and higher technical qualifications
• Attracting more women and underrepresented groups into the construction sector through outreach and inclusive curriculum design

A properly funded and empowered college will not only meet Bradford’s needs — it will power the Northern Powerhouse’s wider ambitions.

📍 Regional Growth Starts at Street Level

Construction skills are foundational. You can’t level up a region with plans on paper — you need planners, grounds workers, steelworkers, joiners, designers, and skilled tradespeople trained and ready. This is why Bradford’s regeneration should place the development of local people at its core, not its periphery.

Bradford College isn’t just ready to deliver — it’s already doing it. What it needs now is the backing, vision, and investment from government, industry, and regional partners to go further and at pace.

🧱 Build People, Not Just Places

Regeneration is about more than buildings. It’s about people. And if we fail to equip our own communities with the tools to rebuild their city, we will have squandered more than funding — we will have missed the opportunity to make regeneration truly generational. With the highest rate of 18-24 year olds unemployed in the country and swathes of underemployment Bradford needs this investment now.

Bradford can be a builder of its future — not a backdrop to someone else’s. But only if we invest in the institutions, like Bradford College, that are already laying the foundations.