At the end of almost every project planning meeting, the same question gets asked last: "Where's the crew staying?"
It's usually treated as admin. Something for procurement or facilities to sort the week before mobilisation. Find something near the site, book the cheapest option, and move on. For most of the industry, that's the whole process.
The problem is what that process misses.
A labour market with no room for error
UK construction new orders reached £71.7 billion in 2024. The sector needs an additional 41,200 workers every year through 2030 just to keep up. Over 200,000 EU workers have left UK construction since 2019, and more than a third of the current workforce is aged 50 or above.
Put simply: the pipeline has never been fuller, and the workforce delivering it has never been harder to hold onto. In that market, how a company houses its people during a project isn't a footnote. It's a factor in whether experienced workers stay for the duration — or leave for a job that treats it as one.
Costs that don't show up where you'd expect
The real issue isn't that poor accommodation is expensive. It's that its costs don't land on the accommodation line. They show up in transport budgets when workers commute 40 minutes each way. They show up in rework rates when fatigue sets in by week five. They show up in HR data months later, as turnover, with nobody tracing it back to where the decision was actually made.
We put together a full breakdown of this, including a real deployment where a 22-person civil team moved off a budget hotel mid-project and what that move actually recovered once every cost was accounted for.
What's in the report
- Why the UK's labour shortage makes accommodation a retention issue, not a logistics one
- A category-by-category look at where poor accommodation decisions actually cost projects money
- A full case study from a South Yorkshire infrastructure programme, with the real numbers
- A six-point framework for briefing, procuring, and measuring accommodation properly
It's a free download, no strings attached beyond an email address.
