The 2025 On The Tools Awards gathered 450 construction professionals to honor achievement across 21 categories. Electricians, plumbers, carpenters, community heroes, sustainability champions.
Beneath every trophy: an industry that can’t find workers.
The Winners Earned It
Trade-specific awards recognized technical mastery. Support role categories honored branch colleagues and site managers. Broader contributions: mentorship, diversity advocacy, mental health awareness.
TradeKart won Tech Innovation. One Community Hero raised over £10,000. A Sustainability Hero turned waste into community learning spaces.
The work matters. The recognition is deserved.
But while they celebrated, the sector collapsed around them.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
In Q4 2023, 55% of construction firms struggled to find skilled construction tradespeople. Nine months earlier: 29%.
That’s not a shortage. That’s a collapse in progress.
Only 53% of construction apprenticeships reached completion in 2022/23. The other 47% walked away—from training, from the trade, from the industry entirely.
The UK needs one million additional construction workers by 2032. Britain’s response: a £600 million investment targeting 60,000 trained workers by 2029.
That’s 6% of what’s needed. With three years less time to deliver.
The Disconnect
You can honor the best electrician in the UK while electrician roles go unfilled. You can celebrate a Community Hero while mental health challenges drive workers out. You can award innovation while nearly half your apprentices quit.
The awards aren’t the problem. They’re proof of one: a construction industry that knows excellence but can’t scale it, retain it, or replicate it fast enough.
What Needs To Happen
Construction knows how to create excellence. The awards proved it. TradeKart innovated delivery. Community Heroes built engagement. Sustainability champions created new models.
That same innovation needs to attack retention. Not by celebrating the 53% who finish apprenticeships, but by understanding why 47% don’t. Not by honoring mental health champions, but by making mental health support standard across sites. Not by awarding one Tech Innovation winner, but by scaling technology that makes the job sustainable.
The UK construction sector needs one million workers by 2032. It won’t get them by honoring the few who survive a broken system. It’ll get them by fixing what drives people away: brutal hours, poor conditions, inadequate support, lack of progression.
Should we celebrate the 450 who showed up or focus on the million who aren’t coming?
Both. But right now, we’re only good at one.
I watched construction honor its best while bleeding talent it can’t replace. The celebration was genuine. The crisis is bigger. And the gap between what we celebrate and what we fix is the reason the math doesn’t work.