Among the flurry of warnings about the potential negative impacts of Brexit in 2016 – in what was dubbed Project Fear by detractors – were anxious voices from the construction and housebuilding industry. Figures such as David Thomas, chief executive of Barratt, said a vote to leave the EU would mean “even more pressure on skills shortages.”

With estimates at the time that in some parts of London’s construction sector as many as half of workers might be from the EU, there were serious fears about what a leave vote could mean for an industry already facing a skills shortage.

Six years on, there has been a clear change in the number of EU nationals working in UK construction: the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports a 42% fall between 2017 and the end of 2020. The industry had 176,000 EU-born workers in the third quarter of 2019, but just a year later this had plummeted to 127,000. The exodus of EU-born workers has been greatest in London, where the decline was 30%, from 76,000 to 53,000 in the course of that year.