[Closed] Huge lack of construction staff. Agency content.

George Osborne's looking for a second job currently, maybe give him a call.

Industry fails to train and value staff in lack of personnel shocker! I'm amazed that the building trade got so far into 21 century before the skills shortage bit.

The samething happens in construction everytime we come out of a recession, its nothing new.

Robots.

I should imagine the government will opt for the recession option rather than the training.

Sandwich +1

For years now politicians have led the 'got to go to uni' charge. Schools and universities are a marketing machine for degrees - and we just don't value our trades enough. I would be more than happy for my lads to pick up some tools...

There have been loads going to college too!

A few years ago i tried changing jobs to construction? and dispite having done a level 2 c&g had practical skills but because I was over 25 no one wanted to takee on to train.

Another friend has had the same problem. Attitude was closed shop unless you already had a good mate cousin etc

A few years back I drove my nephew around our local millionaires row pointing out all the houses that I knew were owned by builders.
He is now a brickie and on a pound per brick.
Unfortunately he's not saved a penny and sleeps on his mate's floor.

When I was 62 I wasn't very good either. I'm much better now I'm 63.

A pound per brick!!!! I've now got this vision in my head of a wages clerk going round in his/her business suit counting the bricks laid in a wall 😆

Wrighty - just out of interest, do you need to see any qualifications from your joiners? Are they on a day rate?

I only ask as I'm pretty handy (hobby carpenter and have restored a few houses) and might explore this as a second line of employment.

It's all going to be very well that we're going to encourage inward investment in infrastructure when we've been reliant on imported skills for years and now we've done a really good job of telling them they're not wanted. This combined with an education systems that churns out unemployable graduates in subjects we don't need!

Brexit innit. 😀

I work in construction in the SE and the skills shortage has always been a problem. When I talk to the site guys, who are overwhelmingly Eastern European, most have a planned a route out of the UK and back to Europe since the Brexit ref. Most seem to favour Germany. If they do start to leave for Germany the skills gap will worsen.

Successive UK government have done too little for too long. Construction seems to be a vocation that a lot of people look down on ( it can be hard, dirty work) and conditions aren't great.

mitsumonkey - Member

A pound per brick!!!! I've now got this vision in my head of a wages clerk going round in his/her business suit counting the bricks laid in a wall

That's the QS does that, not the Wages Clerk 😉

siwhite you'd be better off advertising locally and getting all the cash in hand work like most chippies around here do.
Joking aside most carpenters I know who are any good are all self employed and work mainly with other trades who are also self employed taking on extensions etc.
The ones I speak to have no interest in working for big firms/site work.

This is why Davis said last week he doesn't expect immigration to decrease after Brexit and May is talking about keeping freedom of movement this morning.

The joys of post-truth politics

As for construction workers, what sort of benefits are included, sick pay, annual leave, pension etc?

I have a router and i know how to use it, bush is worn though and its slightly off centre so you can only use it one way...

What do you need doing?

Brickies are on the front line when it comes to automation in the construction industry. There are already machines out there that can do large expanses of bricky work. From a personal point of view, I've seen a few things in my own trade which can automate tasks normally reserved for the "lad"...but nothing that affects me yet or in the near future

Leaving all that aside. There is a massive skills shortage in construction. Personal experience on a lot of sites last year, when things started getting busy again would indicate that there is a skills shortage on site too, even if there's a full compliment of bodies there. 😆

So desk wallahs can have a giggle about it - but we've got to ask ourselves what this means in the grander scheme. It means: lower skilled workers starting to look for skilled workers day rates and skilled workers looking for day rates that make desk jockeys faint (once they've done the mental arithmetic to reach a pro-rata salary figure). It means sites desperate to get labour start hiring untrained staff and giving responsibility to less experienced guys & gals in a dangerous environment. It means that quality of construction goes down, costs go up, accidents increase, deaths and career ending injuries increase. The cost to build your extension, loft-conversion or knock-through go through the roof. (No pun intended.)

Skills shortages in construction (while good news for the likes of me - I can start a little bit of upward pressure on rates that have hardly changed in five or six years) are not great news when we have a national outcry for infrastructure investment, calls for MOAR houses, MOAR building, etc etc.

Ring Nick Knowles - he always seems to have a large supply of tradesmen on tap. And they work for cakes!

Biggest shortage I see on site is [b]decent[/b] brickies, there seem to be quite a few crap ones, but not many that are very good, and most sites are running Polish/Irish gangs as it's all they can get, not to say they're any worse than some of the british lads.

The work just about meets minimum standards usually, but pretty it ain't. On the smaller scale side of things there's very high quality work going on, older experienced brickies just getting it done, but they're happy doing what they do and don't want to go lodging or chasing the money.

One moan you always hear is that big sites never use local blokes, then site tell you they put the feelers out and nobody local wanted to get their health and safety certs. up to date or could actually meet the criteria. I guess payment terms can be a stumbling block too, some will be on 60 or 90 days, fair time to wait for your first cheque if you're used to weekly pay and have spent it all by Thursday......

Labour Agencies have killed this industry.

I have a trade and without bragging too much i'm pretty good at it but when quiet over the winter there two of us enquired about site work and the going rate was what i was on 15 years ago as an employee ie holidays thats all you might get in the building trade if your lucky. Things are busy again but some folk want their work cheap as chips done and are not realistic about rates too many dodgy untrained folk doing us out of work
As to the £1 for every brick you wouldnt get that anywhere north of London maybe 50p
Im self employed no paid holidays, all insurance to pay, new vehicle to lease and fuel etc etc

That's the QS does that, not the Wages Clerk

No we don't. That's a Bonus Surveyor.

and £60per m2 for labour only brickwork? Not on my watch.

There is a massive shortage of QS's at the moment.
According to the RICS it's easier to employ a ballet dancer than a QS at the moment.

I'm fighting off employment agencies with a shitty stick at the moment trying to entice me away.
One chancer, who i've never had any contact with before, phoned the reception at work yesterday and claimed that we were best buddies at Uni and he wanted to catch up as he had been out of the country for years.

http://www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/news/view/easier-to-employ-a-ballet-dancer-than-a-quantity-surveyor

Next time you pass a road construction gang, notice how few are under 50 y/o.

And my lad went to college for joinery, couldn't get an apprenticeship. Both firms he tried out with decided not to take one on, worried about demand (over the next 3 years).

But on the opposite side how hard is it to get a trade in (just had a granny annex done, and it wasn't easy scheduling).

I nearly went for a job as a QS once, alas it had been filled and I ended up as a trainee roof designer for the same firm.... for 6 months.

Then building control and still here nearly 9 years later but wondering if the other side of the fence would be any better now.

The recession sorted the construction labour market out a bit, it put a lot of the poorer builders out of work round my way, on the whole work is better quality now that it was pre-recession as the chancers and untrained guys who were just riding the wave disappeared. But good trades are very busy now so I expect them to start popping up again as the demand is there.

My likely next big project is 3 office blocks of 30 x 15m its a steel frame box to take the roof with the entirety of the walls in brickwork. I'm ****ing dreading it. Brickies at the minute have taken militancy to a new level and if it's not how they want it they throw the rattle and walk. The Lou d a brick thing ain't happening anywhere near here but the lads on housing are easily pulling 1k a week for 4 1/2 days

Years ago straight out of Uni I went to work in construction recruitment. We couldn't pay enough, £200-£300 per day for trades and up. (2001 - London)

1 out of 25 would be a decent human, probably 30% no show and most would walk if the site was cold/more than 2 stops away etc. Anyone decent had gone self employed already. I couldn't understand it. A bloke with no education but willing to learn could have been picking up £60k a year in 2001. Almost without exception they were all broke, usually drunk and totally untrustworthy.

Everyone at school in the 90s with a brain had been talked into further education, those with Dads in the trades were all set up already. All those lads who would have traditionally gone onto a 'tools' job were just ignored, abandoned as ****less and they'd gone on to fill that brief magnificently.

We just used to ship buses full of guys from Poland and Lithuania, it was the only way.

When I talk to the site guys, who are overwhelmingly Eastern European, most have a planned a route out of the UK and back to Europe since the Brexit ref.

Agree with you on this. Only going to get worse when Hinckly point and HS2 get going..............

Recruitment agencies dont get me started on them, bring in Eastern European and pay them peanuts gets rates down, i re sat the cscs got the pass paper for £20 to sit the test but they want £30 more to get your card printed and prove you have qualifications, i've advanced craft c&g from 35 years ago but agree so many guisers claiming to be time served

Recruitment agencies dont get me started on them, bring in Eastern European and pay them peanuts gets rates down,

How many times did 'time served salt of earth' trades tell me this as they turned down job after job paying double what we paid the Eatern European guys, eventually they would reluctantly do me a favour and take a job and then fail to bother turning up til 1pm on the Monday.

Inevitably it was the agencies fault when two Polish lads would do it for half the money and actually stay on site past 3pm.

I understand the economics of immigrant labour driving down expectations for everyone but that time taught me to look beyond the anecdotes. There was way more than enough work for everyone at decent rates but the British guys didn't like it when they couldn't demand any terms and conditions they fancied.

When we were doing our last big build they combined a robot bricklayer demo with some of our research partners, the one I saw in action was almost exactly like this:

Next time you pass a road construction gang, notice how few are under 50 y/o.

Just the same in our industry (Engineering)
We use a steel fabrication company to build machinery base frames, and to provide coded welders, etc.
The last two contract welders we've had have both now retired, and the average age at their works is mid-50s.

Its funny how some things change when i was 20 in the building trade 90% of guys probably smoked, loads had drink problems, hangovers until 12, many drove still half pissed and due to the fact i hated bowls and never got too excited about fitba but liked cycling of any kind "are ye a poof" was thought by a few until you have kids. Things now I work around maybe 12 guys , 1 smoker and a couple o vapes, some eat porridge wi blueberries and two 25 years younger than me ride road bikes with me

i think that mirrors a wider change in society though (sorry, slightly off topic!)

i work at a university and at the freshers fairs these days it's full of strapping lads with massive biceps advertising the Protein Shake and Tight Shirt Society. Can't imagine such a thing when i was at uni!

This year they also had the Feminism Society opposite the Pole Dancing Club (sorry, 'Pole Fitness') which was a very funny touch from someone...

That ketchupbot video had me sat here stifling giggles. Not sure why it tickled me quite so much!

"I haven't got a router and I've never used one" being the catalyst behind my decision.

Do many site chippies use Routers?

It's more a cabinet maker thing IME...

Have to confess I have two but one of them has never left it's box, must get round to selling it....

Do many site chippies use Routers?

Google trend hinge jig for starters.

Fair point!

Although you can chisel out a hinge / lock rebate pretty quickly if you do them a lot.

I just use a chisel as it's not worth buying the jig for the odd door now and again.

The builders who did our house extension contracted in a guy to hang all the doors. he turned up with an assortment of routers/jigs and absolutely ripped though it.

I've previously done site carpentry (and kitchen fitting) and you'd never compete with a hammer and chisel these days.

You can even buy hinges now with rounded corners so you don't have to clean up the holes with a chisel after routing them out.

When we had a load of work done on our house, the guy who did the upstairs doors used a hammer & chisel. He did a pretty ropey job (most of them are a bit wonky) and it took him ages (three days to hang five doors in existing frames).

A mate of the builder, apparently.

If I'd had the time to do it myself I'd have bought the jig. But I'm just an amateur. What do I know ?

I have worked in an FE college teaching carpentry i can say that year on year we turned out about 20-30 students from full time courses with a C&G qualification which is not worth the paper it is written on. Colleges are funded on the successful completion of the course, so by hook or by crook all students qualify. Many of these kids wouldn't last five minutes on site. The government think that there are thousands of qualified younsters entering the job market but in reality only a fraction make it into industry. All school leavers have to stay in education until they are 19 and achieve at least level 2 in both English and Maths which they study alongside a vocational qual. Most of the kids that i taught had no interest in carpentry and when asked why they chose the course would say they thought it would be a laugh and that it would be all workshop based. It is very difficult to get them to attend their classroom taught lessons and most fail to achieve their english and maths.
I was made redundant 2 years ago and went back on site where i found that the attitude of the managers to be lacking and spent more time fill ing out risk assessments and method statements that knocking in nails. I am currently working domestically and have far more work than i need.

Hmmm.

Maybe I should become a brickie instead of doing a masters.

wrightyson
He lasted precisely 30 mins before I had to have the awkward conversation of how he wasn't right for the job.
"I haven't got a router and I've never used one"

Ah! I'm your man

#conf t
#hostname do_I_get_the_job

wr mem

....how am I doing?

In the last 2 weeks had a teenager ask for an aprenticeship in joinery, off me, had to explain we couldnt take him on.

Then last week met a chap who used to be an electrical engineer, he said the workplace was being iundated with sparks who had done a 2 wek course and where working on some large jobs without any experience.

and on friday am working for a retired joiner who had to retire due to ill health and can no longer work, so hes going to supervise.

Fianlly in the last few days lovely sunshine and warm, quite a few ofice based people have said id love your job working outside in the sun, they totally fail to understand all the cold/windy .rainy days.

33. Worked as a nurse for 10 years. Carer since 18.

I'd love a trade. Joiner, plumber, spark.

Can I get anyone to take on a punctual, mature, hardworking and sensible person like me? No. I need to be 16 so I can be paid £125 a week as an apprentice.

It's rubbish. I can't see a way into my desired careers, I'd willingly take a pay drop to learn but I do need a living wage.

Hell I can even plaster to a good finish and fitted my own kitchen, bathroom and windows with no real issues.

Oh well.

It's no different trying to recruit in Engineering, I interviewed probably a dozen before finding a good design engineer.
Probably two, maybe three, actually lived up to the claims made on the CV's. Some were quite laughable, clearly just chancers, heads filled with dreams by agencies. One had driven for 3 hours, was given the wrong address, then it turned out the twit at the agency had totally misread his skills. I felt sorry for the poor lad.
Still, we found a good un' in the end.
I dread having to ever do it again.

olly2097 - Member - Block User - Quote
33. Worked as a nurse for 10 years. Carer since 18.

I left nursing at 33 as well, oddly enough.

Try here:

http://www.btplc.com/Careercentre/careersatbt/openreach/index.htm

Possibly not what you're looking for, but interesting with a lot of prospects.

I looked into being a sparky after being in retail for 9 years after uni and hating it. But there's no way in, I just don't understand why they don't take on aprentiships for older people - people who know what they want rather than some kid who is only doing it to get enough cash for their Corsa and getting legless on a weekend.

I've laboured for a builder and helped out an electrician, both friends of mine and if I ever lost my job I'd ask if they could take me on when they could.

just don't understand why they don't take on aprentiships for older people - people who know what they want rather than some kid who is only doing it to get enough cash for their Corsa and getting legless on a weekend.

With the apprentice levy this year there is no max age. We've just advertised for engineering apprentices and in 24 hours had prob 15 application ranging from school leavers to mid 30's.
As a company we are already looking at tweaking the scheme, so if an apprentice is older, we maybe pay a bit more but expect it to be completed quicker. Based on them being a bit more mature.
At 35, a four year apprenticeship is a big undertaking.

As a company we are already looking at tweaking the scheme, so if an apprentice is older, we maybe pay a bit more but expect it to be completed quicker. Based on them being a bit more mature.
At 35, a four year apprenticeship is a big undertaking.

Strange as mature students at uni doing book learning take 3 years to get a degree, where as tradesmen are always learning new skills and working around new problems.

Make an apprenticeship for a trade say 2 years, and then a year of probation on full pay.

I did a 4 year apprenticeship, and probably loved most of it.

Project, going back to what you were saying about sparkies, I've heard on the grape vine companies are employing loads of apprentices or sparks mates then having say two qualifies lads overseeing/checking their work. I'd be ****ed as a qualified spark if I'd be validating a load of basically unqualified work to the required standard.
Joiner number two today has been a lot better, he is getting 23/hr mind and using my labourer....

understand what you are saying if there are loads of unskilled guys basically working unsupervised, but how would you expect an apprentice to learn unless he/she was actually doing the work? one or two juniors with a fully qualified mentor would seem the way to do it, no?

wombat - Member
mitsumonkey - Member
A pound per brick!!!! I've now got this vision in my head of a wages clerk going round in his/her business suit counting the bricks laid in a wall
That's the QS does that, not the Wages Clerk

Everyone knows QS' can't count

You wanna try getting good labour on t'railway

Everyone knows QS' can't count

We can.

We just choose not to most of the time.....There's no profit in proper counting. 😉

Slight diversion, why is the UK obsessed with building with brick? Seems pretty inefficient to me.

There is a massive shortage of QS's at the moment.
According to the RICS it's easier to employ a ballet dancer than a QS at the moment.

Hmmm. What's the day rate in London at the mo? Toying of contracting for 5/6 months over the winter...

planners and their love of the vernacular have a lot to answer for.

Hmmm. What's the day rate in London at the mo?

Depends if you're doing the matinee as well as the evening performance.

Ah! I'm your man

#conf t
#hostname do_I_get_the_job

wr mem

....how am I doing?

Ah, iOS jokes 🙂

Funny how all the threads here appear to be how loaded you could be with a trade, whilst during our hq build all the builders were convinced I was loaded because I worked in IT and did that 'book learnin'. Dad was a sparky and took me aside when I was 12 and said never, ever do this job.. though I'm not convinced he had it right now.

joiner number two today has been a lot better, he is getting 23/hr mind

He is getting or his agency is getting?

Dad was a sparky and took me aside when I was 12 and said never, ever do this job..

.....and he was right.

The problem with the construction industry is the boom / bust nature of it.

I get a dozen recruitment agency approaches a week at the moment. I could jump ship for an extra £5K tomorrow

Two years ago, it would have taken me months to find another job and i would have to have taken a £5K drop to do it.

A year from now?....Who knows?

[b]Murray - Member [/b]

Slight diversion, why is the UK obsessed with building with brick? Seems pretty inefficient to me.

Brilliant question - honestly no idea, it is inefficient, very weather and skills dependent, not to mention old fashioned, and makes houses a lot more costly while trying to pass current SAP calculations and acheieve required 'U' values.

Even timber frame clad in brick - pointless in my view, why build a highly insulated, fast to erect, efficient, warm, wooden box then surround it with lumps of cooked clay. Planning needs to relax to move away from it really. Though, from a sustainability and maintenance perspective it is pretty good in terms of longevity.

Nope 23 quid direct to him. That's Derbyshire area. So basically 180/day give or take.

Tom_W1987 - Member
Hmmm.

Maybe I should become a brickie instead of doing a masters.

If the goal of your masters is to earn £XXk a year, then yes a trade will get you there faster.

I know people who have multiple bachelor degrees and multiple masters (one person has two of both!) and struggle to earn £25k in a city that isn't London. They can't get interviews in roles in London.

I have one degree in an arts subject which I've managed to translate into working within a software engineering team and I earn great for my age vs my peers and the nation as a whole.

If I could do it all again, I would absolutely choose engineering. It seems so much more interesting than sitting at a desk all day.

But when I was 15/16 choosing ALevels and then 17 choosing my degree there was no exposure to apprenticeships, or how to get onto that path. I'm not surprised there is a shortage. It was all "go to Uni and do what interests you" - what interested me at the time was mainly having an easy ride and dicking about with computers (which I was good at both).

I'm doing alright, but I often wonder where I would be if I took my maths more seriously and figured out the engineering route. Would probably be posting on STW less.

I took Physics at A Level but dropped it because the tutor was an old Italian dude with a really thick accent and I couldn't understand a single word he was saying. True story.

"planners and their love of the vernacular have a lot to answer for."
No 🙂 House buyers/owners and their aversion to anything else !!

If I could do it all again, I would absolutely choose engineering. It seems so much more interesting than sitting at a desk all day.

"planners and their love of the vernacular have a lot to answer for."
No House buyers/owners and their aversion to anything else !!

....or high street mortgage lenders and their reluctance to lend against anything other than "traditional" construction houses.?

Happily busy on tools at the moment. If I had to rely on agencies or trust a trader website rubbish I'd be looking for a new line of work.

This idea that all building trades are paid 50k per year is way out other than maybe the big cities ie London and its suburbs maybe 40 k in Edinburgh Glasgow but the rest North of York wont get anything near, maybe 25 if they're lucky
As for bricks or stone think of your heritage , asthetics etc do you want pressed coated steel sheeting or plywood with mesh and a 15mm harl. Im thinking acoustics as well

If I could do it all again, I would absolutely choose engineering. It seems so much more interesting than sitting at a desk all day.

I would say 90% of the time myself and all the other engineers I work with are trapped at our desks doing calculations or paperwork. The technicians build our prototypes following instructions we have to make for them and we rarely get to leave the building to see our work in action or to meet clients.

This does seem to be getting worse s they want to squeeze more of the higher end work out of each person and it makes less sense to allow a highly paid engineer to build a tool that a technician can do at a lower rate. Then they complain that the engineers have no experience in the actual assembly or real world side...

I would say 90% of the time myself and all the other engineers I work with are trapped at our desks doing calculations or paperwork.

Yeah, im aware of that, it was a brash generalisation on my part. My mate works for Esso and is always sending picture of huge turbines and shit, that stuff looks interesting.

But for the best part he is also at a desk typing away on a terrible Dell laptop. At least I get a MacBook Pro in software development 😆

Nope 23 quid direct to him. That's Derbyshire area. So basically 180/day give or take.

so take off 5 weeks holiday, a few days sick leave and some pension provision, that's roughly £30K a year (ie within 10% of UK average wage) - with limited job security. Sounds pretty fair, I'd say.

For years now politicians have led the 'got to go to uni' charge. Schools and universities are a marketing machine for degrees - and we just don't value our trades enough. I would be more than happy for my lads to pick up some tools...

I know I'm a bit late to the party, but this ^^^ time a million, and I speak from the point of view of an academic.

If my kids want to pursue an academic line because they truly love a particular subject, then I will be happy to support them, but I would still encourage them to pursue a trade of some sort.

olly2097 - Member
33. Worked as a nurse for 10 years. Carer since 18.

I'd love a trade. Joiner, plumber, spark.

Can I get anyone to take on a punctual, mature, hardworking and sensible person like me? No. I need to be 16 so I can be paid £125 a week as an apprentice.

It's rubbish. I can't see a way into my desired careers, I'd willingly take a pay drop to learn but I do need a living wage.

Hell I can even plaster to a good finish and fitted my own kitchen, bathroom and windows with no real issues.

Oh well.

What you could do is stick an ad in your local paper saying that you assemble flat-pack furniture, put up curtain rails, that sort of thing. Start off doing the work evenings and weekends and if you're good the word will get around. At some point you'll have to branch out a bit, develop specialities and one day you'll be able to give up the day job.

My industry is fixated with parachuting graduates into project engineer roles. This results in lovely spread sheets and diagrams but woeful management out on the ground. They are cheap however! I've a very experienced colleague who time and again gets seconded to projects (he's too expensive to employ full time but the amount of money he saves from his years of experience would pay his wages 10x over) to sort out FUBAR's and he says he cringes at some of the meetings as it's painfully obvious the graduate is in way above their head. Some will listen to advice but others won't and then blame everyone else as the project falls behind or hits a hitch.

That or they are employed to depot manager positions where they have no/appalling man management skills and last months before being moved as the depot turns against them.

I've just had steel railings put in by a local blacksmith. Absolutely top notch work, he's trying to retire and can't as he is too busy, my wife (an engineer, resting) was building a retaining wall while he was here and he offered her a job - said he woudl train her up in blacksmithing as she is a hard worker. She's quite keen and I think it's a great idea. He was saying he's tried to get grads and apprentices but they generally (and this is his comment and opinion not mine) are lazy, demanding and expect everything on a plate with no commitment or input on their part. He seems quite sane and balanced as well.

Nope 23 quid direct to him. That's Derbyshire area. So basically 180/day give or take.

so take off 5 weeks holiday, a few days sick leave and some pension provision, that's roughly £30K a year (ie within 10% of UK average wage) - with limited job security. Sounds pretty fair, I'd say.

This is the most sensible post of the day. It's hardly a pretty packet is it?

Last year I was in the position of recruiting 2 new multi skilled engineers & out of over 300 applications either via our company jobs web site & agency's I interviewed 6 as the majority just didn't have the skills at all!!

The youngest was 35 who we have taken on & he's doing OK the other lad was 44 and in some areas is superb but needed training in others.
The thing that swung it for both of them was the willing attitude to learn new stuff & not bluff about stuff they had a knowledge gap about.

The sticking point for many is that our job is 24/7 your on call to go in at the drop of a hat and if you don't get it sorted a lot of people will go short of a whole range of food.

We are paying £36,000 basic + overtime & you really struggle to get the right people. NW based too

so take off 5 weeks holiday, a few days sick leave and some pension provision, that's roughly £30K a year (ie within 10% of UK average wage) - with limited job security. Sounds pretty fair, I'd say

Err not really.

180x5x47 =42300

Plus with a decent accountant you won't be paying anywhere near the paye level of tax.