On June 3rd, at Arup’s London headquarters, we launched TradeHive, a pivotal new initiative from OneHive designed to confront the most urgent yet overlooked challenges in the construction industry: mental health.

The facts are stark and impossible to ignore. Every week, 30 construction workers in the UK die by suicide. That’s more than any other industry. According to data from the Lighthouse Construction Industry Charity, stress, anxiety and depression account for over 27% of all work-related illness in construction. The Home Office has also reported that two thirds of construction workers turned to alcohol or drugs to overcome their mental health challenges. This isn’t just a wellbeing crisis, it’s a productivity, retention, and safety crisis too.

TradeHive was born out of an increasing number of conversations with leaders across the construction ecosystem from frontline site managers like Boom Construction and Amaik to training organisations like MecSafe and borough teams like Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. We kept hearing the same thing: the system is broken, and the human cost is too high. Workers are under pressure, support is fragmented, and stigma is still rife.

Civil engineering firm, Arup kindly hosted the Roundtable, where we were honoured to convene voices from across the sector including Chris Sibley, from The Ollie Foundation, who reminded us that:

"if three men were to fall to their deaths each day on UK sites, the industry would be shut down. But when those same men die by suicide, it’s silent." 

This is the silence TradeHive is here to break.

TradeHive is a sector-specific digital learning and wellbeing platform designed to connect construction workers to relevant mental health support, accredited development pathways, and community. What sets TradeHive apart is that it meets the workforce where they are, in language they understand, with content that’s bite-sized, mobile-first, and mapped to real job outcomes.

The sector is crying out for change. The recent “Mental Health Roundtable for Construction” white paper revealed that over 70% of organisations lack a structured approach to workforce wellbeing, and only 1 in 4 SME leaders feel equipped to offer meaningful support. This is not just a people issue, it’s an economic one. 

Deloitte found that poor mental health costs the construction sector £45 billion per year.

TradeHive also directly supports the Construction Playbook’s vision of embedding social value and inclusive growth into every project. By offering peer to peer connections, early intervention tools and streamlines the stress-inducing manual paperwork associated with site operations and management. We’re not just improving wellbeing, we’re fortifying the industry to ensure it can meet the UK Government target of 1.5 million new homes over the next five years.

We know TradeHive won’t solve every challenge overnight. But with coordinated action and a commitment to embedding wellbeing as core infrastructure, not an afterthought, we can rewrite the future of construction.

A huge thank you to everyone who joined us in the room and to those working every day to make construction safer, healthier, and more humane. This is just the beginning, but it’s a powerful one.

If you’d like to get involved, partner with us or share your story, please get in touch at [email protected] 

We can no longer just embrace the change… we must #BeeTheChange