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40 Summer 2021 B uilding Mental Health, the CITB and the Lighthouse Construction Industry Charity have published a report detailing the social value of their Mental Health First Aid Instructors Programme, an initiative to train 288 construction industry dedicated Mental Health First Aid Instructors. The Social Value Report shows that for every £1 invested there has been £5.50 worth of social value returned to society. This result was possible despite the challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic, which meant that the programme had to be extended by a year. The programme achieved 99% of its target for training instructors and 166% of its target for training Mental Health First Aiders (MHFA) enabled to operate in the industry on a daily basis. ‘Building Mental Health’ was launched by a working group of construction industry leaders and experts in 2018 in response to findings published the previous year in the ‘Thriving at Work’ Stevenson/Farmer review of mental health and employers. Commissioned by the Government, the report looked into how employers could provide better support to employees, including those with poor mental health or wellbeing, to remain in and thrive at work. The Thriving at Work review identified not only the immediate human cost of poor mental health at work, but also the knock on impacts for society and the economy. It stated that employers are losing billions of pounds because employees who are less productive, less effective, or off sick. In construction alone, stress, anxiety and depression accounts for a fifth of all work related illness. One of the key objectives of the Building Mental Health Programme was to address the findings of that report and provide companies of all sizes with a portal of free and easily accessible information, so that they could develop a positive mental health culture within their workforces. Contributions from across the industry ensured that an array of support and expert guidance was made accessible to all. The programme also includes a 5-step framework to better mental health, which focussed on the importance of pro-active training to support the industry. To help support the aims of the Building Mental Health framework, a specific training project was created in May 2018 to deliver a programme of bespoke construction-based instructor courses. The project was managed by the Lighthouse Instructors Programme delivers £5.5 million of social value to society.