Mr Silverman said the popularity of home improvement programmes on the television had led to an increase in the number of people wanting to work as professional gardeners.Can't get the sink unblocked? Never mind that, look at the roses.. A RARE JEWEL, unseen by the public for nearly 150 years, has been loaned by the Queen for the first ever international exhibition of the Sikh artistic heritage. It will take pride of place alongside priceless stones which once belonged to Shah Jahan, the Mogul emperor who built the Taj Mahal. We will help them find the staff if they train them.""We are aware there's a shortage of plumbers and those sorts of jobs.

You do have to phone around and pay quite a lot of money." But there is one area where there is no problem finding the staff. Those who stayed with it find their skills are out of date and they need to retrain."We have drawn up a register of people who are interested in building as a trade or want to retrain and made an arrangement with companies that want to build here. People move here from other parts of the country and they want jobs in management. They don't come here to do plumbing and carpentry."Lawrence Silverman, chairman of economic and external affairs at Reading Borough Council, said that the area had suffered from high unemployment in the late Eighties and Nineties, when the construction industry was in depression."Many people turned to other jobs because there was no work for them in the building trade, so now there is a real shortage of builders.

Any more than that and it's a waste of time," he said."But this area has changed a lot. "When we finally got a builder, he said he knew a plumber who would come and even he didn't bother. One day the builder was walking up to the road to our house and the plumber just drove straight past him and disappeared into the sunset."According to Rodney Daborn, a plumber based in Sunningdale, his increasingly specialised skills mean he can afford to be choosy about his work."There certainly is plenty of work about and I don't reckon to travel more than about 10 miles for a job. Some of them didn't even return our calls - you have to leave a message because they're never in," he said.

I just couldn't believe that they wouldn't even travel nine miles here."As for having the car valeted, I was told it would be at least six weeks before they would have time to fit me in."John Lawrence, who lives on the Berkshire-Oxfordshire border, said the difficulties involved in finding a plumber for a simple job were rapidly acquiring legendary status."We started building a utility room about eight months ago and wanted a plumber to put in a sink We rang about four and none of them bothered to turn up. He must have thought the job wasn't big enough."I come from Suffolk and people are much more willing to travel to a job. Of those, only one actually came out and said he would give me a quote but he never bothered either. Only one agreed to come - the others said it was too far and it wasn't worth their while," he said."Then I tried to get hold of a carpenter for what I thought was quite a big job - replacing two windows, converting the carport to a garage and building a desk and some shelves in the loft I rang 12 people from the Yellow Pages Only three bothered to return my call.