There’s an element of futurology to several articles this month. Most obviously, there’s the launch of the BIM 2050 forecasting group, whose focus on the construction world 30 years hence is obvious in its very title. Then our vox pop on whether we’re likely to see Chinese contractors’ names on UK sites within 10 years. And new chief construction adviser Peter Hansford highlights the forthcoming 10-year “industrial strategy” for construction, a document we know is likely to discuss increasing the industry’s capacity to win work abroad.
Online (17 January) we also covered the latest five-year forecast from the Construction Skills Network report, compiled on behalf of CITB-ConstructionSkills. It predicts further job losses for the next four years, even after modest growth returns to the sector in 2015. The reason is spare capacity: while output has dropped by 16% in the five years to 2012, construction employment has so far dropped less, by 11%. The difference is under-productive labour, which will result in further job losses.
So what does all this suggest about the industry in 10-30 years? Quite possibly a smaller industry, employing fewer people and facing competition from Chinese contractors that can mobilise the production and labour capacity of a fifth of the planet. On the other hand, an industry delivering greater efficiencies thanks to BIM, where we’ll see greater integration between different specialisms, with shared commercial and design risk ultimately leading to a smaller number of vertically-integrated construction businesses. That, in turn, could mean greater productivity, and profitability.
On another note, if the current economic shake-out leaves ongoing spare capacity, then the UK construction sector might just rediscover the taste for overseas contracts that it left behind sometime in the 1990s.
Of course, the changes all this implies will come at a cost: the long-term trends are being played out today – and tomorrow – in the depressing stream of business failures along the construction supply chain. For individuals, there’s redundancies (or the threat of them) and near-static pay levels. But construction doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s buffeted by rapid technological change and global economic shifts, by climate change and demographics. In a fast-changing world, it is unrealistic – and unhelpful – to hark back to a previous era, because the world, and construction with it, is moving forward.
