Fit for purpose...?

Is the UK demolition and construction industry fit for purpose? Or are we merely maintaining a broken system, propping it up with temporary fixes and blind optimism.

There is a recurring question within the UK demolition and construction industry. And that question is: “Is it fit for purpose?”

Is the CITB fit for purpose? Is the NFDC fit for purpose? Is the HSE fit for purpose? I will leave you to wrestle with those rhetorical queries at your leisure while asking you to ponder a wider and deeper question. Is the UK demolition and construction industry itself fit for purpose?

As someone who draws their living from the sector and has many friends working within it, it’s a question I am uncomfortable asking. And while my default reaction is to say, “Yes, of course it is fit for purpose,” I think it’s important to consider the bigger picture.

As an industry sector, it sees more companies going out of business than any other. If you were feeling charitable, you might suggest that what some company owners have in ambition and sheer grit, they lack in business and economic acumen. But we have lost upwards of 5,000 companies in the past 12 months or so, and some of them had grown into multi-million-pound organisations before their untimely demise. So they must have been doing something right.

You might point to the volatility of the economy and the political landscape over the past year or so. But that has applied to all businesses across all sectors; and, in spite of everything, they’re all doing way better than we are.

The truth is that many demolition and construction companies work on margins so thin you can see right through them. They have been ground down by demanding clients and their “value engineering” procurement processes to the point that there is no wiggle room. And when something goes wrong, which it inevitably does, that narrow profit can quickly become a very wide loss.

For years, decades even, we were slowly but surely improving our health and safety statistics. Injuries were in decline, and fatal accidents were at an all-time low. But post-COVID, these have spiked once again. It’s as if we forgot how to work safely during the protracted lockdown. What does that say about the robustness of our health and safety culture? Was it ever truly embedded, or was it just lip service backed by a fleeting moment of compliance?

According to a report on Construction News a while back, around 21 percent of construction project value is wasted on rework. To put that another way, we are spending around £21 billion per year putting right issues that should have been right in the first place.

Despite being granted key worker status that allowed many demolition and construction companies to work through the COVID-19 lockdown, more than 170,000 construction companies applied for and been granted bounce back loans. According to a Construction News report late last week, only one in ten of those loans has actually been paid back.

And then there is the workforce itself. We can’t find enough people to carry out all the work currently in the pipeline. And, according to the CITB, we’re just a few years away from a staff shortfall of a quarter of a million people.

Again, it is easy to find excuses. Young people are lazy; they don’t want to get their hands dirty; they are all too busy on TikTok, YouTube, or their mobile phones. But I have been reporting on the industry’s skills gap for more than 35 years. I was reporting on it before the advent of the mobile phone and long before YouTube and TikTok even existed. This is not a new phenomenon. It is not a generational issue. The skills shortage has been a factor for decades.

And what have we done about it? We have run half-hearted, campaigns that try to shoehorn young people into the industry without making any fundamental changes. We have dressed up the same tired recruitment drives with new slogans, new logos, and new funding that disappears into oblivion before it makes a difference. And, as always, we have tried to shift the blame onto the youth of today rather than look inward and ask, “What have we done to make this industry appealing?”

The answer, quite frankly, is not much. We have done nothing to modernise an industry that still sees physical hardship as a badge of honour. We expect young people to step into an environment where mental health is dismissed, where long hours are the norm, where job security is a lottery, where there is mostly just a single gender, and where workplace deaths are seen as collateral damage.

And while we are on the subject of change - or the lack thereof - let’s talk about innovation. Or rather, let’s talk about the industry’s reluctance to innovate. Other sectors have embraced technology, automation, and new ways of working. Yet, in construction and demolition, we cling to outdated methods, resisting anything that challenges “the way we’ve always done it.” We scoff at the notion of electric or hydrogen-powered machines, declaring that they will never replace diesel. We view offsite construction with suspicion. We dismiss modular builds as cheap and inferior. We resist change at every turn, then act surprised when we find ourselves lagging behind.

And let’s not forget about the environment. The government talks about net zero. Big construction firms release glossy reports on sustainability. But walk onto any major site, and you will see the same wasteful practices that have existed for decades. Materials are over-ordered and discarded. Recycling is an afterthought. Embodied carbon is an inconvenient footnote.

The reality is that, as an industry, we are stuck. Stuck in old habits. Stuck in outdated business models. Stuck in a workforce crisis that has been decades in the making. And perhaps most damning of all, stuck in a mindset that refuses to acknowledge these problems are of our own making.

So I ask again: Is the UK demolition and construction industry fit for purpose? Or are we merely maintaining a broken system, propping it up with temporary fixes and blind optimism, hoping that things will somehow change without us ever having to do the hard work of changing them ourselves?