Good news, for everyone involved in the design and construction of the built environment: the UK Government is putting aside £72 million to ‘transform the construction sector’. It is doing so through setting up a ‘Core Innovation Hub’ (https://apply-for-innovation-funding.service.gov.uk/competition/142/overview). The announcement defines three innovations it wants the hub to focus on: a digitally driven manufacturing approach, improved productivity, and optimizing the whole-life performance.
But while this sounds positive, the novelty is questionable. The first two innovations were being discussed twenty years ago in Sir John Egan’s report ‘Rethinking Construction’ (1998). In his follow-on report ‘Accelerating Change’ Egan added the importance of sustainability, including whole-life energy and carbon performance but also emphasizing the importance of economic and social sustainability. Most importantly, Egan said that we should approach these changes, ‘by first sorting out the culture, then defining and improving processes’, and then and only then, ‘finally applying technology’ (Egan, 1998, p.28)
The Government’s latest announcement then agrees with Egan, while missing his fundamental point. By concentrating on the end stages, on the technologies and the environmental impacts, the focus completely misses out the necessary foundations of culture and process change, and of economic and social sustainability.
There is some irony in the timing of this initiative, and in what it doesn’t seek to transform. The announcement was on the 26th March, a couple of months after the devastating collapse of Carillion, and just a few days before the equally shocking revelation of the gender pay gap.
The collapse of Carillion in January left hundreds of thousands of workers looking for new jobs, delays on projects across the country, and both financial and environmental losses so complex that it is likely we will never know their full extent. Capita now looks set to follow. This trend, which has seen construction companies morph into giant bidding firms, who then outsource the multi-sectoral contracts they win to a complex and disjointed chain of subcontractors and suppliers, is one of the macro-processes which currently governs the industry. The collapse of Carillion has shown that the process acts against both economic and social sustainability, and changing this approach should now be an absolute priority.
Then on the 4th April, data on salaries from over 10,000 UK companies revealed that the construction sector had the worst gender pay gap of all, with an average gap of 25% between the median male and female pay. The UK also has the fewest female engineering and construction employees in Europe (see https://theconversation.com/how-gender-equality-can-help-fix-the-construction-industry-90413) and suffers from a serious image problem. Not surprisingly, the sector is predicted to suffer from a major skills shortage after Brexit (see The Farmer Review of the UK Construction Labour Model: Modernise or Die, 2016). The repeatedly-made argument for culture change is unquestionable.
If the Government wants to transform the construction sector, it should focus on redesigning the culture and the underpinning processes, rather than tinkering with the technologies. Addressing the inequalities in the treatment of different social groups, and ensuring the social and economic sustainability of how the industry is structured, are essential first steps. Once these foundations have been addressed, only then will be the time to consider the incremental innovations of digital manufacturing, increased productivity and counting carbon emissions.
Leave a Reply