This review has highlighted that the construction industry in the UK is chronically under invested due to a combination of economic, market and behavioural factors. Long-term productivity is stagnant. On top of this, the industry faces a major threat from declining workforce numbers.
It is clear that a flourishing construction sector will need continuing, improved and more efficient support for traditional building skills. These skills remain important and will always be needed. However, in isolation, they will not meet the UK's growing construction needs. This is particularly the case in housebuilding which is most reliant on traditional building methods.
To generate additional capacity in the sector, we need new business models, supported by new investment, and using new construction methods. This is essential to avoid putting additional pressure on the supply of skills (thereby inflating labour costs) and to overcome the factors which inhibit change, especially in the residential sector.
The vision should be of a UK construction sector where traditional skills needs are efficiently met, with looming labour shortages at least partially offset by a greater and more focused investment in the appropriate skills that industry will require in the future. Alongside this, purposeful and strategic industry leadership is needed, driving investment in new technology and manufacturing capability that will grow over time to boost capacity and productivity and reduce the reliance on labour in line with the likely future reducing availability. It is suggested that the residential sector will lend itself more easily to a large scale move to a manufacturing led approach but with the ability to evolve into other sectors subsequently. This is an imperative to meeting the UK's housing needs without adverse impacts on our ability to deliver vital infrastructure and commercial construction.
The prognosis for 'business as usual' highlighted in section 3 above is not an attractive one. The case for change is compelling and industry needs to modernise itself to become a more compelling proposition for prospective new entrants or face a future of decline and marginalisation. Modernisation through better productivity and harnessing technology should also improve long-term margins, decrease unit delivery costs, and create greater predictability by de-risking on site delivery - the part of the process where so many issues occur and create adversarial tension and non-value add effort.