TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

The current pace and nature of technological change and innovation in wider society is such that unless the industry embraces this trend at scale, it will miss the greatest single opportunity to improve productivity and offset workforce shrinkage. Failing to embrace change will also further marginalise the industry by reducing its attractiveness to a new generation of workers who will have grown up in a digital world. This has the potential to accelerate the rate of decline in structural capacity, with further declining workforce replenishment levels and continued reliance on traditional construction techniques both conspiring to constrain achievable output. This review suggests there is a tipping point that is likely to be reached in the next 10 years where industry will see all of the symptoms highlighted in section 1 getting worse to the point where decline possibly becomes irreversible.

Interestingly, the example of Japan cited above is also relevant in the context of embracing technology and manufacture led construction. Tokyo alone is still able to build nearly the same number of homes per year that the UK delivers nationally (circa 140,000) This is purely due to the reliance on a different delivery model for single family homes which benefits from the mass market cultural acceptance of pre-manufactured modular housing. In turn, this empirically confirms the ability to effectively offset workforce constraints, in housing at least, by changing the means of delivery. The cultural acceptance point is obviously valid here though and the town planning control of modular delivery in Japan is also very different. Both of these issues should be considered part of the potential solution in the UK and how we might develop our own, culturally and planning context aligned version of a Japanese model of housing delivery.

As highlighted on page 36, there are early signs of manufacturing-led foreign corporates considering entering the UK market and overcoming traditional barriers to market entry through use of pre-manufactured construction products. New foreign entrants in this field, if meeting technical and quality standards, would indeed potentially be a much needed boost to UK housing supply capacity. But reliance on foreign entrants would represent a lost opportunity for the UK to retain value added, including direct and indirect employment, IP development and potentially building an export base.