The report examines the industry’s current ability to meet construction targets
Titled Capacity Constraints in Construction: Rethinking the Business Environment, it is the latest publication from the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) and addresses construction capacity and the ability to deliver on targets.
The report addresses the issues holding back delivery, including recruitment, training, retention, and economic volatility.
Policy changes are needed to ensure delivery
The construction industry remains the sector with the highest number of insolvencies, affecting the UK economy as a whole. The CIOB report states that policy changes will be needed to effect both short-term fixes to support the industry and long-term solutions to ensure challenges do not persist.
To fully help the sector, it recommends that five major targets are set:
- Reducing volatility
- Ensuring more transparent, accessible, usable, and coordinated knowledge
- Improved policy effectiveness
- Better coordination of policy with clearer signals
- Improved diffusion and adoption of innovation
Brian Green said: “Construction is regarded as the most volatile major sector of the economy and it repeatedly faces capacity challenges. This means firms within the sector shape themselves to withstand swings between having too much work and too little resource and having too little work and too much resource. It is inefficient and debilitating to the industry.
“Unsurprisingly, there have been multiple reports over many decades into the construction sector to solve the problems this causes. They have tended to focus on the symptoms of this volatility, suggesting solutions such as improved contractual arrangements, better training, technical solutions such as prefabrication, improved health and safety, or ways to improve the image of the industry. Implicit in many of these reports is the notion that firms within the industry are acting irrationally and need to change.
“This report takes a different tack. It assumes firms are likely to be responding rationally to their business environment. So it argues that rather than simply seeking to force changes on the industry we should look to change the environment within which it operates. The industry and its firms would inevitably adapt of their own accord. These changes should include seeking ways to reduce the volatility and improvements to the institutional framework that determines what gets built where and when. Underpinning this, there should be greatly enhanced information to help steer decision-making.”
Sustainability is also a key concern
Last month, the CIOB Sustainability Conference took place, with over 200 attendees participating in online discussions about the state of environmental, social, and economic crises in the UK.
Pooran Desai OBE, author and social entrepreneur, spoke at the conference: “We are realising the world is massively interconnected. We face many problems – social, environmental, and economic – but can’t solve them in siloes.
“We need solutions that join up across health, climate, jobs, migration, and national security. For example, 80% of spending on our health service in the UK is now on diseases primarily caused by diet, lifestyle, social issues such as poor housing, and pollution, like air pollution.
“The construction industry can play its part in becoming part of a future that pulls us together rather than pulls us apart.”
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