Is Construction Really As Backward As They Say?

New book 'Why is Construction so Backward?' calls for less regulation, fewer key performance indicators and less reliance on the idea that densely packed cities will solve our problems.

Why are homes so expensive to buy and to maintain? Why is construction one of the world's poorest performers when it comes to innovation? Why has housing become a major factor in Gordon Brown's concerns about the British economy and the euro? These are some of the questions addressed in a new title under the Wiley-Academy imprint, Why is Construction so Backward? The publishers describe the book as a powerful but left-wing call for less regulation, fewer key performance indicators and less reliance on the idea that densely packed cities will solve our problems.

The authors are James Woudhuysen, writer and editor and currently Professor of Forecasting and Innovation at De Montfort University in Leicester, and Ian Abley, an architect with Whitby Bird and Partners.

There is also a contribution on the 1960s housing boom by Dr Stefan Multhesius, Honorary Professor in the History of Architecture at the University of East Anglia, and Miles Glendinning, an historian and writer based at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland.

Martin Pawley, a former Editor of the weekly magazine Building Design and now a regular contributor to the Architects Journal, acted as an adviser to the project and brings out some of the principal issues in his foreword.

He is not so sure that the industry is as backward as the authors portray.

Their description is not very flattering: they assert as a doctrinal fact that construction is: " - atomised in industrial structure, poorly managed in practice, and endlessly weighed down in regulations.

To get a kitchen or bathroom fitted, a small extension added, or a new building commissioned costs a lot of money and frequently involves recourse to the law.

"Residential floor space commands more and more of a premium.

On top of that, the business of buying a house can be expensive and time-consuming.

Yet behind the backwardness of the whole property sector is a wider crisis of capitalist innovation." In large parts of the world, they add, and hand in hand with transport infrastructure, the quality and quantity of the building stock has become a mainstream political issue.

Now all these things are broadly true, but there is not a great deal the industry can do about it within the conditions it has to operate.

Meanwhile, with movements like Construction Excellence gaining momentum in Britain, the industry should be given credit for the efforts it is making to improve its productivity and efficiency Martin Pawley is plainly aware of these conditioning factors when he writes: "Is construction really backward? Anecdotally the charge seems impossible to refute, but it is not.

Even the most determined attempt to think it through soon runs into contradictions and turns back upon itself.

For, in the end, who can truly say that construction is any more backward than the markets it serves? Anyone old enough to remember the labour-intensive building sites of the 1950s, with their rows of batch mixers discharging into wheelbarrows to be pushed and pulled up ramps of scaffold boards to distant formwork, would have to concede that today's tower craned and weatherproofed construction site, served by trucks making just-in-time deliveries of pre-mixed concrete and pre-engineered assemblies, represents a tremendous advance in organisation and methods." 'Impenetrable fog of overlapping responsibilities' But, he observes, upstream of these improved logistics a vast bureaucracy of regulation and statutory controls has grown up, a source of endless postponements and delays.

The once straightforward act of building has become smothered in an impenetrable fog of overlapping responsibilities.

This is a not unfair depiction of the conditions in which the industry has to work in the democratic societies of the 21st century.

The message of the book seems to be that the industry will have to adopt more industrialised methods of construction and off-site fabrication if it is to match achievements like those of the 1940s when some 60,000 prefabricated council houses were produced within 15 months from the end of the war in Europe, at the same time repairing and refurbishing 100,000 bombed dwellings and building 34,000 new private houses.

That is all the more striking when one bears in mind that this was achieved without the logistics which Martin Pawley extols and are now so evident on the best-run sites.

This example indicates that the real problems of the industry lie a lot deeper than building systems, methods of construction management and the effectiveness with which labour is deployed.

Martin Pawley quite rightly draws attention to the fall-off in the rate of house-building since then.

But what about the enormous rise in house prices over the past 50 or 60 years? As he says, a modest suburban house that could have been purchased in 50 years back for £1,000 may commands a price today of £100,000 or more.

However much the industry strives to reduce its costs, it could not make much impression on this rate of inflation.

What the authors need to look at is not so much the rise in construction costs which have gone on year by year at the prevailing rates of monetary inflation; it is the huge rise in land prices caused partly by competition for desirable locations but also by the restrictive effects of the planning legislation.

The evidence which the house builders gave to Kate Barker in the course of her housing inquiry demonstrates this only too vividly, for example the absurd situation where it takes as long as ten years to build out a medium-sized plot of land in an area like Stansted where the pressure to accommodate in-comers is acute.

Even so, the house-building industry is making efforts to improve its performance in a sector of construction that is potentially highly profitable.

It is giving a measure of leadership in the drive for integrated construction, as the Strategic Forum for Construction illustrates in its latest listings of demonstration projects.

Here the industry, or that part of it that wants to shake off the image of the traditional past, is making prodigious progress.

Drive for construction integration making headway For example, the CDS housing partnership in Liverpool that is using a fully integrated construction team approach to establish a 'virtual company' and create a strategic alliance of like-minded organisations to improve repair and maintenance services on Merseyside over a period of five years.

Or the integrated team of five partners in the Slough area led by Willmott Dixon (three constructors and two consultants), carrying out a development programme in the Southern Counties of England over the next five years.

And then there is CIOB at the forefront of beneficial change, entering the fray with its site conditions campaign, now taken up by Construction Excellence who point out that this kind of initiative is particularly relevant to professionals who assume that conditions on site are the contractor's responsibility despite the impact that site conditions may have on the quality of workmanship or on visitors to the site.

Introducing its integration toolkit, the Strategic Forum says to the industry: do you want delivery 25 - 40 per cent better with 11- 30 per cent less capital employed? do you want improved profitability, reduced costs and more sustainable outcomes? do you want significantly improved predictability of programme, price and quality? Allegations of backwardness may in some respects be justified as a hangover from the past, but construction in the United Kingdom is certainly not an industry which is going backwards.

Why is Construction so Backward? - published by John Wiley and Sons of Chichester as a Wiley-Academy paperback, 321 pp., price £29.99.

Back to top