A Reality Check: the construction industry is not modernising

The Plain Language Group is hosting a new series of calls to talk about why the construction industry is not modernising and what we can do about it.

Join us on Teams at lunchtime on Friday 2^nd May.

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Have you ever caught yourself feeling like you’ve been dreaming, and then you wake up?

On the one hand is the dream: a vision of a built environment utopia. A perfectly constructed, digitised, net zero built environment where everything works, is safe and is used to its full potential.

On the other hand, when we wake up, we have the way construction works today.

• Construction and the built environment are major contributions to carbon emissions, and yet implementing sustainable practices remains a niche activity.
• Construction remains one of the most hazardous of industries and concern about unsafe buildings is causing jitters in the mortgage and insurance markets.
• Whilst digitised construction product information remains essential to the modernised construction and asset management, construction product manufacturers do not generally supply structured data to the supply chain.

We discussed some of these issues at our round table event, “Industry Voices: Why won’t our industry modernise?” in March 2022.

Many people who want the utopia don’t know how to get there or perhaps think they might know one or two of the bottlenecks but not how to unlock them.

And many people who live the reality, don’t think that we ever will; they’ve seen it all before.

Which one are you?

We have been trying to modernise for generations

Government, industry and society have been talking about modernising the construction industry and the built environment since the 1930s. See our sample list of reports on construction industry inefficiencies dating back to 1934 here.

If you work in our industry, as a consultant, manufacturer, contractor, designer, or even as a client or asset owner, you will recognise the clamour to modernise – the Farmer Review ‘Modernise or Die’ (2016) being a good example.

And you will recognise the initiatives that intend to make it possible: for example,

• Modern Methods of Construction (since the 1998 Egan Report),
• the BIM Mandate 2011,
• Net Zero targets (since 2019),
• the Information Management Initiative 2024,
• the Code for Construction Product Information (2021),
• the Building Safety Act 2022,
• Digital Product Passports (proposed in 2022), and
• the Construction Product Reform Green Paper (2025),

to name just a few. That’s a lot of new stuff.

Yet right now, you probably are not dreaming of a utopian future, more likely, trying to deal with the day to day.

And yet, we are not modernising

At our Industry Voices Round Table, one of the delegates (representing specialist subcontractors and manufacturers) said,

“Short-term outlook is a key barrier. As the CEO of a trade association with many SME members, the daily/weekly challenge to them is about getting paid, rocketing costs and labour shortages”.

Our research of C-Suites in construction product manufacturers in 2023 confirmed that they too were focused on short term concerns, with regulation, sustainability and digitisation low down the list of priorities:

Has anything changed?

We suspect that three years on from Industry Voices, and four years on from when we published our plain language guide to digitisation, things have changed very little.

And yet there have been plenty of initiatives.

And the pressures are still there to deliver safe, efficient buildings.

Is there another way?

How do we get to an efficient, modern construction industry, producing an efficient, modern built environment?

How do we stop focusing on the firefighting and start taking simple steps to move from here to there?

How do we turn the utopian vision into the day to day?

We think we can.  But we won’t do it by listening to the clamour of visionaries.

• We will do it by listening to the practitioners. The people on the coal face.
• We will do it by talking to each other, rather than at each other.
• We will do it by sharing and learning across our silos, rather than hiding in the mystery of buzzwords and incomprehensible jargon.

That’s why we want you to join our call on 2^nd May.

SIGN UP HERE

Facilitating conversations since 2018

The Plain Language Group began at a seminar held at the IET on 17^th January 2018.

Six months on from Grenfell, we invited construction product manufacturers, consultants, contractors and clients to share their challenges with product data. We also invited data companies to listen to the practitioners and see what happened.

On that day we learned the value of listening to the people at the coal face, and seven years on we still know that value. So let’s do it again and look at the deep-rooted blockers facing our sector. We know there is still so much more to do.

What challenges do you face?

If you’re working in construction, construction product manufacturing or asset management and you would like to join the conversation, we are having our first call on Friday 2^nd May from 1-2pm on Teams.

• We’ll be inviting you to share your thoughts about what your challenges are that prevent modernisation.
• We’ll be starting the discussion about how we might overcome those challenges and what is stopping us.
• We’ll be doing some myth busting and asking and answering some questions.
• We’ll certainly be saying the unsayable!

And we’ll be asking you what you think we should be having productive conversations about, so that the journey begins with effective, achievable steps.

The session will be very interactive, so be prepared to take part!

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