The future of the construction industry is here already. The only problem is that you have to go halfway around the world to see it. While off-site construction has never really taken off in the UK, in Japan, what we still quaintly call modern methods are used to build 150,000 homes a year (see box, right). The Japanese enthusiasm for factory-built housing is partly rooted in the same kind of labour market shortages that bedevil the UK industry. Japan's ageing workforce has led to a severe labour shortage in the construction and civil engineering industry but it is responding to the crisis by investing heavily in modern methods of construction (MMC) and robotics. In the UK, Mark Farmer, who recently left Arcadis to set up his own construction consultancy, Cast, has just been asked by the government to lead a review of construction labour force skills (see box overleaf). The former Arcadis development director did the spadework in a report that he co-authored for his old firm last year into the demographic challenges facing the sector. This pointed out that the construction industry's productivity has barely increased in the past 20 years. As such, while many other industries have invested in labour-saving plant and technology, construction depends as heavily on scarce labour as it did in the early 1990s.
展开▼
