In November the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development predicted that the UK will be the second-worst performer in terms of economic performance in the G20 this year. The evidence that Britain is suffering from poor productivity keeps mounting, and the impact is felt in our struggling public services and the decline in our standard of living. And construction is not helping. According to the Office for National Statistics, the industry is below the UK average and showed negative or little growth between 1997 and 2020. Of the various sub-sectors, the construction of buildings has fallen the most, with architectural and engineering services showing a similar decline. There are many reasons for construction's poor performance. Most jobs are bespoke, which means each project has to be designed and built from scratch, a process that is expensive and slow. Modern buildings are increasingly complex, making it hard for project teams to deliver schemes where everything works as intended on completion. The industry is also suffering from a skills shortage, exacerbated by the combination of covid-19 and Brexit as thousands of European workers went home and never came back. The workers who are left are ageing and are not being replaced as they retire. Contractors operate on ridiculously slim margins, so there is not the money to invest in research and development that would improve productivity, and there are other cost pressures such as the need to deliver net zero buildings.
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