Construction skills: plus ça change plus c'est la même chose!
- Duncan Cartlidge
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Construction skills
Last month the CITB (The Construction Industry Training Board) the CIOB and ONS published their overview of the UK construction industry in 2026 and it didn’t make for very encouraging reading. The CITB is of course at the sharp end as far as skills and training is concerned. The reports didn’t pull punches describing construction as a sector that has remained largely unchanged for decades and telling a story of an industry at a crossroads – continue in the same way and fall short or alternatively invest in people and innovation to secure the future.
The Get It Right Initiative (GIRI) is a group of industry experts, organisations and businesses dedicated to eliminating error and improving the UK construction industry. Construction errors impose a significant financial burden on the UK construction industry. According to the GIRI, the annual cost of errors is estimated to be around seven times the industry’s total annual profit. Investing in training and professional development not only reduces errors but also boosts output and profitability. In construction, where the cost of mistakes is disproportionately high, reducing rework alone could ease pressure from rising demand and improve productivity. GIRI’s research revealed that when unrecorded process waste, latent defects and indirect costs are included, the situation gets much worse. We’ve all seen headlines like ‘New build hell’. Without a focus on competency, quality drops and re-work increases, ultimately leading to poor productivity. When comparing new home completions with customer satisfaction data, periods of higher output have often aligned with lower customer satisfaction which typically reflects underlying quality issues that require time and money to resolve, driving up remedial work. This adds cost, diverts resources and ultimately has a negative impact on productivity. According to the Employer Skills Survey, 2024, hard-to-fill vacancy density was highest in construction at 57%. The CIOB has also been assessing the industry zeitgeist among clients. In response to the question, ‘how would you like contractors to improve their services?’, perhaps not surprisingly almost three-quarters of clients said ‘workmanship and build quality’.
What is really depressing is that I recently came across a video on YouTube from the 1960s on Housing Standards in which home buyers describe their experiences of 'Jerry building' (incidentally, look out for the building inspector at 3.21 in his suit and trilby!). It seems as though little has changed during the past 60 years, apart from the building inspector's dress code.
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