The rise of the robots means skills are even more important

Comment16.04.18by Richard Brown

Construction is one of the areas most likely to be disrupted by technology, but that is no reason to turn your back on training, writes Richard Brown

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Technology makes it even more important to skill people up, writes Richard Brown of @centreforlondon #ukhousing

Meet SAM, the bricklaying robot #ukhousing

There’s a hypnotic video online, featuring ‘SAM, the Semi-Automated Mason’, a robot that can lay bricks five times faster than a human.

Perhaps SAM’s time has come. London and the South East are struggling to meet rising housing targets, while the workforce is facing difficulties posed by its age profile and the potential for tighter immigration controls after Brexit.

Perhaps.

Certainly Centre for London’s report on how automation, pay pressures and Brexit could affect London’s workforce in the next 20 years identifies construction as one of the sectors most likely to be disrupted by automation. We found around half of all construction jobs in London are capable of automation.

SAM, the bricklaying robot:

It is also true that an industry with a 32% non-UK European workforce in London, often recruited on a fairly informal basis, may struggle to navigate new post-Brexit work permit regimes – whenever these are announced and introduced.

When 20% of the workforce nationally is aged over 55 the business case for rapid automation may become hard to resist.

But there is significant difference between skilled trades, which only have a medium potential for automation, and the lower-skilled labouring and machine operation roles, where the exposure is much higher.

The current confluence of circumstances may be just what is needed to push modern construction methods from the margins to the mainstream; from discussion to delivery, offering economies of scale and opening up opportunities to new entrants like local authority housing companies, as well as enhancing the productivity and quality attained by established house builders and housing associations.

Such new approaches, as recommended in ‘Modernise or Die’, Mark Farmer’s bracingly titled 2016 report for the Construction Leadership Council, can range from construction of complete apartments (or modules like bathrooms) in a factory, to the manufacture of components – panels, window units, ceilings etc – that can be assembled on site. In either approach, integrating digital design and manufacture in the predictable, tidy environment of a factory can create new homes faster, more cheaply and with fewer faults than traditional ‘wet-trade’ construction.

They also shift the geography of construction, moving labour upstream in the supply chain. Homes for the overheated South East market can be assembled in situ from components manufactured across the UK – or even overseas.

Redesigning these processes will also transform the human skills that are needed to manage the construction process and to assemble the components swiftly and accurately on site, maybe using craft techniques to put finishing touches to new homes.

Centre for London will be publishing further research later this year on the opportunities offered by such innovations, and the barriers that are still slowing progress.

“Redesigning these processes will also transform the human skills that are needed.”

The big worry with automation, in the construction industry as elsewhere, is what happens to people whose jobs are lost in the process.

Some will find new roles in the remodelled construction sector, or in other new occupations that we can only guess at today; others – particularly those with the lowest skill levels – may struggle.

But this is a reason to invest more in a vocational training system that has been neglected for a generation, rather than to try to turn back the tide of innovation which could at long last carry housebuilding technology into the 21st, or even the 20th, century.

Richard Brown, research director, Centre for London