The UK government sees artificial intelligence as the answer to many of the country’s problems. From fixing potholes to reforming the NHS, it claims its recently unveiled AI Opportunities Action Plan could create 13,250 jobs and fire up economic growth, writes BESA chief executive officer David Frise.
The strategy includes a potential £14bn investment from the tech sector in ‘growth zones’ that will upgrade our digital infrastructure, creating another boom in data centre building. Small business owners could gain particular benefit from using AI to speed up planning and improve record-keeping, the government believes.
So, is this time to let AI rip on the construction and building engineering sectors’ wider systemic problems?
In his recent article for Building magazine, industry seer Mark Farmer said construction had repeatedly proved that it was incapable of reforming itself to meet its post-Grenfell responsibilities.
“The industry’s trading model of adversarial and layered transactions to maximise risk transfer has been set and established over decades in response to inevitable boom and bust cycles”, he wrote.
Superficial
Farmer added that the industry would always find a way to “game the system” and “demonstrate superficial conformity” with any legislative change like the Building Safety Act or the multiple late payment ‘codes’ and ‘initiatives’ we have seen over the past several decades. These have singularly failed to halt the endless plunge towards the bottom on cost that perpetuates a culture of corner cutting (so-called value engineering) and business failure.
The collapse of ISG just two weeks after the publication of the Grenfell public inquiry report in September was a tragic irony illustrating just why true industry reform remains so distant. This calamitous event had tragic echoes of Carillion’s failure, which happened just a year after the Grenfell Tower fire.
Back in 2018, we were promised that ‘another Carillion’ would never be allowed to happen again, but once more thousands of small supply chain businesses are trying to pick up the pieces – and many going to the wall because of the ludicrous way construction goes about its ‘business’.
The unfinished projects ISG left behind are gradually being picked up by other clients, but we are already hearing some stories about specialist contractors being offered renewed terms to finish their work – but at lower rates than the original tender .
It is nigh on impossible to embed a new safety ‘culture’ against this backdrop, and Farmer said reform would remain a ‘pipe dream’ without “a massive legislative effort covering prompt payment, project bank accounts, responsible procurement, self-employment v PAYE incentives, workforce licensing, more stringent building regulations and a consumer rights revolution”.
However, successive UK governments have shown little appetite for this level of intervention at least in part because the current dysfunction often works in their favour by, as Farmer put it, “dispersing risk and protecting budgets”.
And our new Prime Minister has already promised to “back the builders not the blockers” by removing “red tape”, which suggests even our shiny new building safety legislation could be in trouble as Labour “goes for growth”.
The Grenfell Inquiry report accused the people who worked on that particular refurbishment project of negligence, but they could have investigated hundreds of similar projects around the country and found the same issues – it is only luck that has prevented more Grenfells.
Some people are greedy, others are negligent, some are naïve about the level of risk they are accepting in a contract. So, was everyone greedy or, like most in the industry, were they just trying to make some sort of profit from an under-priced contract?
Sadly, seven years after Grenfell and six since the collapse of Carillion this is still the way our industry operates.
And just last month the safety body Collaborative Reporting for Safer Structures (Cross UK) issued a ‘red alert’ about remedial cladding work because some of it is has been so badly botched it is blocking smoke ventilation systems.
Is that not the ultimate irony? Trying to put one safety problem right by creating another. That’s what happens when you keep doing things the same way and expect to get a different result.
Relentless
History just keeps repeating itself, but could AI break our relentless cycle of razor thin margins, short-termism, and create the innovation we need to deliver better quality projects?
Look at what it has achieved in other sectors. In digital tech, Microsoft has just unveiled a new material that can reduce the need to use lithium in batteries – with transformative potential for many industries that rely on energy storage, including ours.
The company used AI to analyse 32 million possible materials and found 18 that could work. Using traditional methods, that would have taken almost two decades…AI did it in 80 hours. And in healthcare it is driving massive improvements in the accuracy and speed of cancer detection.
Such things are happening when AI is still in its “toddler” development phase, according to its champions. GPT6 is due to be unleashed this year, which is described as “PhD level” by comparison.
During the latest BESA podcast, experienced government property specialist Steven Boyd highlighted the huge disconnect between construction and operation with a lack of joined up working meaning vital information was lost at handover that undermined the safety and quality of the building in use.
“Whilst lots of information is gathered, and there's lots of work done on handover, a few months after the handover, normally, a great deal of that has been lost, which is such a shame and such a waste of money. It means that having a genuine whole life perspective is a challenge,” he said.
“We need to smash through the ‘glass ceiling’ at handover that stops the smooth transfer of information into the operational phase.”
Surely AI could solve that one.
We have too little money and too little time to do the job properly and there is little sign of this pattern being broken. And while awareness of the Building Safety Act is clearly rising, a survey carried out by AMA Research on behalf of BESA, found that very few companies have actually done anything about it.
Just 9% of respondents reported making “significant changes” to help them comply with the legislation, the vast majority still say it has had a minimal impact on their businesses despite most saying they were ‘aware’.
Basically, they know they should do something but – and this is something BESA members regularly report – if you raise the issue of additional (but potentially costly) safety measures, many clients don’t want to know, and you risk being priced out of the contract. The new safety legislation is not seen to be enforced so many are happy to take a chance.
Fortresses
So, the real issue for government is how to balance its growth agenda i.e. actually building things, with the need to enforce safety. You can’t turn buildings into safety ‘fortresses’ and you can’t compromise on the things that keep people healthy as well as safe like indoor air quality, acoustics, access to lighting and space etc.
All this costs money and needs expertise to deliver, and can be done, but not with the current financial model. The industry should reform itself, but it won’t unless the economics of construction change – and the government cannot duck this, otherwise they won’t have an industry able to deliver anything, let alone anything safe.
Reform, therefore, means creating a more professional industry – which must start with the finance, but must include more sophisticated working models including better use of information and digital tools.
So, could AI with its astonishing speeds and ability to crunch numbers like never before finally create the new model we need? Could it, through revolutionising our productivity, address skills shortages, our ageing workforce, planning delays, design mistakes etc. etc?
And if AI can’t, what else is going to make sure the country has the safe, efficient, and sustainable built environment it needs…and save our industry from itself?