A throwaway comment the other day by an electrician I know brought home the underlying demographic time bomb we have in the industry.
He and some colleagues were discussing one of their number getting his bus pass. It transpired that in the team of eight, all but one had a bus pass, and the other one was due his within the next couple of years.
The reason why this struck me is that this team works in the house building sector and the electrician said that they were a dying breed, with little evidence of anyone stepping up to fill their shoes.
Trainees got dumped as the recession started to bite (he hesitates to call them apprentices). This made life easier for them as they were not having to supervise or correct work, so productivity was better in the short term. But this short-term improvement in productivity, and perhaps quality, comes at the price of being able to sustain long-term growth and retain product quality.
“Some say that if the housing shortage is that critical then ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ – a bizarre attitude after the Decent Homes programme did a lot to ameliorate the deficiencies in the poor-quality housing built in the last big surge.”
The housing sector is worth looking at because there are at least some statistics to work with. In 2007 at the peak, 147,000 private homes were completed. According to the HBF customer satisfaction survey, 77% of customers said that they were satisfied or very satisfied. In the 2012 survey, 90% were satisfied, a big improvement although the number of completions was down to only 89,000, a fall of 40%.
So a boost in house building will stretch the capacity of the supply chain to meet the demand for labour, skilled or otherwise. Unless managements have a very clear sense of how they are going to manage through the boom then all the plans in the world to build 250,000 good quality homes a year will come to nought.
There are some who say that if the housing shortage is that critical then “beggars can’t be choosers”. That’s a bizarre attitude coming after the Decent Homes programme which did a lot to ameliorate the deficiencies in the poor-quality housing built in the last big surge. There is a tendency to build to the Building Regulations, but that means they’re legally compliant, it’s not a guarantee of quality.
So we need a better measure of housing quality. In that same HBF survey 91% had also reported problems to their builder and 72% reported more problems than they expected to have, with 11% reporting more than 16 faults. If you had 16 or more faults on a new car, irrespective of how much you paid for it, you might demand your money back.
