In the autumn of 2020, an East Yorkshire-based company announced that it was building a three-bedroom house using a robot. No doubt keen to write about anything other than the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, journalists from outlets as diverse as Metro, The Sun, The Daily Mail and BBC jumped on the story.
The company, Construction Automation, said that its Automated Brick Laying Robot (ABLR) had the potential to construct a house in just two weeks, thereby increasing productivity and build quality, and removing the need for human operatives to work at height. Co-founder David Longbottom told the BBC: “Our goal is to automate housebuilding as far as we can.”
Since then, the UK’s housing crisis has only worsened. There has also been a general election and the new Labour government’s commitment to build 1.5m homes by the end of the current parliament. So, are automated approaches like ABLR and other new technologies the only realistic way that the housing target can be met?
Séamus Carroll MRICS, associate director at Keegans, says that the way we typically build has failed to innovate and compares poorly with other industries. “Construction has largely escaped the exponential technological curve that has transformed other sectors – we are still building with methods recognisable from a century ago,” he says.
However, he doesn’t think that technologies such as ABLR alone will prove transformational. “The real productivity gains are in modern methods of construction (MMC),” he says. “The winning approach is not trying to ‘bring the factory to site,’ but moving as much work as possible into controlled factory conditions and leaving only rapid assembly for site. Precision-made modules and components allow shorter programmes, higher quality and better performance.”
Dr Bola Abisogun FRICS, founder & CEO of AI-QS, largely agrees but says that construction and its related fields require a change in mindset if the opportunities presented by new technologies are to be fully realised. “Importantly, [we need] assurance that quality, accountability, traceability, ultimate liability and overall whole-life value will not be compromised,” he says.
“[We also need] a more welcoming insurance/assurance and warranty sector that will seek to underwrite the new landscape of inherent risks, both known and unknown. If the latter is not possible, we run the risk of not being able to include such solutions and the ability to innovate and scale, at a site level, will be rendered bankrupt and placed in the ’too difficult’ box.”
The effect of automation on jobs
Of course, many people are worried that automation will lead to a loss of jobs in construction on a massive scale. Back in 2020 for instance, a union representative told the BBC (in the same article as Longbottom was talking up ABLR) that automation “poses a serious threat to jobs”. For Carroll, however, this is to ignore the march of history. “It’s too simplistic to frame automation as jobs lost,” he says.
“History shows that technology reduces the number of roles but increases their value. Agriculture is the classic example: in the early 1800s, more than 90% of people in Britain worked the land. Today, agriculture employs around 1.4% of the UK workforce. That shift didn’t create mass unemployment – instead it freed labour for industry, services and innovation, multiplying productivity and raising living standards.
“Construction is approaching a similar inflection point,” he adds. “The likely outcome of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation is fewer roles overall, but of higher value. Repetitive site labour will decline, while demand will surge for robotics operators, AI supervisors, digital engineers and cost consultants who can interpret machine-generated data.”
Carroll says that this can already be seen playing out. He points to Laing O’Rourke’s Explore Manufacturing facility in Nottinghamshire, which has automated much of its precast component production. “That didn’t end employment, it changed it,” he says. “Traditional site-based trades gave way to factory-based digital assembly and robotics maintenance roles, with productivity gains that made the company more competitive.”
For Abisogun, traditional roles are likely to be preserved, at least in the short-to-medium-term. “At one end of the spectrum, you have those individuals and firms that want to preserve the old somewhat trusted ways of doing things, albeit with less transparency, accountability, traceability and efficiency,” he says. “This is a perspective that the insurance sector understands and is familiar with.
“The golden thread commands a more transparent, accountable, traceable and efficient process, mandating a digital solution or record to be held indefinitely” Bola Abisogun FRICS, AI-QS
The golden thread
So, the advent of new technology will not destroy traditional jobs – at least any time soon. But Abisogun, who has been banging the drum for better use of technology in construction for decades, senses that a revolution may eventually be underway.
He points to the new ‘golden thread’ requirement contained in the Building Safety Act, which has the potential to inform change. “The golden thread commands a more transparent, accountable, traceable and efficient process, mandating a digital solution or record to be held indefinitely. That could imply that automated building processes will become the norm and not the exception in the next few years, particularly as the realities of an ageing and digitally ill-equipped workforce begins to bite,” he says.
In addition, Carroll says that construction does not operate in a bubble; that other professions and services also need to up their game to expedite house building. “MMC alone won’t achieve 1.5m homes,” he says. “The true bottleneck lies in planning and building control. These services are chronically under-resourced and under-performing, creating time costs that dwarf the savings from on-site automation. Fire remediation is a striking example: where compliance requirements can add an additional year into project duration. That is not a direct cost problem, it is a system delay problem.”
Here, technology can play an important role, not least in using AI to speed up both planning and building control. “Empowering AI within regulatory processes offers a transformational opportunity,” he says. Automation on site might save weeks, but AI-enabled compliance and approvals could save years across the housing pipeline. Meeting the housing target will depend less on automated building processes than on intelligent reform of the regulatory bottlenecks upstream.”
So, how might all this affect surveyors? Again, Carroll makes the point that the profession will need to adapt, but it isn’t about to become extinct. “Surveyors are poised to become the interpreters of automation,” he says.
“Robots may build, but surveyors set the commercial reality, risk frameworks and quality standards those robots must operate within. Our role will expand into validating data streams from automated builds, auditing AI-driven cost models and advising clients when to trust, and when to question, the outputs of technology.”
He concludes: “The biggest shift will be moving upstream. In this sense, automation won’t reduce the role of surveyors, it will elevate it. The profession’s unique strength is independence and ethics: the ability to test, certify and assure stakeholders in environments of uncertainty.
“As construction becomes more automated and AI-driven, independent assurance will be more vital, not less.”
