Danielle Wood

There are a few things at play.

It's a very fragmented sector, lots of really small firms.

That seems to be feeding into an environment of really low innovation.

So if you look at R&D, you look at technology adoption, construction lags, almost every other sector of the economy and given productivity growth comes over time.

Through innovation, that's put a real dampener on the sector.

We've seen a big explosion in regulation and regulatory burden.

I mentioned the National Construction Code before.

I think that's blown out from 100 to 700 pages or something.

I don't have the exact numbers.

in front of me, but increased regulation at every step of the building process.

And we can see that in building times having slowed very significantly over the period.

There's also ongoing challenges with workforce and attraction and retention of staff and the right trades.

And in some ways, we increase barriers to coming in and working regularly.

uh in the sector and you know we had some suggestions around how we could improve um flexibility and get the workforce in that that we need so there's not a single answer but but certainly those things seem to have contributed to what is a really lackluster performance in a really critical sector

It did come up during our consultation with developers.

You won't be surprised to learn it may well be an issue.

It is only an issue for the multi-storey piece because single storey and other sites are not unionised.

Interestingly, actually, when we split it out, we actually found bigger productivity deterioration amongst the low-rise builds.

So it certainly can't be everything that's going on, given that we see the same picture, in fact, even worse picture when it comes to low-rise construction.

We didn't translate it into a sort of price impact, but certainly it will have a very real impact in a world where you are less good at adding the supply that you need than that shows up in house prices.