Leading construction industry intelligence provider, Barbour ABI, brought top industry experts together at an exclusive event after the first day of the UK Construction Week exhibition in London to discuss the need for culture change.

Dr David Hancock, Construction Director at Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) highlighted the scale of the issue:

“The construction industry has to educate and source locally, teach more trades and skills to improve communities and put the heart back. We have to care what we build and want to do better. That’s the change this industry needs. We measure costs, not benefits, and the concern is that with rising inflation hitting construction projects, that could become worse. Our industry must not revert to the old ways.”

Trudi Sully, Impact Director at Construction Innovation Hub said:

“I deliberately avoided construction for a long time, because it seemed a scary place to work. The Construction Innovation Hub is all about culture change. Enabling, educating and empowering the industry is what we do. Over the last four years of the hub we have worked with more than 400 construction supply chain companies to support research and innovation. Much of transformation is about partnerships, to mitigate risk, bring about change more quickly and enable better decision-based outcomes. Better manufacturing processes are leading to those processes being adopted in construction too. Advances in other industries are providing construction with a playbook to follow to make improvements.”

Rebecca Lovelace, Founder and Chief Dot-Joiner at Building People said:

“The built environment is about a world of amazing opportunities, and we need to get out of fragmented silos to realise its potential. We need boarder diversity in construction, not just more women as diversity brings more innovation and helps culture change. We need to enable anyone who is interested to become involved in the built environment.