How is UK construction surprisingly like Europe?
“What does UK Construction have in common with mainland Europe? It’s not a trick question,” says Mike Rigby, MD of MRA Research. “The answer is a lack of common standards, data and systems. Because of that, it’s harder in construction to reach through specification and supply chains to achieve consistently safe, on-time, on quality, cost-effective building.”
When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24th February 2022, most of the world, including Russia, expected it to be all over in a matter of days. Uppermost in European minds was, and still is, what if they don’t stop at Ukraine’s borders?
NATO members wanted to show firmness and solidarity with Ukraine, and draw a red line for the Russians by moving French tanks to the Ukraine border within 3-5 days of the invasion.
They’d been preparing battle plans and practiced annual war games against the possibility of Russian aggression for decades. Ten years before as dozens of US Bradley tanks on exercise charged into a Polish railway station, they had their turrets ripped off by a tunnel roof. But the lessons weren’t learned. A decade later, crumbling bridges and roads, mismatched rail gauges, and complex country bureaucracies across the EU still present barriers to rapid army manoeuvres.
Things didn’t go to plan. France was unable to send tanks to Romania by the shortest land route through Germany and instead had to tranship via the Mediterranean.
The European rail industry body said, ‘we need to check which tunnels are big enough.’ The tilt of the track could cause heavy military loads to fall off on bends. Mismatched railway gauges in the three Baltic states are in the middle of a 24bn Euro upgrade to integrate them into the European network. Moving military assets from Portugal and Spain would face a similar barrier.
Germany’s road network needs a lot of work. German customs had previously refused to allow French Leclerc tanks to enter because they were too heavy for Germany’s roads, and last year a 100m stretch of Dresden’s Carola Bridge collapsed.
What should have taken 3-6 days to the Romanian border overland, to make the Russians think twice, took a leisurely 45 days via the Mediterranean Sea.
In a review, they identified 2,800 transport infrastructure ‘hotspots’ across the EU, soft and hard-stop barriers. Five hundred needed fixing urgently at eye-watering cost. To put that into perspective, thirty percent of Europe’s recently agreed 5% defence budget is to be spent on fixing or dismantling these barriers.
UK Construction is even more fragmented, with myriads of building materials supply chains and strung-out specification channels. But, like Europe, joined up building, joined up anything is still just an aspiration. For want of common standards and tools and accessible, common digital data, it’s extremely difficult in construction to reach through specification channels and supply chains to achieve consistently safe, on-time, on quality, cost-effective building.
One of the most interesting and revealing topics in the recent BMBI Annual Debate was on technology and digitalisation in construction. The Data Yard initiative represents the industry’s collective response to fragmented product information systems, and September’s supplier sign-ups to the BMF’s Data Yard platform is a watershed for industry wide digital transformation.
Read a summary of it in BMN’s BMBI Debate Supplement and watch the full video discussion on www.bmbi.co.uk. It will be time well spent.
This article was first published in the Builders Merchants’ News magazine.
