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Even multimillionaires can’t escape Britain’s cowboy builders, it seems. Last week, residents of One Hyde Park, the UK’s most expensive flats, won a £35m court case against the contractor that built their homes. The high court ordered the construction company Laing O’Rourke to fix defective pipework that was discovered to be causing problems in 2014, only three years after the luxury development was completed.
At the other end of the economy, tens of thousands of families are facing damp and mould issues also caused by botched building works. A National Audit Office investigation revealed in October last year that a staggering 98% of external insulation fitted under the previous government’s home-improvement schemes was installed so ineptly that it will have to be repaired or replaced.
Across the UK, an epidemic of similar stories reveals a brewing crisis in construction quality. New-build houses are regularly beset with shoddy workmanship. In Croydon, an almost brand-new 35-storey tower is already so riddled with mould and leaks that residents are being moved out for major repairs. Barratt Redrow, one of the UK’s largest property developers, recently uncovered £248m of defects across their portfolio.
At every tier of society, the UK seems hamstrung by abysmal construction standards, unable to build anything without catastrophic bodges and eye-watering remediation bills. How did building in Britain get so bad?
“We are the dinosaurs of construction in Europe,” Barbara Jones, a veteran builder with 45 years of experience on construction sites, tells me. “I work with people from lots of different countries and they are laughing at us. They think we’re ridiculous, that we don’t value skill. A tradesperson is nothing here. Whereas in Germany, it’s a very respected job.”
Jones says there seems to be a devaluing of practical skills in schools – a process kickstarted when Britain’s Skills Training Agency, which had for decades offered rigorous tuition across a variety of vocations, was sold off under the Thatcher government. Despite warnings that privatisation would be unsustainable and could lead to asset-stripping and lower-quality courses, the Conservatives flogged the organisation to a private company in 1990 that went bust only three years later. The fiasco precipitated a nationwide collapse of construction training, compounded by a lack of legal protection for specialist roles in the sector.
In many developed economies, skilled construction jobs are strictly regulated in the same way as they are for doctors and lawyers, so that only fully qualified professionals can take on these roles. In Germany, which is widely considered to enjoy a significantly higher standard of construction than the UK carpenters, roofers, architects, bricklayers and plumbers must all be properly trained and accredited before they can practise. In the UK, however, anyone – regardless of qualifications – can be a carpenter or perform the functions of an architect.
The UK’s extensive building regulations don’t protect us from sloppy construction, either. Britain has thousands of rules governing the design of new architecture, covering everything from the width of doorways to the gradient of staircases. But in practice, local building control inspectors are not able to double-check the quality of every brick that’s laid. It was once standard practice for developers to employ an independent clerk of works, as is still common on the continent, who’d visit construction sites frequently to monitor the quality of workmanship. These days, the role has all but lapsed or is performed by the contractors themselves, in effect allowing them to mark their own homework.
In the past, architects were often charged with overseeing build quality on the buildings they designed. But in recent years, a new type of construction contract has given builders more power to make changes to the projects they are working on without external oversight. The “design and build” contract has become notorious among architects as a bodger’s charter, enabling unscrupulous builders to cut costs by, for example, swapping out high-quality materials for cheaper alternatives. Some have even argued that the design and build contract, under which architects are only involved as initial design consultants before builders take over responsibility for finishing a project, contributed to the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy.
“There’s a culture of cost-cutting, whether for social housing or for high end,” explains architect Astrid Smitham, whose housing scheme in Barking, designed with Nicholas Lobo Brennan, won the UK’s most prestigious affordable housing prize in 2023. The pair have worked in Europe as well as in Britain, witnessing first-hand how much worse the culture of our construction sector has become as contracting firms cut corners to make more money and replace labourers’ day rates with piecework. This system sees builders paid a small fixed amount for each task they complete rather than an hourly wage, incentivising working as quickly as possible and cutting corners.
Inferior modern materials have also played a role in the decline of UK building quality. In the past, British architecture was predominantly made with flexible and breathable materials such as Victorian lime mortar, which was able to handle temperature fluctuations, moisture changes and ground movements. Today, construction is dominated by cheaper, more rigid materials such as cement, which is prone to crack over time.
So, what needs to change? Most importantly, the political appetite to improve building standards. The fact that the construction quality crisis has been brewing for so long without meaningful action from the government is, however, hardly surprising given how underrepresented construction workers are in politics. More than 10% of the workforce are in a skilled trade occupation, but hardly any of our MPs have a background in manual labour. If the Green party candidate Hannah Spencer wins the Gorton and Denton byelection, she’ll probably be the only plumber in parliament.
Britain’s construction quality crisis isn’t a mystery, but the logical outcome of political choices. It’s the result of deregulation, privatisation and allowing the primacy of cost-cutting profiteers to supplant quality control and craft. When you rob building of its dignity, you don’t get efficiency; you get mould, leaks and devastating repair bills at every rung of the social ladder. Until those choices are reversed, we’ll keep building problems faster than we can fix them.
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Phineas Harper is a writer and curator
