The demolition industry needs to speak with a single voice if its views are to be heard.
As a miserly, Atheist curmudgeon who is constantly on a diet, the retail, religious, social and culinary delights of Christmas are largely lost on me. But if there is one thing to be said in favour of the festive period, it is the fact that it is quiet. The phones fall silent, and even those funny emails offering cut-price Viagra or access to previously lost Nigerian fortunes abate for long enough to look back at the year gone by and to lay plans for the year to come.
Here at Demolition News Towers, it also gave us time to finally put down in writing some long-overdue reflections on this industry of ours.
We will be uploading these personal reflections individually over the next few days, starting with today’s piece: Time to Make Ourselves Heard.
We hope you find these articles thought-provoking and, regardless of whether you agree or not, that you will share them with your colleagues and take the time to comment and add your voice to the debate.
After decades in the shadow of the construction industry, the demolition sector has emerged blinking into the light of direct public scrutiny.
In the past 20 years or so, the industry has made huge strides in improving site safety, reducing the environmental impact of its operations, developing highly specialised equipment and reducing the amount of waste it sends to landfill. In fact, in these and other areas, the pupil has become the teacher, setting standards to which our construction cousins can only aspire.
But there is one area in which the demolition industry continues to lag behind, playing second fiddle; the bridesmaid to construction’s bride.
As a major employer – in the UK, the construction industry is generally one of the economy’s largest – the construction sector boasts a booming and powerful voice that echoes through the corridors of power. The demolition industry, meanwhile, sounds like Harpo Marx with laryngitis.
No major civil engineering or construction project now takes place without some form of involvement from or consultation with the big names in the construction sector. The London 2012 Olympic Development Agency called upon the expertise of construction leaders, as did the Crossrail initiative, Thames Gateway, Heathrow Terminal 5 and a whole host of other forward-thinking projects. All of these projects – to one degree or another – would require some demolition work.
And yet, the demolition industry – the facilitators that allow the construction Johnnies to do their thing – was not party to those consultations. Instead, demolition was corralled into a corner by its construction cousins only when the deals were done, and handed deadlines, contractual demands and working practices that suited everyone EXCEPT the demolition industry.
The reasons for this are, of course, manifold. The primary reason is that while UK Demolition PLC employs in the region of 10,000 people, UK Construction Ltd employs somewhere in the region of two million individuals. Furthermore, it is estimated that each £1 spent on construction in the UK will ultimately yield £2.84 for the UK economy. Together, the size of the construction industry and the size of the financial stick that it wields effectively drowns out the whisper from the demolition industry.
There have been attempts in the past to circumnavigate this system. For many years, the National Federation of Demolition Contractors encouraged and enjoyed the patronage of a series of Members of Parliament and Government ministers that were supposed to fight the industry’s cause in the House of Commons. The European Demolition Association poured money into a lobbying company that supposedly “had the ear” of the European Parliament in an exercise whose success can be measured purely by the depletion of association funds.
And yet, for all its comparatively small stature, demolition really should hold all the cards. In London, Paris, Frankfurt, New York and Melbourne, virtually no construction can now take place without at least some prior demolition work. Demolition is the facilitator; the advanced force that paves the way for the coming battle; the first step on the road to change. Without demolition, construction work in the world’s major cities simply cannot happen.
Surely, at a time when construction has been weakened by the ongoing global recession, the time has come for the demolition industry to take its place alongside its far larger and more unwieldy cousin at the lobbying table. Surely the time has come for demolition’s voice to be heard.
