The Advocacy Myth

If you spend five minutes reading the trade press on any given morning, you would believe the Prime Minister spends his days trembling behind his desk in Downing Street, cowering from the righteous fury of construction trade associations.

Every single week, without fail, another body “calls upon” the government. They “urge” the Housing Minister to leap into action. They “demand” that Andy Burnham reverses supply-chain inflation before tea time and fixes planning bottlenecks before he goes to bed.

It sounds terribly urgent, doesn’t it? It conjures up a grand image of a trade chief marching up Whitehall, banging on the door of Number 10, and thrusting a rolled-up manifesto through the letterbox while shouting demands for change.

Anyone who has worked in or around Westminster knows that it doesn’t work that way.

In truth, no minister was phoned. No private secretary took a memo. No Mayor sat down over a morning mug of builder’s tea to read Construction Enquirer and thought, “Blimey, the CPA wants me to fix global steel tariffs, I’d better get right on that.”

What you are watching is pure and meaningless political theatre.

Take a look at a recent headline floating around industry news feeds: “Burnham urged to help construction supply chain costs.”

Read past the headline, however, and you will find a report on national interest rates, global supply shocks, and hefty import tariffs set by central government. Despite his new lofty position, Andy Burnham has as much power over central bank interest rates as he does over the orbit of the moon. Yet there his name sits in the headline, attached to a desperate plea to save the day.

Why do trade bodies do it? Because it is all part of a grand illusion.

Trade associations rely on member fees from hard-pressed contractors, demolition firms, and material suppliers. When the economic climate turns sour, those members start to question what their annual subscription actually buys them.

Issuing a press release allows the leadership to clip the resulting trade article, plaster it across their website, and declare: “Look how fiercely we are fighting your corner.” In truth, it merely highlights the disconnect between the industry, the government, and those who claim to bridge the gap between the two.

This advocacy has been reduced to mere brand management. The trade press gets an easy story to hit their daily quota, the trade association gets to pretend it holds sway over ministers, and the paying member gets a warm feeling that someone is shouting on their behalf.

Real lobbying remains a quiet, dry, painstaking business. It happens through 80-page technical consultation papers, evidence submitted to select committees, and months of unglamorous meetings with senior civil servants in Whitehall corridors. It is slow, tedious, and mind-numbingly boring. And, it appears, the trade associations simply lack the stomach for it.

And besides, when was the last time that industry or the general public ever forced a government to reconsider or to change direction? Back in 2003, in the run-up to the war in Iraq and the search for weapons of mass destruction, more than a million people took to the streets of the UK to protest against the war. The government went ahead anyway, only to discover those WMDs didn’t actually exist.

In my lifetime, I have seen protests against nuclear weapons, rampant capitalism, the Poll Tax, Brexit and countless other causes and campaigns, gripes and grumbles. Not a single one forced a governmental U-turn.

Make no mistake: something has to give, something has to be said, and someone has to take action. The UK construction industry is in a dire and desperate state right now. The situation isn’t quite at the level of the 2008 crash, but it’s certainly headed that way.

We have already lost more than 8,000 companies to insolvencies in the past two years. The arrival of the Building Safety Act and its extended liability clause is making things significantly worse. It has already claimed Ardmore Construction, and it could easily drive many more perfectly good firms to the industry exit.

But calling upon the Housing Minister in an online statement is the political equivalent of shouting at the television screen during the nine o’clock news. It makes a lot of noise, it feels therapeutic, but the person on the screen cannot hear a word you are saying.

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