Numbers in employment will drop a further 6% before market starts to recover in 2012

Hopes of an early recovery in the construction industry have been hit by a new report which predicts that the numbers of architects in employment will fall both this year and next.

Sunand Prasad

“I don’t think it’s feasible for institutions and universities to set quotas” Sunand Prasad

According to the report, produced by the Construction Industry Council (CIC) in association with Construction Skills, the number of architects and architectural technologists in work will fall 5% this year to just under 42,000.

The report, The Impact of the recession on Construction Professional Services, estimated that 2011 would see a further fall of 1.3% to 41,418 and said part IIs would be left particularly exposed due to an “oversupply” of architects.

The report included a survey of more than 300 construction firms of all disciplines which revealed that 85% of the architectural practices felt the supply of graduates exceeded demand.

Architect Mark Way, director of skills at CIC, said he was particularly concerned for the newly qualified and those with a second degree.

“People will hang on and do what they can but they’ll get to a point where they’ll have to do something else,” he said. “It’s deeply unfortunate that people are coming out of education to face perhaps the worst recession since the second world war. Universities are businesses and their role is not just to educate people but to attract them.”

Fellow report author James Hastings, head of construction futures at research group Experian, said: “The professional institutions and education providers really need to get together and work out how to deal with this situation… the problem you’ve got is that there is this long gestation period [for architects].”

But former RIBA president Sunand Prasad said it was virtually impossible to predict demand.

“There is no underplaying the human impact of this,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s feasible for institutions and universities to get together and set quotas because I don’t think you could ever get the numbers right.”

He added that architectural education did equip people to work in other fields but said courses could be improved to give individuals the best mix of skills.

The report said that the number of architects and architectural technologists in work had plummeted 19% from 54,426 in 2007 to just over 44,000 by the end of 2009.

One reason for this, the report added, was that architecture appeared earlier in the construction process meaning other professions, such as mechanical and electrical engineers, had not yet been hit as badly.

The report predicted employment numbers would only start to rise in 2012, and then by just 1%.