Building refurbishment and upgrading (including maintenance, repair, restoration and
extension) – all broadly categorised as ‘repair and maintenance’ by the government
for statistical purposes – are major components of construction activity, having
consistently accounted for just under half of the construction industry’s total output
for the last two decades. The government Department of the Environment,
Transport and the Regions categorises construction output as ‘new work’ or ‘repair
and maintenance’, and between 1994 and the first quarter of 1999 the value of repair
and maintenance work has averaged, annually, some 49 per cent of the total of all
work carried out by the construction industry (DETR 1999: Information Bulletin 599).
During the period between 2002 and 2007 this trend has continued, with repair and
maintenance representing just under half of the work undertaken in the UK. A full
breakdown of statistics is available from the UK statistics authority (www.statistics.
gov.uk). Further statistics on construction can be found at the Department for
Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (www.berr.gov.uk).
Building owners and developers have, in recent years, come to realise the
potential value of our vast stock of old, redundant and obsolete buildings as a
means of providing, through their refurbishment and re-use, high-quality ‘modern’
accommodation more quickly, and at a lower cost, than the alternative of new
construction. Refurbishment can provide ‘new’ accommodation in only half to threequarters
of the time needed for the alternative of demolition and new construction,
and at only 50–80 per cent of the cost, resulting in considerable financial benefits
to the developer.