2012 Olympics: The Effects of it on the British Construction Industry

It will bring revenue to certain industries, and will negatively affect others, as well as impacting life anywhere even near London at the time of the games itself. I don’t live particularly close to London (a good 60 miles away at least), but even here people are thinking of renting rooms etc to tourists coming over to watch the games, which will inevitably leave the roads very congested for the duration.

Anyway, I digress, the main problem faced by the British construction industry is that there is already an over abundance of labor available, and not enough jobs to support all of them, even though the market is booming at the moment. The recent influx of foreign workers (particularly to this field) from inside the European Union from places such as Poland and Slovakia will mean there are a lot of people left out of work when the construction contracts for the games are finished.

Construction directly for the games themselves are merely a drop in the ocean of works that will be carried out because of this happening in London. New hotels are springing up, as well as countless hotel and industrial renovations and small scale property developments so that people can rent out rooms to the tourists when they arrive. As well as all the different products that will need to be more mass produced for the games, meaning more work for this industry that wont be there when the games are over with.

Of the firms involved with the particular project as well, there will undoubtedly be overruns and missed deadlines due to the logistics of building in the center of London itself and from intangible things that can and always do go wrong, like late shipments of materials, etc. This will of course reflect badly on those involved any may prevent them from getting large contracts in the future, which will harm them not because of their own incompetence but because of the reality of taking on an unusual project like this in the first place, and all the problems that go with it.