Demolition Training – The Future?

A good news story for the City of Wolverhampton recently caught my eye. The University of Wolverhampton, in partnership with the Construction Industry Training Board, are at the advanced stage of planning permissions and negotiations with owners to purchase an old brewery site in the city that has been unused for over 20 years. The plan is to transform it into an international centre of excellence and a state-of-the-art construction and skills focused campus and business park known as the West Midlands Construction UTC (University Technical College).

While this is excellent news for the city and for the future of construction workers, one issue comes to mind. This piece so far has used the word construction four times and yet there is no mention at all of demolition. Nationally, construction training is given a lot of coverage and promotion and yet training for demolition workers is almost an add-on. Another indicator of this is quite simple but illuminating, Google "demolition training" and you get a massive 50 million results, but try again using construction training and you get a staggering 826 million results.

The demolition industry is good at training its staff, but it seems as if this is purely through its own efforts and despite the lack of support from elsewhere. So with an election coming up, I would say to politicians: if you are serious about the future of construction don’t forget the demolition side of things, we need support too. We are not just here to clear away the mess of previous generations, so that the glory boys of construction have a nice clean area to work on, we are a major part of the process of regeneration and deserve support on a national level.

Who knows, maybe a University of Demolition!