Why is there a call for more contractors in Australia? Marine and civil infrastructure demand, compared with the UK

Australia has been short of civil contractors for most of the last decade, and the shortage has a particular shape. It is not a general lack of builders. It is a shortage of people and firms who can deliver large, wet, remote civil works, often against a programme set by an energy transition that is running faster than the workforce behind it. The UK has the same transition and a different shortage. Understanding both is the key to deciding whether to move, bid or stay put.

What is driving the demand

Three things, pulling in the same direction. First, Australia's electricity system is replacing coal with wind, solar and storage on a timetable that requires an unusual amount of heavy civil work in a short period, with much of it in places that have never had a contractor's compound before. Second, the coastline is long, populated at the edges and exposed to a climate that is already moving the design storm. Third, the mining and export economy depends on ports that must be kept at depth, and the dredging fleet that does it is international and stretched. Set against that, the Australian construction workforce is small relative to the land area, concentrated in the south-east, and ageing at the senior end. The call for contractors is a call for firms that can mobilise a few hundred people to a remote site with their own plant and their own engineering, and that is a rarer thing than the headline suggests.

Pumped-hydro storage

Pumped hydro is the clearest difference between the two markets. Australia has committed to the largest pumped-storage programme in the English-speaking world, headed by the 2,000 megawatt Snowy expansion, with a tail of smaller schemes in Queensland, Tasmania and New South Wales. Each one is a tunnel, two reservoirs, a powerhouse cavern and a set of reversible pump-turbines, and each one has run into the same shortage of tunnelling crews, high-head penstock fabricators and hydro-mechanical engineers.

The UK has a smaller pipeline of a few schemes in the Scottish Highlands, and a policy framework for long-duration storage that has only recently given investors enough certainty to commit. The engineering is identical. A reversible pump-turbine is a cousin of the bi-directional bulb unit on our main sheet, scaled up in head and down in diameter, and the cavitation analysis follows the same logic. An engineer who has done draft tube work on a low-head tidal machine will find the Francis-type pump-turbine a familiar problem with a bigger budget. The generation schedule on our feasibility desk is a tidal analogue of the dispatch schedule that a pumped-storage operator runs against the spot price.

Coastal seawall resilience

Both countries are spending on seawalls, and both are under-spending relative to what the sea-level projections imply. In the UK the Environment Agency's long-term investment programme and the Welsh coastal risk management programme have funded a decade of rock armour, sheet-pile walls and managed realignment, much of it on the Severn and its tributaries, and the design standard now routinely includes a climate uplift to 2100. The contracting market is mature, competitive and mostly domestic. Margins are thin and the work is steady.

In Australia coastal protection is largely a local-council responsibility, funded from a mix of state grants and rates, and the result is a patchwork. There are excellent schemes on the Gold Coast and in Adelaide, and there are long stretches of eroding suburban coastline with no plan at all. The demand for contractors is therefore lumpy: a council will tender a 40 million dollar wall after a storm and then nothing for five years. Firms that can price that lumpiness and carry a plant fleet between jobs do well. Firms that arrive expecting the UK's steady programme do not.

Port dredging

Dredging is where Australia's call is loudest. The iron ore and coal ports of the Pilbara and Queensland need continuous maintenance dredging, and the LNG and container ports need capital dredging that must be done under some of the strictest marine environmental conditions anywhere, because of the Great Barrier Reef and the Commonwealth's offshore dumping rules. The large trailing suction and cutter suction dredgers are owned by a handful of European contractors who bring their own crews and sub-contract the local civil works, the marine environmental monitoring and the sediment plume modelling.

That last item is where a UK estuarine practice overlaps. The sediment transport modelling we do for a Severn lagoon, tracking where the fine silt goes once the residual current changes, is the same analysis an Australian port needs for its dredge plume and its spoil ground. The physics is identical, the regulators are more demanding, and the fees reflect it. The UK dredging market is mostly maintenance work in the major estuaries and the occasional capital scheme, with the same European fleet and the same sub-contracting pattern, at lower fees.

Chartered civil engineer mobility

A chartered engineer from the UK can practise in Australia, but not automatically. The key points for a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers:

• Recognition. Engineers Australia recognises UK chartered status through a mutual recognition agreement, so a CEng MICE can apply for Chartered Professional Engineer status without re-examination, subject to a competency review and a fee.
• State registration. Queensland requires registration under its professional engineers legislation to provide engineering services at all, and Victoria and New South Wales have brought in similar schemes. Chartered status is the usual route to that registration, but it is a separate step and it takes months.
• Visas. Civil engineers have been on the skilled occupation lists for years, which makes employer-sponsored and skilled independent visas available, but the process is slower than the recruitment adverts imply and sponsorship ties you to one employer.
• Standards. Australian Standards differ from the Eurocodes in detail and in philosophy, particularly for concrete durability in a marine environment and for wave loading. The first year is spent learning which of your instincts transfer.
• Insurance and liability. Proportionate liability rules in several states change how a consultant carries risk compared with the joint and several regime that applies in England and Wales. Read the contract.

A frank comparison

Go to Australia if you want to work on pumped hydro at a scale the UK will not reach for a decade, if you can tolerate remote sites and a lumpy pipeline, and if your firm can carry plant and people between states. Stay in the UK if your interest is estuarine and tidal, if you want steady coastal resilience work with a mature regulator, and if the thing that gets you out of bed is the Severn's 14 metre spring tide. Australia has long, hot, beautiful coastline and some of the best port engineering in the world. It does not have a Severn, and it has no plans to build the tidal lagoon that the Bristol Channel has been waiting for since the 1920s.

Our own answer is on the home sheet. The feasibility desk shows what we think the Severn can deliver, and why we have chosen to stay in Cardiff Bay to prove it.