We speak frequently in architecture about how poorly remunerated the work is. We speak of missing fee scales, a race to the bottom, undercutting, reduced demand, and being undervalued. In light of the renewed RIBA agendas around fees and protection of function, now seems to be an apposite moment to take stock of architecture’s economic position.
It is now old history that the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC) required the RIBA to drop its fee scales in 1982. The RIBA then published “recommended”, followed by “indicative” fee scales in response. However, in 1992 an investigation by the Office for Fair Trading required the RIBA to also withdraw those.
This prohibition of any form of prescribed fees was reinforced in 1998 by the Competitions Act. All of these governmental policies were part of the socioeconomic drive for de-regulation and free market economics that has gripped British politics of all colours since the late 1980s.
A skill as hard to quantify and as impenetrably technical as competent architectural design and delivery has not been seen as high value
Unfortunately, as we have seen, when left entirely to the free market, a skill as hard to quantify and as impenetrably technical as competent architectural design and delivery has not been seen as high value. Fees are lower in real terms, and architectural salaries have not kept up with inflation.
In other highly technical, professional, sectors of the economy – brain surgery, pharmaceutical dispensary, probate law, to name a few – the government has chosen to legislate public protections so that only regulated professionals could deliver these highly technical services. In architecture and engineering it has not, and the Hackitt inquiry seems to point to this being the wrong decision.
The political momentum to reconsider the safety implications of protected functions that has resulted from this report seems to have launched the RIBA’s renewed drive to push the government to reconsider protected functions. It is interesting to see that Jack Pringle has also announced that the RIBA is now working with the MMC to consider how fee guidance acceptable to competition laws could be reintroduced.
Within this context it seems sensible to consider how architecture sits within the wider UK economy. Architecture is, in many ways, typical of the economic story of the United Kingdom since the Second World War. During the post-war years, architecture benefited considerably from the increase in domestic investment and construction, both at the time at a rate unprecedented in British history. Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows that annual investment in fixed capital – that is homes, commercial buildings, public buildings, and infrastructure – quintupled between 1945 and 1979.
This is also the period in which politicians crafted policies that shifted the British economy away from domestic manufacturing production, which was becoming increasingly expensive, towards a service-based “knowledge economy”. The rough idea being, I believe, that we would buy all of our physical goods and materials from countries such as China who could manufacture more cheaply, and sell our knowledge and services abroad to make up the resulting trade deficit. Higher skilled, higher earning jobs for British workers … and fewer factories, mines and manufacturing plant.
In recent years the wisdom of this has begun to seem questionable as prices of imports rise, and the services and knowledge sectors of these developing economies have grown. The appetite for what the UK is selling is cooling.
Architecture and engineering services’ economic contribution has grown from equivalent to the entire economic output of Liverpool, the UK’s fifth biggest city, to being equivalent to the entire economic output of Birmingham, the UK’s third biggest city
However, this shift benefited architecture. In 1998, ONS data shows that architectural and engineering services, separate from physical construction, were worth £45bn in 2025 prices. Over the past 27 years, this has risen to £94.4bn – effectively doubling.
As this growth was faster than the UK’s economy overall, the contribution of architecture and engineering services increased from 2.6% of UK GDP in 1998 to 3.3% in 2025 – a 27% increase in value. To illustrate this in more concrete terms, architecture and engineering services’ economic contribution has grown from equivalent to the entire economic output of Liverpool, the UK’s fifth biggest city, to being equivalent to the entire economic output of Birmingham, the UK’s third biggest city.
This shift towards the knowledge economy has made highly-skilled sectors such as architecture an ever more important part of the economy. However, sustaining this sector has become more dependent on exporting services overseas as Britain has invested less in physical assets at home.
ONS data shows that in 2016 exports of architectural and engineering services were worth £11bn (in 2023 prices). By 2023 this had risen to £15.2bn; a 38% increase in just seven years, making exports around 15% of the total value of the sector.
It makes sense then that our sector’s fastest period of growth since 1998 was during the great boom years of the global services trade, between 2004 and 2007, where it grew by 30% in just three years. Since then the growth of the sector has slowed considerably, impacted by Brexit, covid, and recent global conflicts, growing just 1.9% per year since 2016, compared to over 4% a year between 1998 and 2007.
We have all felt this slowdown in practice. In 2022 96,050 people were employed in architecture and urban planning in the UK. In 2024 this had fallen to 85,500, an 11% decrease in two years.
Architecture is often forgotten as the part of the process that comes before construction, and as such tends to be impacted even more quickly
On the face of it these figures show a recent history that broadly speaks of optimism and solid growth. However, within the figures the growing reliance on global exports to sustain the size of our profession is worrying. It leaves us more and more exposed to global economic forces.
It is a bit of a truism that construction is a bellwether for future economic health, but architecture is often forgotten as the part of the process that comes before construction, and as such tends to be impacted even more quickly.
The state of our domestic economy has led to belt tightening at all levels. As such, less individual expenditure on, say, the domestic extensions which sustain so many practices; less domestic investment in new commercial buildings and, in spite of a housing crisis in the South-east, the residential sector has slowed considerably too. The government is not investing significantly in public infrastructure – at either the mass transit or the local school level.
Unless there is a shift in domestic economic strategy, the profession’s financial resilience would seem to lie outside the UK, which feels a rather strange place to be for a profession that cares so deeply about the context and local communities impacted by its work.
