The efficacy of any national budget is rarely judged on neutral economic facts alone; it is filtered through the pre-existing biases, hopes, and fears of its audience. The Autumn Budget 2025, delivered by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, was no exception.

For the UK construction sector – a vast ecosystem comprising giant contractors, small family-run firms, and millions of individual tradespeople – the balance sheet was decided long before the Chancellor stood up. It was defined by whether one’s personal or commercial interest was being served or sacrificed. For every measure welcomed by one segment of the industry, a contradictory fear was immediately voiced by another.

Perhaps the most potent immediate contradiction is the labour cost increase.

For the individual worker, the announcement of an increase in the legal minimum wage was undeniably positive news. The National Living Wage for over-21s will rise by 4.1% to £12.71 per hour in April, while the rate for 18 to 20-year-olds will jump 8.5% to £10.85 per hour, moving towards a single rate for all adults. Furthermore, minimum wages for 16 to 17-year-olds and apprentices will increase by 6% to £8 an hour.

These increases represent at least a degree of relief for low-paid workers grappling with persistent inflationary pressures.

Yet, this relief for the employee immediately translated into a “massive blow” for the employer.

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For three weeks every winter, the nation settles down with an evening cuppa to watch a select group of “celebrities” endure what is sold as the ultimate test of human endurance: I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!

We watch, absorbed and disgusted, as a retired politician or a fading reality star must navigate a swamp, eat a kangaroo’s dangly bits, or share their bed with a dozen large, hairy spiders.

Contestants are thrown together and expected to get along and to work together. They share a toilet in a shed, and they have to deal with their own and each others’ waste on a daily basis.

They are set ridiculous tasks, mostly against the clock and often involving water and mud. If they complete those tasks successfully, everyone gets to eat. If they don’t, well it’s rice and beans all round.

When it’s all over, they emerge, blinking into the real world, hailed as heroes for surviving the horrors of the Australian wilderness. One of them will ultimately be crowned King or Queen of the jungle.

Meanwhile, up and down the country, there will be demolition and construction workers watching all this unfold, thinking: “That looks like an average day at work”.

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I have a confession to make. I use Artificial Intelligence. Not a little bit. Like all the time. But I am not ashamed or embarrassed.

I use it very selectively. I use it to research article and video topics. I use it to create thumbnail images for my YouTube videos; something that is a pain without AI. I use it to summarise my videos and my podcasts. I could do it myself, but it’s slow, and I would rather use my time for something far more useful. And I use it to produce slide shows because I hate PowerPoint with a passion.

I draw the line at having it write for me, though. AI might have absorbed the sum of all human knowledge, but I am still not convinced that it possesses the requisite skills to manipulate language in quite the same way as a human being. That being said, I now have an AI agent that acts as my editor, checking my work for spelling, grammar, and flow before I press the publish button. I have named my editor Nobby because most of the editors I have encountered over the years have been quite “knobby.”

Nobby is my spelling and grammar checker, my thesaurus and language arbiter, my editorial co-pilot. And Nobby is the reason I am reframing my thoughts on AI’s place in construction in general, and in the cab of demolition and construction equipment in particular.

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