All the presidents men

Where has the trust gone?

Chris Magee, managing director of Knowles & Son, kicked off proceedings by bemoaning the lack of trust between contractors, consultants and clients. Recently, he said, his company had been hit by clients and consultants who had promised to see them right – and then broken their word.

That rang a bell with William Sapcote & Sons’ MD Richard Sapcote. ‘Ten years ago we could all sit round the table and sort things out. Now everybody gets entrenched. Nobody wants to be accountable,’ he said. ‘Some of the project managers that are coming through are growing up with that attitude.’

‘It’s driven more by the insurers,’ suggested Chris Chivers, director of Killby & Gayford. People did not want to own up to mistakes because their PI insurance would go up, he added. Glen Schofield, who heads up Thomas Vale’s housing business, was more blunt: ‘The calibre of consultants these days gets lower and lower.’

Garvis Snook, CEO of Rok, defended the consultants, pointing out that contractors had created more opportunities for things to go wrong because of the fragmentation of the industry. And, he said, consultants’ fees did not reflect the amount of work expected of them.

Michael Puttick, joint managing director of Kingerlee, called for contractors to become part of the professional team. Even in design and build, he said, contractors were engaged so late in the process that the designers couldn’t implement any suggested improvements as there were no fees left.

Bob Heathfield, chair of Appleyards Consulting and former boss of Ballast, advised people to forget the good old days. ‘Everyone is far more commercially and contractually aware of their responsibilities and I can’t see that changing,’ he said. And since consultants were no longer paid a lump sum, which gave them room to be flexible, there would be no more cosy round-the-table chats. The only way to achieve the same effect was to choose the clients you worked for and the team you worked with… which was one thing to be said in favour of frameworks, he said.

Being professional is an expensive business

Magee also raised the issue of red tape, bemoaning the increasing number of changes to employment legislation and tax rules. ‘That is not helping us at the moment in knowing what’s coming round the corner and hearing about it sufficiently early to understand it.’

Sapcote highlighted the dilemma faced by smaller contractors: to compete with larger firms, they must be up-to-date legally and with accreditations such as Investors in People or the Contractors Health and Safety Construction Scheme. But often they were up against firms that were smaller, and less professional than them. And each new initiative meant more work for someone on a small head office team. ‘It adds to my overhead and we are getting squeezed,’ said Sapcote.

Chivers was unsympathetic. ‘We have got two choices: moan about it or do something about it,’ he said, a message he was to repeat a couple of times during the afternoon.

Puttick, meanwhile, said his approach was to pick and choose initiatives, according to whether he thought they would benefit the company.

‘Investors in people has been good for us,’ said Clive Benfield, managing director of the Benfield Group, even though clients didn’t always see it that way. ‘When we go out to tender and we have got all these things, the client still selects the lowest price,’ he said. ‘Everything we have done has been a total waste of time because someone else put in a price which is £50,000 less.’

Who’s recruiting whom?

Garvis Snook became almost evangelical on the subject of tradespeople. ‘We have disconnected ourselves from the delivery mechanisms,’ he said. He’s busy recruiting tradesmen at a rate of 70 a month. Having them on the books is the only way to make sure the customer gets what they want, he argued.

Why, if the Government wants to build more houses, are the planners delaying the process?

Glen Schofield

Mark Beard, managing director of EW Beard, is working to a different agenda, pushing to engage with the supply chain so that subcontractors’ employees felt ‘aligned’ with Beard. Puttick was concerned that when it came to training, small firms were feeding the big ones.

As for staff retention, Snook felt that mid-20s was a dangerous age for tradesmen. They have skills and could be tempted down the subcontracting route. Training and development of this group was key, he added.

‘Where I experience it going wrong is where we don’t engage with our employees enough, we haven’t explained our aims, or what the targets are,’ offered Chivers.

Sapcote wondered where the next generation of contracts managers were coming from: ‘Our senior managers tend to be in their 50s. I’m not sure where the contract managers of the future are.’

No one talked about recruiting women until prompted by president Roger Flanagan. The general feeling seemed to be that women were welcome, but no one had any specific recruitment policies in place. ‘There are no barriers there at all if they want to do the job,’ said Benfield.

‘We have got a [female] site manager and a project manager,’ said Puttick, but he confessed: ‘I don’t think we are as focused as we should be.’

Rok has two female board directors, however it’s silly to expect a 50/50 mix of the sexes, said Snook. ‘It’s political correctness gone mad. I cannot ever see our industry being the most attractive place for women to work because of the nature of the work we do. If it ever gets to much more than 15-20 per cent of the workforce I will be surprised.’

The revolution is coming!

Garvis Snook made everybody slightly nervous with talk of an ICT revolution. ‘When it comes to IT, as an industry we are a decade or more behind industry generally.’

Smaller companies were particularly vulnerable because they could not afford to make the sort of investments Rok was making, he said. Snook is putting £2.5m capital expenditure into his ICT each year to cut out ‘massive costs’ by bringing in innovations such as electronic invoicing.

Chivers wondered what smaller firms could do. He had already tried an off-the-shelf solution and was not impressed. Snook said the solution for smaller firms was to band together to develop systems collectively. ‘I don’t see ICT as being a means by which to gain competitive advantage,’ he said.

The bane of our lives: utilities

Glen Schofield was incensed by the poor performance of the statutory undertakers, pointing out the irony of a government which urged speedier construction while regulations meant that projects were held up for weeks as they waited for the utilities companies to arrive.

‘They need to be revolutionised,’ he demanded.

‘Why, when we have excavations going on through everyday activities, do we have to engage with statutory utilities who come to site when it suits them, with the same excavation equipment we have got on the site every single day, and delay us by digging into the same ground we have been digging to every day?’ he asked. Schofield proposed that contractors should be allowed to install the services, perhaps with specialist firms carrying out the jointing.

when it comes to iCt we are a decade behind industry generally

Garvis Snook

Benfield empathised. He had 10 houses almost complete, but waiting for their main services. He quite often dug trenches for utilities, at his own expense, to speed things up.

Beard called on the CIOB to lobby the government to change legislation.

Frameworks are bad news

The general feeling about frameworks was that they were bad news for many small firms. Thomas Vale obviously disagreed, having done very well with framework agreements in the Birmingham area.

Heathfield pointed out that the concept of SMEs collaborating to get into frameworks was all well and good, but in practice cultural differences got in the way. Beard thought pride might be a barrier.

Sapcote had already tried it. But having overcome hurdles of culture and pride, encountered financial barriers. First it was tricky to get insurance, second, the amount each firm still had to invest in the bid process was too great.

Puttick said he was totally fed up of government policy under which programmes such as Building Schools for the Future and ProCure 21 destroyed existing relationships with local authorities. His firm had just finished a very successful £8.5m school, but part way through a negotiation on another project worth £18m, the council was told that if it wanted funding it would have to go through BSF.

‘We are being denied the opportunity of a substantial amount of work in our area,’ said Puttick. It made sense to use local firms, he argued: ‘We want to do a good job because of our reputation. The national boys can come in and carry out rape and pillage and carry on.’

Snook got back to his theme of co-operation. ‘There’s a Tsunami coming,’ he warned. ‘At the front end there are tradespeople and that’s your biggest advantage.

It does not matter whether they are organised through one big company or through tens of thousands of companies, it’s still the same people doing the work. [The major players] don’t have your advantage of local people and labour force. You don’t have buying power of big customers but collectively you could.’

Please reform the planning system

Clive Benfield said that changes to the planning system had made life more difficult, with the shift towards high density developments, often on brownfield land. That meant apartments, which could not be sold until they were all finished so lead to a stop-go situation with projects.

Then there’s the planning approval process. It can take up to two years. Now PPS3 says that any sites with more than 50 units must have affordable housing which means a registered social landlord gets involved. ‘It makes it awfully difficult to assess the value of the site before you buy it,’ said Benfield.

Schofield asked why, if the government wanted to build more houses, were planners delaying the process. ‘Either rationalise the route of increase the resource to deal with it,’ he said.

It was the problems with the planning system which caused most concern in the group when asked to vote at the end.