“This could be bigger than just the health sector, even bigger than the UK is. This could be a European directive. It could be a worldwide directive,” says Balfour Beatty’s Tom Yates.

The senior commercial manager is talking about an idea which was developed on a recently completed pair of small ‘sandpit’ projects in Coventry for the Manufacturing and Technology Centre (MTC). Consisting of a health project and an education project, they were conceived as a testbed for previously untried building methods. What came out of it is not just getting Yates excited, it’s getting government departments talking too.

Construction is not short of big ideas at the moment, as we are seeing through our year-long Building the Future Commission project  to improve the built environment . But it is short of skills, materials, time, money, and, most of all, actual implementation of the many proposed solutions to these problems. Blame lies squarely at the industry’s short-termist culture and a lack of government vision to drive change. But if the sector could get a grip on the concepts which came out of the sandpit projects, Yates says the impact could be “seismic”. 

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