Charter will raise our game, says Clients' Confederation

The newly formed Confederation of Construction Clients (CCC) has launched a register of chartered clients as a mechanism to improve the quality of buildings.

The CCC is hoping that signatories to the Charter will help clients match the improvements being achieved by building suppliers in the wake of the Latham and Egan reports.

"The Charter will be a formal mechanism to measure and benchmark key aspects of client performance" said the CCC's chairman, BAA Group technical director Mike Roberts.

In essence a toolkit for achieving best practice, the Charter aims to set a common framework for public and private sector clients to follow when procuring services from the construction industry. Measures to improve client behaviour are at the heart of the Charter, with mission statements including "client leadership" and "focus on the customer", plus focus on integrated teams, quality and training.

In addition to a commitment to a programme of continuous improvement, signatories to the Charter will be required to measure their performance against the seven national Key Performance Indicators as devised by the Construction Best Practice Programme (CBPP), such as time and cost performance, and profitability of the supply chain.

As a condition of Charter membership the data must then be released annually to the Data Management Organisation, which will help chartered clients benchmark their own performance against the pooled information.

The Charter will be operated by a management board composed of client and supply-side representatives, including BAA, Defence Estates, NHS Estates and the Office of Government Commerce. The Data Management Organisation will be independently managed by Agile-Achilles Information.

The Charter management board intends to conduct surveys on client satisfaction with supply-side performance, along with suppliers' satisfaction with client performance.

Speaking at the launch, construction minister Nick Raysford hailed the Charter as a radical improvement in construction. "The key to being an effective client is to establish a team based on partnership, shared risk and shared incentives, mutual respect and fairness" said Raynsford. He also told the CCC that its leadership role will be "absolutely vital" in maintaining momentum and leading reform.

However, concerns were raised at the ability of the Charter to reach down to small and occasional clients.

Allan Crane of the M4I said the performance of supply side is very much dependent on client behaviour. "The supply side needs strong clients who set and insist on strong standards" Crane added.

Tony Giddings, Construction director of the Argent Group, told the CCC it had a "big challenge" to support one-off clients who "still find themselves inexorably drawn into traditional and conventional methods of procurement".

Raysford admitted that performance is still "patchy", adding: "We have a major challenge to turn the best practice of the few into the common practice of the many."