Human beans

It’s bananas. The harder we work, the less we get paid, and we can’t blame the recession. Engineers who spend their time making construction easier or architects who work hard on their space-planning only succeed in reducing their fee. Percentage fees are responsible for this, perpetuating what I could call “The Drawer Law” (that is, “reward” backwards).

I think I know why this is. The penny dropped a couple of years ago when I was on a panel interviewing architects for a project worth several hundred million pounds. Afterwards, I asked our client’s managing director if he knew what we, his engineers, did for his money. “I haven’t the foggiest idea,” he replied, adding that because our fees were about “market”, if we could run a business, and so could he, he was happy. And that was it: the “market” prevails. Our fee was about £5m, and I guess he took the same approach to everyone else. So combined fees of probably £30m, or in rough terms about 400 man-years of work were given out on a “not the foggiest” basis.

Now that we are trying to re-invent our professions, we really must re-invent how we are appointed. When I joined Arup as a graduate, an eminent engineer called Tony Stevens told me: “A good engineer does 10 pages of hand-written calculations a day.” Thirty years on, that well-intentioned remark should be in a museum. Blithely ignoring the advent of the digital age, fees are essentially the same as in 1979. The conclusion is that they can’t relate to what we actually do.

There have been many well-intended moves over the years to make sense out of this tomfoolery, but the percentage fee culture still holds sway. Even today I received an email from a project manager on a retrofit into which we had tried to inject some rational thought: “Your proposal, while eminently logical, makes it hard for me to evaluate you against the others. Are you able to give some thought to a percentage fee on overall construction costs?”

I asked our client’s managing director if he knew what we, his engineers, did for his money. ‘I haven’t the foggiest idea,’ he replied

I don’t mean to be rude, but surely we can do better than this? To “help” us, kindly project managers often send out voluminous “scope” documents, which usually just tell you which beans will be counted. And statements such as “Design the reinforcement” are far too vague. This one covers a multitude of sins from (a) Overdesign one slab in five minutes and flood the project with twice as much rebar as it needs, to (z) Carefully design everything over a period of months, make the structure absolutely sing and reduce its embodied energy by half.

Scope-ism like this tries to homogenise us. In percentage-land, nobody is good, nobody bad, all are apparently average – probably the only field of human endeavour in which this is so. Count the beans properly, then everyone is the same, at which point what else is there left to distinguish you except your fee?

Last month we were asked for a structural fee on another £100m project, this time on a complex waterfront. Elected sight unseen onto a shortlist of three, we were then emailed a sketch of a masterplan. We were asked for a percentage fee between 1% and 2% (there’s only £1m difference after all). “All I need is a percentage, nothing else today.”

Who benefits from this? I suppose possibly the hard-pressed project manager who finds it easier to fill in his spreadsheets. But not the design professionals who are reduced to a cell on that spreadsheet. Nor the client who pays for it without understanding what they get. And not future society, which really doesn’t need excellent designers to boil themselves down to commodities.

We were asked for a percentage fee between 1% and 2% (there’s only £1m difference after all). ‘All I need is a percentage, nothing else today’

Real benefit comes not from percentage fees but from understanding. Klaus Bode of the environmental pioneer BDSP once told me, without irony, that he always tries to use intelligent design to bring down the environmental costs of a project so that they are less than his fee. Innovative companies like BDSP can’t do this and survive if appointed on a traditional percentage. They would make more money by being rubbish.

For the avoidance of doubt I’m not arguing for time-basis fees. I simply believe in commissioning designers in a way that knowingly selects them for their talent not for their convenience.

Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat thinking that perhaps we really are baked beans, and I should stay in my tin and accept it. Then I remember I am a human engineer.

Finally, I should make great apologies to the exceptions to this culture of ignorance...