Procure for all ills

A good building needs a good client, and being a good client is very difficult. Most professionals only find themselves being consulted because their client is in trouble and the more trouble they are in, the less they tend to question the advice they're given. Architects, however, tend to get appointed when their client is in an expansive mood and therefore not so deferential. "Negotiate a contract that allows a competent builder a reasonable profit?" they cry. "You must be joking!

The prices these builders charge … it's criminal.

My neighbour saved himself a fortune building his own garage."

In all building projects, things go wrong. They don't always go wrong in the same place, or at the same time, or to the same degree, but they always go wrong. Everyone in the professional team knows this, everyone on the construction team knows this. Novice clients don't know this. An experienced team working together sees to it that the client doesn't suffer too much, and preferably only discovers problems after they have been resolved. This happens even if the various parties have never worked together, so long as everyone understands their role.

One of the effects of the lottery bonanza has been to create a group of clients with great ambition but little building experience. These enthusiastic people, who can manage to stage Aïda in a Nissen hut but who can't manage to replace the toilets properly, can suddenly find themselves in charge of a multimillion-pound building budget.

The current funding mantra of "try a new procurement system every five minutes", spearheaded by bean-counters and the Egan brigade, means novice clients are being encouraged to enter into novel forms of procurement where the traditional role of the architect, their principal adviser, has been sidelined as part of an inappropriate efficiency drive. These new procurement methods remove a service traditionally provided (and charged for) by one party and include it as part of the duties of another, in the hope that the charge will disappear.

While everyone in the building process is having a miserable time, it is business as usual for lawyers

Building's report on Stoke City's theatre project (21 September, page 17) offers a cautionary tale for clients who are offered novel procurement methods. A firm of extremely experienced theatre architects, which had nursed Stoke council's project through the lottery funding process, found itself having to sue for additional fees (£1.25m) as a result of additional work it had been put to during the construction process. Rather than pay this, its client was advised to mount a counterclaim and then subject this to the full circus of the law. After more than two years at arbitration, the council agreed to pay the architect's fees as requested.

Anyone who has had to defend a counterclaim knows what an expensive and unpleasant business it is. What seems particularly out of proportion in this case is the scale of the on-costs that the council has incurred. Not only does it have to pay the architect's legal fees in defending the counterclaim (twice the architect's fee) but also those of its own legal advisers for prosecuting it. Arbitration is supposed to "streamline the matter of dispute resolution", yet this process has cost the council nearly £8m in total, almost a third of the cost of developing and building the two theatres.

Construction delivers a huge variety of projects of extreme physical and practical complexity. Getting things built is difficult enough even when everyone knows the score and is being paid properly to do their bit. Yet the industry is being constantly harassed to streamline its act and adopt novel contracts and methods of working. A cynic might note that when things go wrong, and everyone involved in the actual building process has a bloody miserable time of it, it is business as usual for our colleagues in the legal profession.