The end of life as we know it

It’s a nervy time. The action necessary to address the deficit is not going to bypass construction, and anyone who reads the newspapers knows that something is coming, and that it won’t be good. But we won’t have the full picture until the spending review in the autumn (and for the avoidance of doubt, no, I don’t have any special knowledge). In the meantime we wait and wonder.

It would be understandable if the industry’s reaction to this combination of doubt and doom were to put its head under the duvet and wait for things to blow over. But there is an infinitely more helpful response. That is to recognise that desperate times call not for desperation, but for a new proposition - for long overdue attention to be paid to our unenviable ranking as one of the most expensive places in the world in which
to build.

There is a shared interest here, on both the supply and demand sides, as much of that expense is waste, and waste threatens profitability and affordability. Of course, for those who make their living in the building industry, there can never be too much construction; but public sector clients need and want to build as well. They have services to deliver, and the special contribution made by well designed space is now widely understood - so maybe we really are all in this together.

“I have made a promise that there will never be a Morrell Report on the structure and practice of the industry. We already have reams of diagnosis and almost as much prescription”

There also seems to be a shared understanding as to where improvements can be made in the way we make buildings, and the principles that should be clung to in setting out to do things differently.

For me the key principle is that we must not sacrifice value for cheapness. Value is created on drawing boards, not building sites, and this is the product of a constructive dialogue between designers and end users, concentrating on outcomes rather than outputs. It follows that people or procurement arrangements that obstruct such a dialogue destroy value.

This means that buildings must make spaces where people can do their best work (a fair definition of good design); but we should stop at the point at which further cost does not add sufficiently to utility or client satisfaction.

So this is the first step in reducing the cost of public buildings: building the right thing, and doing so by reference to cost, quality and value benchmarks derived from experience.

Experience gives confidence about what to build and what it should cost, and it leads naturally to another principle. If there is a simple answer to what makes good projects, it is “good clients”. Through leadership and a growing readiness to swap notes on good practice, the public sector is developing teams and agencies worthy of that title.

Are they perfect? None that I have met would claim as much, but they should be developed and supported, and above all their services should be used - and used throughout the wider public sector, so that infrequent procurers do not have to learn (or fail to learn) at the expense of the public purse.

“Other industries have had to reinvent themselves in the face of fierce foreign competition, but construction clients still can’t import a building”

As to what has to be learned, in my long march around industry bodies, I have made a promise that there will never be a Morrell Report on the structure and practice of the industry. We already have reams of diagnosis and almost as much prescription, and there is broad agreement about that, too. There is waste in the system from prequalification, through a procurement process larded with questions irrelevant to selection, to needlessly redrafted forms of contract, to procrastination in the decisions necessary to maintain progress, to uncontrolled changes in scope and specification, to constant reinvention of the wheel, to friction in the passage of money through the supply chain, to layers of supervision and oversight that add no value, to a wilful neglect of IT, to … well, you get the point. We know where to look.

This does raise an obvious question, though: if we know what to do, why hasn’t it happened already? And why should we believe it will happen now? I think the main reason there hasn’t been more progress is because there hasn’t had to be. Other industries have had to reinvent themselves in the face of fierce foreign competition, but construction clients still can’t import a building. In short, there has been no burning need. Now, though, there is. The main challenge is not just to compete against each other for the work, but to fight against the threat of no work at all. That calls for a high degree of collaboration between public sector clients and privaste sector contractors to develop a joint programme targeted at waste of every kind.

Nobody would have volunteered for the circumstances that have created this opportunity, but opportunity it is, and we have both the reason and the means to seize it. We just need the will. If not now, when?

Paul Morrell is the government’s chief construction adviser