Maverick client at the wheel

Our stay in Chongqing is short, but for me it makes the biggest impression. The city is a kind of CIOB heartland, with links going back years to the large university there, famous for its construction and real estate faculty. The people we talk to here are both senior and open, a rare combination. From the start the CIOB recruited allies among those likely to go far, and one of these has been Professor Li Shirong, formerly a professor of construction management at Chongqing University, and now vice mayor of Shapingba District, one of the 40 territories comprising greater Chongqing (See box, right). As vice mayor, she is a key construction client. Shapingba spends more than £300m on infrastructure alone per year. On top of that, a typical Shapingba project is a new “university town” covering 20 sq km, soon to be home to 11 universities. Planning began in 2002. Farmers were relocated and contractors broke ground in June 2003. Already 10,000 students are living there. As a construction client, this local authority is a Formula One car. Thankfully, Li is in the driver’s seat.

She says government faces big challenges as a construction client. There are lots of urban planners, but they focus on technical ability, not on social and environmental considerations. Government lacks experience in anything but lowest-price contracts. Health & Safety rules lack coherent legislative back-up. Disputes between developers and building users are springing up without techniques to resolve them. These factors, key to successful public procurement, are doing a short-legged sprint to catch up with the pace set by the market. Perhaps most crucially, government lacks experience in project management. A typical approach has been to leave projects in the hands of government officers, inexperienced as construction clients, and vulnerable to projects veering off course. Even if you hire consultants, she points out, you need to understand the process in order to get the most out of them.

“I was so worried,” she says of the time when she took the job as vice mayor. “I could not push projects forward or finish on time.”

Li’s got a secret weapon now, though, developed for the Shapingba district, but repeatable elsewhere. She leans forward and drops her voice when she describes it. It’s called the Public Works Bureau (PWB), and comprises 15 or so state employees, construction managers, cost engineers, civil and structural engineers, a roving posse of construction professionals who can shepherd public projects from inception through to design and construction.

She says four members of her PWB are CIOB members, and she expects more in due course.

One extra benefit of the PWB, Li maintains, is that it could limit corruption, a big problem in public procurement here, and something for which ranking bureaucrats are regularly shot. According to official statistics, from 1998 to 2002, there were 846,000 Communist Party members disciplined for corruption and 137,700 expelled. How will her PWB fight corruption? She argues that corruption is more likely when you get unaccountable government officials muddying the procurement process by dealing with a plethora of contractors and consultants. With one body handling design competitions, tendering, the whole bit, you get simplified, standardised procedures and, hopefully, transparency.