Meet the person charged with delivering 40 hospitals in nine years

“I really am here to make it happen, and that means being prepared to fall out with people sometimes. You have got to be brave and bold about how you advocate for what we should be doing – and that doesn’t mean going along with the status quo most of the time.”

New Hospital Programme (NHP) commercial director Emma-Jane Houghton knows what she wants and she knows what she needs to do to make it happen.

The woman picked to lead the commercial strategy for the government’s decade-long hospital building programme – which will see 40 hospitals built across England by 2030 – is aware of the huge task in front of both her team as a client and the construction industry that is going to have to deliver it. Overall the programme consists of 48 hospitals, eight of which are active projects which Houghton’s team has inherited in flight.

The scale of the NHP provides a significant opportunity for companies of all sizes across a broad range of sectors to make a long-term investment in their capability and skills base, creating jobs and driving growth

Emma-Jane Houghton

Talking to Houghton, it’s clear she is excited about the challenge for herself but animated too by the opportunities for construction, an industry that, she says, is “close to my heart”.

“The scale of the NHP provides a significant opportunity for companies of all sizes, across a broad range of sectors, to make a long-term investment in their capability and skills base, creating jobs and driving growth,” she says.

Presented with a monumental task, Houghton – who was born and raised in Lancashire – has developed a unique commercial approach that will see the client and supply chain entwined more closely perhaps than ever before. So, what has brought her to this point in her career, what does her commercial plan need construction firms to do differently, and how is the sector going to get these projects built?

Mix of skills

“I want to combine the best of what I have got as a QS – my creativity from music, my management consultancy background, and my relationships and network – to really make this [NHP] happen,” she says.

This highlights how Houghton’s approach is perhaps reflective of her route into construction, which was anything but typical. An arts graduate with dreams of becoming a concert pianist, she concedes that she “didn’t even know what the construction industry was” when she first joined it shortly after graduating from Keele University in 2001.

“I graduated and realised I needed a job, so I think I was very, very lucky that I fell into construction. I have always felt that it’s a very, very diverse industry where people are prepared to invest in people around them and train them up,” she says. “It’s a fantastic work environment that not enough people know about.”

Her foray into construction became a career, with Houghton, who is now based in Surrey, going on to train as a chartered quantity surveyor, working first at Mott MacDonald and then at Turner & Townsend. This gave way to a role as an associate director at big-four consultancy firm KPMG, before making the transition into client roles with Heathrow Airport.

“I think, if you’re not always from a traditional background with a sort of fixed idea about what construction is, you can develop a broad range of skills that you then bring to fruition in a role like I am in now,” says Houghton. “I’ve got a project and major programme delivery background. I am a chartered quantity surveyor with all the technical training that goes with it, but I am also a trained big-four management consultant and I am able to bring that mix of skills to be effective in the role I’ve got now.

She speaks with a level of surety that instils confidence in her ability to deliver the project and deliver it on her terms – and she is quite clear about what those are. “It’s about thinking about what I’m actually buying, maybe I’m also buying a person with a skill, maybe I’m buying a bit of intellectual property,” Houghton says.

“Maybe I should be thinking about some digital solution. Maybe I’m buying something to be automated. I’m buying an outcome rather than an input.”

And this idea is at the heart of the NHP, which is being delivered via a framework alliance with industry, the hope being that the supply chain can be set up horizontally. This means that every level of the chain will be feeding back into the client more often and that the “collective learnings” can be applied across the programme.

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“It is a generational alliance, which we are calling Gen A … From a company perspective that means they have got a pipeline, they can invest now and think, ‘while there might not be a role tomorrow, there probably is work for me if I get my act together in a couple of years’ time’.”

Over time Houghton says that the framework alliance will allow a broad range of suppliers to become involved in the NHP and that programme benefits, such as net zero design and the use of MMC, will be achieved as suppliers will have been invested in and have a visible pipeline of work. She adds: “To begin with, the trusts will be the contracting authorities, but we will have our framework alliance in place for them to use.”

Houghton flags up how in this way the NHP will intertwine two pieces of sector-wide policy that she has been central to developing – the Construction Innovation Hub’s Value Toolkit and the government’s Construction Playbook. Both of these instruments promote the use of standardisation and MMC, the importance of introducing design for manufacture and assembly (DfMA) at the earliest stage possible and, in the case of the latter particularly,  the way in which net zero policy must be baked into a project’s planning from the outset.

“We are working to ensure SMEs have visibility and access to opportunities, and will put proactive measures in place so that we engage SMEs and make sure they provide feedback into our emerging package and procurement strategies,” she says.

Diversity

One of the goals of the programme is to create a hospitals playbook, a blueprint for both the design and delivery of the hospital of the future which will then be owned by the alliance. And, for this to occur, Houghton says construction must be prepared to innovate and look to draw inspiration and ideas from a different source.

“Most definitely, we should be casting a net much wider at that academia level and at that apprenticeship level. And not just for young people but also for people who are quite mid‑career and going into a second career.

“We should be much more accommodating to bringing in that range of skills. What you really want is that diversity of thought, rather than ‘groupthink’, otherwise you’re never going to get the innovation you really need.”

After a pause she adds that it’s a no-brainer for the industry to embrace a more diverse workforce – not least because, if it doesn’t, it’s “knackered, because so much of the workforce is ageing”.

As Houghton seems ritually to do, she is practising what she preaches. The NHP programme team is 50% made up of women. Asked if she feels her role as a woman leading a major government social infrastructure programme is significant to highlighting career pathways, Houghton has a number of thoughts.

“I have never felt that being female in this industry has held me back at all. I’ll go as far as to say that, in the breadth of my experience, I find the construction industry to be the least sexist environment I’ve ever worked in, actually.

“I have never felt that I’ve particularly needed female leadership in order to get ahead, and in fact I have had enormous investment from a handful of really significant to me, male mentors, and that has been fantastic.”

But she concedes that she is fully aware this is not the universal experience and that, if she can play a role in supporting not only other women but other people from non-traditional construction backgrounds, that is something she wants to do. “I’m often told, as a senior woman, that for other women, and for other people who are less like the norm … it gives them confidence and makes a big difference. And I take that seriously.”

As she speaks of her experience, her passion and genuine affection for the construction sector are clear. She speaks of the “generosity of time” that exists within its workforce, but she also recognises the limitations in the current way that it operates.

Houghton says she is acutely aware of the roles that risk transfer and a lack of historic investment in innovation due to uneven workloads and fragmentation play. She says her team is putting a lot of thought into creating a commercial model that fosters an environment that breaks down these historic challenges.

We want to bring in sensible risk allocation. lots of clients are guilty of not doing that, and it puts suppliers off, which creates a really weak market

Emma-Jane Houghton

“If they [construction firms] can see it, they can start investing in that forward pipeline and we can start to talk about some of the sorts of innovation and modern methods of construction that we aim for further down the line.

“When it comes to things like sustainable contracting practices, it’s a commitment to creating what I call a safe contracting environment for all of these suppliers. We want to bring in sensible risk allocation. Lots of clients are guilty of not doing that, and it puts suppliers off, which creates a really weak market. We want big, strong markets from which we can draw, so why wouldn’t we create that environment?”

She adds that latent manufacturing capability within the sector at the moment is quite low, with confidence in some of these technologies – particularly as they link to componentisation and design standardisation – being a bit ad hoc, which constitutes another major challenge for a sector charged with delivering 40 hospitals using MMC.

“I see it as our job to create that safe contracting environment, create that space and that infrastructure for it to happen, by first and foremost making a commitment to digital BIM level 4, driving that design standardisation.”

Houghton is clear on the task in front of her and what needs to be done, but is acutely aware that construction, as a traditional industry, may have some fragments that don’t want to play ball.

To those firms she has one thing to say: “We need collaboration. So, for our part, we’re going to have to really foster the safe contracting environment that makes that possible. We’re going to need to create the contracts and environment that gives the incentive for that to happen. We’re going to have to be ruthless with companies and behaviours that don’t accord with that and make it a potentially toxic environment.”

So, is it safe to say there isn’t anything that she would rather be doing? “This is just my absolute dream job,” Houghton says. “It’s commercial. That’s what I’ve trained in; that’s what I’m really good at. It’s about building hospitals for the next generation. It’s about net zero carbon and it’s about all of those things that matter for communities, matter for patients, matter for the nation.”