Ray has a dream

Sure, there have been noble attempts to usher the partnering style of contracting into the mainstream following the Latham and Egan reports of the 1990s, yet whether this has really fed through to the vast majority of the sector is doubtful. O'Rourke himself puts the waste produced through inefficient procurement and site-working in the UK and Ireland at the £25bn mark.

The attempt to bring partnering to the industry allied with off-site fabrication may work at the top end of the industry. Yet this is far from the reality for the main rump of the industry, controlled by one-off clients and dominated by contractors who are used to tendering competitively for work. As Cyril Sweett chairman Francis Ives points out, the power fundamentally still remains between these two parties. Without a huge shift in practice amongst the two of them O'Rourke's call will remain just talk.

There is one area where change could be affected in a fairly straightforward manner, however. Both Ives and RICS project management faculty head Richard Schofield point to the practice of starting projects too soon, without sufficient design. A perfect example of this is the National Physical Laboratory job, where client the Department of Trade & Industry failed to establish whether the contractor could actually achieve the specifications required in the PFI contract. Boy did this store up troubles - the job is due to be finished six years late and cost the private sector consortium Laser £100m (see page 8).

This is where one wholeheartedly agrees with the words of Peter Rogers. He points to why the government's attitude of handing over risk on such public jobs to the private sector as being somehow successful procurement is so off the mark. It's short-sighted and underlines how far we are from the O'Rourke construction idyll.