On Monday evening, I was at the House of Commons to give evidence to the Commission of Inquiry into achieving best value in the procurement of construction work. I spoke mostly about the problems facing SMEs and about the difficulty many local authority clients face in procuring design services effectively.
The Commission is made up of several MPS and one peer, the Earl of Lytton, together with a number of senior figures from the construction sector, including Sir John Armitt, Jack Pringle and Alan Crane. What they are trying to find out is whether construction work is currently procured effectively, and, if it isn’t, what might be done about it.
If you appear to give evidence before a Select Committee you are given advance notice of the main questions, so you can prepare, but this kind of Commission does not follow those formal rules. So on Monday, I sat for an hour and half, together with a colleague from RICS and a colleagues from RIBA, and answered various googlies thrown at us by MPs and peers, as well as from other Commission members.
The hardest grilling, I felt, came not from the parliamentarians, who appeared to me to be genuinely and open-mindedly interested in trying to find ways of improving procurement. It came from the construction industry figures, who seemed pretty unconvinced that SMEs were disadvantaged by current procurement systems, and perhaps not terribly concerned if that was the case. Equally, both the LI and RIBA came under some pressure for arguing that, if you are procuring design services, it is difficult to make a good job of this without some client-side design expertise.
One way or another, the drive to squeeze down costs and speed up projects is on in earnest in the construction sector. The government has staked rather a lot on the general adoption of BIM across the construction professions by 2015 – they expect this to achieve a 20 per cent cost reduction as well as time savings on most public construction contracts.
The Chief Construction Adviser has not given any indications as yet that the public sector is going to push for particular forms of contract, but the Commission showed great interest in the RICS presentation about Performance-Related Partnering (PRP) and how it had been used, apparently to great effectiveness, to build hospitals in Northern Ireland. If any members have been involved in a project which used PRP and has any war stories to tell about it, please let me know. It would be a great shame if PRP emerges as a major recommendation in the Commission’s final report if LI members have had a bad experience with it.