A third of people in construction and its related disciplines are not interested in making the industry better, safer and more sustainable, and therefore should be driven out.
Thats’s the view of Building Engineering Services Association (BESA) CEO David Frise. Speaking at the association’s annual conference, Frise said one third were highly professional, competent, and compliant with legislation and best practice, the next third wanted to reach that standard and just needed help to get there, but the rest ‘simply don’t care’.
“We can try to drag them up…or drive them out of the industry,” he told 300 delegates at The Brewery in London. “Just doing enough is not good enough. We need to take control and change the things we can change so we can have a better industry, but to get there we need competent people.”
BESA launched its Member Pledge initiative during the conference, with several members signing an agreement to put competence and compliance at the heart of their operations and encourage their supply chains to do the same.
Frise said this would create a powerful incentive for clients to specify BESA members because of their ability to prove their competence through the association’s technical audit process. He highlighted that the association expelled 14 members earlier this year for failing to reach the required standard.
“It might seem counterintuitive for a membership organisation to do that but believe me it works. We now have more people waiting to join…membership needs to stand for something.”
Remi Suzan, MD of Gratte Brothers Group, claimed that procurement is ‘killing our industry’. “We must be able to work to an acceptable profit margin…and there is far too much unfair transfer of risk to supply chains. Clients are not bad people, but they will not voluntarily take risk off the table…and unfortunately there is always someone willing to accept a project on any terms.
“If there are cost constraints then the contractor is bound to get aggressive and start looking for mistakes in the specification so they can charge for variations.”
He added that the quality of tender information had been falling steadily, which made it harder to price work accurately.
Lilly Gallafent, director at Cast Consultancy, admitted that consultants were part of the problem because they advised clients on what levels of risk to accept.
“Change needs to start with clients…and we need to persuade them that even if they feel they have ‘won’ now (in a contract negotiation) they won’t feel that in a few years’ time (when all the problems become apparent). They need to stop dumping risk on their supply chains…there are better models out there, but we are not using them. We do try to allocate risk more equitably by analysing it properly, but the client needs to be willing.”
Noble Francis from the Construction Products Association said things were no better in the public sector, stating that civil servants struggled to get projects ‘green lit’ by the treasury if they tried to specify something over the allocated budget to achieve better long-term value and quality.
“The government has lots of theory and value matrices about how to improve procurement, but this rarely reflects reality…and the industry knows how it works so there will always be companies bidding work at the lower level,” he told the BESA Conference.
For more information about the BESA conference, visit the website here.
