The UK government released the Construction Playbook last week which calls out the UK’s ‘broken construction model’. It focusses on the UK industry, however the theories stand and apply internationally. The documents concentrates on the preparation and planning, publication, selection, evaluation and contract implementation stages with regards to improving efficiency and accelerating decarbonisation. The documents recommends policy changes to bring together existing commercial best practice which include:
- Standard design to enable standard products and components, this will result in greater productivity and better whole life cost
- Procuring based on outcomes of the intervention to ensure these, and not cost, are front and centre during tendering
- Engaging earlier with the supply chain to develop business cases so that good ideas can come forward before tenders
- Contracting over a longer-time period, to support industry investment in productivity boosting technologies and approaches through greater certainty of pipeline
- Better benchmarking to understand the whole life cost, value of a project and get an estimate range of what projects should cost
- Better allocation of risk between the sector and public buyers to mitigate risk being inappropriately managed or passed down the supply chain
The Playbook’s advice is not rocket science, but ironically it is not being done well globally and therefore the theories can be applied internationally to assist our global industry to deliver infrastructure in a better, faster and greener way to assist the world during the covid recovery for future generations.
#buildbetterMCE #ICE
