The construction industry needs to capitalise on the collaborative atmosphere created by this year’s MIPIM in order to meet the key challenges it faces, according to Andrew Carpenter, chief executive of Constructing Excellence Midlands.

Speaking in the wake of this year’s event – which was attended by more than 20,000 delegates from around the world – Carpenter says that while a collaborative spirit is alive and well in Cannes, it risks being wasted if not capitalised on at home.

“MIPIM has always been an ideal opportunity to meet the movers and shakers,” said Carpenter. “You can speak with the whole supply chain in one fell swoop, as well as some of the major policy creators and decision makers.

“The event is the nucleus of the collaborative culture that we believe the construction industry needs to ensure it moves forward at the required pace. However, it is how that is followed up that will make the key difference when it comes to creating a truly integrated supply chain.

“It’s our industry’s version of ‘a dog is for life, not just for Christmas’. It’s all well and good doing and saying the right things at MIPIM, but if that collaborative approach gets left at passport control on the way back into the UK, it’s just lip service and not something that is going to drive us forward.”

Carpenter – who is also chief executive of the Structural Timber Association – hosted a breakfast event during MIPIM, which discussed the use of timber as part of the government’s push for net zero. He believes this is a key example of where collaboration is needed in order for the ambitious targets to be met.

“With an eye on 2050 as the target for decarbonising all sectors of the UK economy, it is clear that this is not going to be anywhere near feasible for the construction industry if we aren’t working in lockstep.

“We as an industry are one of the biggest polluters on the planet, and we are at a crossroads in terms of how we tackle that.

“This is a key conversation that Constructing Excellence is having across its regions. We recently refined our theme groups – at which we discuss and define industry challenges – to create a dedicated workstream that focuses on strategic and collaborative research into how the climate crisis can be addressed. Conversations like this are a vital catalyst for continuous, long-term industry improvement, which is what Constructing Excellence is all about.

“We truly feel that the construction industry is at a critical juncture, and it’s our responsibility to make sure that we move forward together in the right direction.”

We had an excellent Summit on the 18th November in Birmingham

Please CLICK HERE to view or download the speaker presentations from the event

Judging the many excellent submissions to the CESW Awards 2021 presented Martyn Jones with his thought for the month: How we can we accelerate the pace of change and improve the spread and adoption of the best practice as demonstrated in our award-winning submissions?

The CESW Awards are recognised across the South West built environment as the biggest and brightest celebration of best practice.

They are the HEINEKEN of awards (other lagers are available), in that they reach all parts of our operating system from developers and clients through to consultants of all disciplines, main and specialist contractors and suppliers of materials and components.

They also celebrate leading practice in dealing with current issues such as pivoting from price to value, sustainability, quality and compliance, digitisation, integration and collaboration, and conservation and regeneration.

Every year our Awards capture exemplars of excellent practice and some of this year’s entries yet again provide some cracking demonstrations of our industry at its best.  On this occasion, not only demonstrating best practice along Constructing Excellence lines but doing so whilst meeting the immense challenges presented by the pandemic.

But, why are aren’t these principles of best practice not being embraced more widely in the industry? And how do we accelerate the rate of change and the spread and adoption of this best practice to meet the challenges we face?

Here are some suggested guiding principles, all of which have long featured in the work of CESW, but which now need to be pursued with a much greater sense of urgency and resolve:

• Capitalising on the current sense of urgency to address the safety and sustainability of our products (past, current and future) and processes. To borrow a phrase, “never waste a good crisis”
• Acknowledging the complexity and challenges that the current change agenda presents but also the immense opportunities for change
• Catalysing efforts particularly around social and environmental innovations and investing time, energy and resources to progress beyond compliance to create greater value – and at pace
• Adopting outward looking, transformational and enabling leadership to stretch stakeholder expectations at all stages of the development process from Strategic Definition through to In Use
• Empowering people through the habit of learning, experimentation and innovation
• Creating spaces conducive to change and populating them with clusters of individuals with the passion, skills, commitment and energy to drive the change agenda
• Nurturing relationships based on values, trust and mutual competitive advantage
• Dismantling the barriers to change presented by our traditional operating system and achieving closer intra- and inter-organisational alignment
• Strategically coordinating the spread and adoption of innovations and focusing effort at pivotal points in our programmes, projects, and supply chains

Are you keen to play a leading role in grasping this once-in-a-generation opportunity to really transform construction? Then why not join one or more of our Thought Leadership Theme Groups?

• Construction Clients Group (open to those from Client organisations only)
• Procurement and Productivity
• Innovation and Sustainability
• SMART (Digital and Offsite)
• Quality and Compliance
• Health and Wellbeing

And if you are a young professional, or in the early stages of developing your career in the built environment, then why not join G4C in the SW? This offers the opportunity for you, as a young professional, to express your ideas as to how we should be reshaping the built environment.  After all the future belongs to you.

Leading homelessness charity, SIFA Fireside is inviting the construction and civil engineering sector to be part of an innovative new concept called Building Employability. The new scheme seeks to increase training and employment opportunities across the West Midlands for people who have experienced homelessness or exploitation.

‘I pledge’ is the first phase of the programme targeting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from across the region. The ask is simple; pledge support for socially responsible approaches to recruitment that helps provide opportunities for people who have experienced homelessness and those who are vulnerably housed. The charity is asking organisations to make their pledge and be directly involved in developing the concept as we begin to think about the post COVID landscape.

Highway Traffic Management has been the first to pledge their support. Managing Director and SIFA Fireside Patron Greg Baldwin said about the scheme: “We are very excited to have been involved in the planning and now the launch of Building Employability with SIFA Fireside. They have supported us hugely in tackling hidden homelessness within our workforce and it’s time for us, and the businesses of Birmingham to come together and pledge in support of their objectives and the aims of this movement.”

Working closely with SIFA Fireside’s specialist Teams, our Building Employability partners will use our innovative employment model to offer clients job opportunities and training within their business.

SIFA Fireside’s Fundraising and Corporate Partnerships Manager, Melissa Roche, said: “COVID-19 has impacted heavily on individuals and businesses across the region, which is why now is a crucial time to look at how we can work together to develop clear pathways and increase the number of people that have access to sustainable employment and accommodation opportunities.

“The commercial sector plays a key role in tackling homelessness in the city and a number of our corporate partners have offered employment opportunities to our work ready clients. Pledging your support to Building Employability is the first step to extending our reach within the thriving building and construction industry in Birmingham. Building Employability is a long-term approach that we want to develop with partners that stimulates real change and action.”

If you’d like to find out more and pledge your interest to come on board and help us develop our Building Employability project, visit our pledge page HERE

CLICK HERE to view the SFBA Proposal PDF

As the UK looks to build its way to a brighter future following COVID, construction clients are being told that they hold the key to ensuring the sector emerges from the crisis a more efficient, inclusive and greener industry.

Constructing Excellence Midlands (CEM) – which was created to lead the change agenda and is already backed by many of the region’s key construction industry players – has launched a new guide aimed at all clients procuring construction work and who are therefore positioned to significantly influence the sector’s processes, practices and outcomes.

Central to the Client Commitments Best Practice Guide is the theme of achieving best value over the lifetime of the project and through considering social value. It calls for a move away from the all-too-familiar ‘race to the bottom’ that can be the result of traditional and often wholly unrealistic lowest-price procurement processes.

The Client Commitments Best Practice Guide deals with six main areas of responsibility for clients:

• Emphasising the need for strong client leadership – which is at the heart of delivering change
• Collaborative procurement and integration of the supply chain from an early stage in the project
• A commitment to people and the need for clients to ensure that this culture is embraced throughout the supply chain
• Sustainability and delivering against the net zero carbon agenda
• Quality and compliance, through design, manufacture and installation
• Health, safety and wellbeing.

A guide was first published in 2006 to outline best practice for clients in the build-up the huge level of construction activity anticipated for the London 2012 Olympics.

The newly launched 2021 guide –  which we developed in association with Nottingham Trent university  –  was arguably even more important now in the aftermath of COVID and the need to address the climate emergency.

For the last 12 months we’ve endured the COVID crisis but we now have the Government’s call to ‘Build back better, Build back faster, Build back greener’ and the Construction Leadership Council’s Roadmap to Recovery for the industry, all of which is taken into account in the new guide and which plays alongside the Value Toolkit and the Construction Playbook.

For the first time in many years the construction industry is coming together with one voice through which more people are understanding the concept of value, whole-life building costs and social value, rather than simply focusing on lowest price build cost.

We all live in a society which is accepting that – post-COVID – the construction industry that we look forward to is not the same one we left behind and clients have a major responsibility for shaping this. I would therefore encourage all clients of the construction industry to read this document, take on board its recommendations and work towards driving the change that we all need.

CLICK HERE to view the Client Commitments Best Practice Guide

CLICK HERE to watch CEO, Andrew Carpenter’s video introduction to the guide

CEM leads the change agenda in construction regionally as part of Construction Excellence’s national mission to improve the industry’s performance and produce a better built environment.

It wants a greater collaborative culture within the industry and acknowledges the need for committed leadership and a customer-focused approach in the sector. It wants to work with the client base to encourage a more enlightened approach to procurement that focuses on quality and delivery – not only cost.

Alongside achieving more integrated supply chains and lean processes, the aim is to pave the way for improved productivity, the adoption of new digital and off-site construction technologies, a focus on people and wellbeing and to address the need to attract and recruit the next generation of industry leaders.

CE Midlands has been in existence, in its current guise, for 2 ½ years and during that time we have built membership to more than 80 member companies and over 300 individuals. We have grown not only in membership but also influence and our ground-breaking best practice guides are now used extensively throughout the sector. Please see: Resources – Constructing Excellence Midlands

With lessons learned through Covid-19 and a New Year upon us the time is right to re-assess our goals and objectives reflecting our industry and the Roadmap to Recovery for which we provide the industry dissemination across the East and West Midlands. We are also the official Adoption partners of the Construction Innovation Hub and this involvement will greatly benefit the industry in general and our members when it comes to future influence. Our first project to provide workshops for the Valuation Toolkit is already underway. Please see: https://constructioninnovationhub.org.uk/

In addition we have two significant pieces of work being carried out in association with Nottingham Trent University to:

• Update the Client Commitments Best Practice Guide Client-Commitments-Final_May-2014.pdf (constructingexcellence.org.uk)
• Create a Diploma in Smart Collaboration to deliver the culture and behaviours outlined as necessary in the Dame Judith Hackitt Review following the Grenfell Tragedy.

To allow us to carry out this essential work we require additional resource, both financial and people, and we are writing to you to ask that you consider joining CE Midlands as regional members. Membership offers you the opportunity to learn & share ‘best practice’, use the knowledge created to influence change and network with other leading construction professionals from across the Midlands. Our need is a specific commitment to allow us to continue our direction of travel.

Membership will provide access to our six Thought Leadership Theme Groups.

• Construction Clients Group (Clients only)
• Health & Wellbeing
• Innovation & Sustainability
• Procurement & Productivity
• Quality & Compliance
• Smart Construction (Digital & Offsite Technologies)

It will also give you membership of one of our Best Practice clubs and access to the other five.

• Birmingham & Black Country
• Coventry & Warwickshire (FoRCE)
• East Midlands
• Hereford & Worcestershire
• Shropshire
• Staffordshire

Should you have any queries or require further information please do not hesitate to contact me. In the meantime, please look at our current Annual Report at: https://www.cemidlands.org/assets/Downloads/cem2019annualreview.pdf . A new Annual Report will be launched at our AGM on 21^st January 2021 with places available by visiting: CE Midlands Annual General Meeting – Constructing Excellence Midlands

We do hope that you will consider this request favourably and hope to hear back from you shortly. You may join immediately by filling in the application form here: Join Now – Constructing Excellence Midlands

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Carpenter

Chief Executive, CE Midlands

This month, Martyn Jones continues his exploration of the changes that can be made to construction’s operating system and delivery methods to combine purpose with profit, and to sustain the spirit of “we’re all in this together” as seen in our response to the challenges of the pandemic.

In December he looked at Two Stage Open Book procurement. He starts the New Year by making the case for project bank accounts (PBAs) in bringing construction clients and lead and specialist contractors together in the spirit of a joint enterprise.

PBSs are not new of course, but they do offer a way to shift the focus away from lowest price procurement/race to the bottom and towards delivering better project outcomes for clients and the whole supply chain.

Back in 2006, Professor Rudi Klein, a leading campaigner and advocate for the interests of construction subcontractors in general and combatting payment abuse in particular, was the guest speaker at the launch of the Bristol Rethinking Construction Club report for the then department of Trade and Industry: Bridging the Gap: Connecting Bristol’s specialist and trade contractors with the Rethinking Construction agenda.

At the event in Bristol, Rudi endorsed the Club’s report and called for the use of project bank accounts to combat payment abuse. This resonated with the findings of the Bristol Club’s investigation, which set out the barriers to specialist contractors’ engagement with the Rethinking Construction movement. These included the onerous payment procedures and retention regimes of many clients and lead contractors.

PBAs work by ring-fencing accounts from which payments are made directly and simultaneously by the client to all parties in the supply chain. Funds in the account can only be paid to beneficiaries, that is, members of the supply chain named in the account (i.e., the lead contractors and supply chain members).

They provide a means of enabling faster payments through the construction supply chain, with payments being made as soon as 5 days from the due date. This is intended to reduce cash flow problems that can lead to the insolvency of supply chain members which, as we know, is potentially catastrophic risks for projects in terms of money and time.

Why use PBAs? Let’s start with the very important but practical advantages. Supply chain members do not have to wait for upstream contractors to process payments as they receive them directly, ensuring certainty, security and speed of payments. It reduces the need for supply chain members to borrow or finance credit and the assets in the PBA are protected from tier 1 insolvencies.

They ensure regular payments within timescales that are much shorter than where cash has to be cascaded down through different contracting layers. Retention monies can be ‘ring-fenced’, providing supply chain members with security that they will eventually be paid when due, Payment-based disputes are reduced, and supply chain members can reallocate the time and energy they spend on chasing payments to more constructive value-adding activities.

But consider this. Even more importantly, in my view, a PBA brings lead contractors and specialists together in a different business relationship, and in the case of the dual authority model of PBAs, bringing clients, lead contractors and specialists closer together.

A PBA places all parties on a more equal footing and sends strong signals that opportunistic behaviour is not acceptable, or indeed needed, as supply chain members are paid fairly and promptly as valued members of a collaborative team. It incentivises lead contractors and supply chains to change their value propositions and move away from providing lowest price solutions. In short, a further step towards unlocking specialist contractor potential to deliver innovative, value-based solutions.

Who is using PBSs? Back in 2010, the UK Government introduced a policy requiring all UK government procurers to use PBAs unless there are compelling reasons not to do so. All the devolved governments also have policies in place requiring the use of PBAs.

Highways England likes them. In their view, “PBAs are now acknowledged to be the most effective method of ensuring secure and regular cash flow, particularly in the wake of recent lead contractor insolvencies. Using them makes [us] the client of choice in an increasingly competitive market and ultimately helps us deliver our programme to improve our road network, and besides efficiencies, they’re also helping us do the right thing for our suppliers.”

However, research by The Specialist Engineering Contractors’ (SEC) Group indicates that the take-up of PBAs by local authorities in England has been slow. Why? Well, there are some challenges including sometimes a lack of transparency along the supply chain regarding their operation and the Cabinet Office hasn’t validated the “compelling reasons” given by a department or agency for not using PBAs.

Occasionally issues have arisen too where the tier 1 contractor has gone into insolvency and there is concern amongst supply chain firms of what happens to disputed sums – although in Highways England projects disputed monies are kept in the PBA until the dispute is resolved. And, perhaps most significantly, lead contractors are reluctant to relinquish their control of the flow of money and the leverage it gives them downstream in the supply chain and which in turn may impact on their profitability. So maybe clients need to show leadership and recognise that their lead contractors should have larger margins and so removing the need for opportunistic behaviour?

It’s the time of year when we think about resolutions for the coming year. Perhaps PBAs should be on your list for changes in 2021?

So here we all are again in lockdown. Thankfully, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, recognised the importance of the UK construction industry in his speech when introducing the latest set of rules and regulations. For our sites it is ‘business as usual’ with the rest of us confined to our homes again. I feel very confident however that thanks to the sterling work of the Construction Leadership Council once again the sector will prove how adept we are with dealing with a crisis and assist the nation through this period of uncertainty.

For CE Midlands, our works seems to grow and grow as the need for collaborative working increases with clients looking for innovative solutions to maintain their building programmes. Our work with Nottingham Trent University continues at pace and we were able to provide an update on the Clients’ Commitments Best Practice Guide at the hugely successful Construction Summit on 5^th November 2020.  At the Summit we were delighted to welcome Andrew Stephenson MP, Minister of State for HS2, to deliver the keynote presentation and this may be viewed by visiting our brand new web site, along with all the other excellent speeches, on our brand new web site at www.cemidlands.org. Our grateful thanks go to Shakespeare Martineau for generously sponsoring the online summit and providing such a thought-provoking presentation that may also be viewed on our new web site.

In addition to Andrew’s keynote presentation and Richard Whittaker and Stuart Grabham updating the guide, excellent presentations followed from Simon Rawlinson of the Construction Leadership Council on the Roadmap to Recovery, Vince Kesterton of Interserve on the building of the Birmingham Nightingale Hospital with all the best practice examples that could and should find their way into everyday behaviour, and Simon Delahunty-Forrest in unveiling the Birmingham City Centre 2040 Future Plan.  However I have to say I was most proud of the presentations given by Paul Chatwin, Amrit Sagoo and Noel Street as they unveiled our ‘How to Guide to Mental Health and Wellbeing’, ‘How to Guide to Best Practice Procurement’ and links with the Grid respectively. The hours and hours of effort provided by our members throughout our network of Theme Groups came to fruition and we owe them a huge debt of gratitude. Details of all these new documents again may be found on our new web site.

Our regular Friday webinars continue, although there has been a slight downturn in viewers which is disappointing. Please do support our November and December webinars as we have an interesting line-up of speakers and topics including this coming Friday 13^th November 2020 when Steve Clarke covers the all-important issue of ‘getting more for less’ which never seems to go away and is particularly critical during these troubled times. Further topics include required skills for MMC, the Building Safety Bill and of course our eagerly awaited monthly ‘State of the Nation’ sessions.

We have added to our series of podcasts when I interviewed Suzannah Nicholl, Chief Executive of Build UK, so please do listen to that when you have a spare twenty minutes. It may be found by visiting: https://audioboom.com/posts/7719647-suzannah-nichol-mbe-chief-executive-of-build-uk

The big news since our last newsletter however is a complete turnaround in terms of how we intend to run our 2020 Built Environment Awards by taking them online. The ceremony will take place on Friday 4^th December at 12.00pm East Midlands and 2.00pm West Midlands and we hope that all members and supporters will tune in to see who has been successful and help celebrate best practice across the region. As it’s taking place online and during the afternoon rather than make it a ‘black tie’ event we’ve decided to make it ‘loud & proud’ and would ask you to watch in your loudest shirts and ensure you use social media throughout the event to publicise both yourself and the event – let’s go viral! Details of how to book may be found elsewhere within this newsletter.

Finally, I would like to thank the increasing number of people actively involved in CE Midlands with the results previously outlined apparent across the region. We continue to be the ‘driving force’ for the improvement agenda across the Midlands construction sector and if you are not yet actively involved please do so now!

ANDREW CARPENTER, Chief Executive CE Midlands

Suzannah Nichol MBE chats to Andrew Carpenter about the moment the idea of working in the construction came to her, setting up Build UK, her love for outdoor activities, achieving her MBE honours and how the industry has handled the Coronavirus pandemic.

CLICK HERE to listen now