Delivering on the ambitions of the £420m Sector Deal

Applying innovative technology and techniques to deliver homes, major buildings and infrastructure and transform our industry under the Construction Sector Deal.

The Construction Sector Deal policy paper was published by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and the Construction Leadership Council (CLC) in July 2018. This stated, “The construction sector reaches every corner of the United Kingdom and touches each of our lives. We are in the early days of one of the greatest construction programmes in our history, from delivering more homes that people can afford, in the places they want to live, to major infrastructure projects…the pace of this change, and the size of this opportunity, demands a construction sector that is the best in the world.”

The programme is very ambitious with a joint sector-government budget of £420 million to invest in new technology and techniques. The Construction Leadership Council is building on the Sector Deal’s strategic principles of Digital, Manufacturing and Whole-life Performance through a series of cross-industry groups. The CLC’s ‘Procuring for Value’ report makes practical, long-term recommendations for both government and industry to facilitate change. This is a subject that should be central to the work of all those engaged in the built environment at a time when we need to restore confidence in the construction industry, and relates particularly to SDGs 9,11 and 12.

We will invite the audience to contribute their own suggestions and by the session end we will identify three key recommendations as the most universally applicable.

This session was developed with the Ecobuild Conference at Futurebuild.

Chair: 
Andy Mitchell - Construction Leadership Council & CEO Thames Tideway

Speakers: 
Ann Bentley - RLB & Construction Leadership Council,
Sam Stacey - UK Research and Innovation (UKRI),
Peter Caplehorn - Construction Products Association,
Lynne Sullivan - LSA Studio, Good Homes Alliance & Green Construction Board,
Julia Barrett - Willmott Dixon

How do we effect real change?

Despite numerous reports and considerable effort since 1945 and, more recently, after the excellent reports from Latham (1994), Egan (1998), Wolstenholme (2009) and Farmer (2017) effecting change in the construction industry has proved problematic as a result of a culture of (reckless) lowest first-cost procurement and serial risk-dumping, on the advice of the legal profession, among others. Yet doing it differently is seen by most public (and many private) procurement officers as the biggest risk of all.

Now we have a comprehensive report on the key activity of procurement by Ann Bentley, RLB Global Chair and member of the Construction Leadership Council.Procuring for Value was published by the CLC in July as an action plan in support of the Construction Sector Deal.

There have been innovations around procurement in the past, including the NEC contracts, PPC 2000 and the IPInitiatives programme, supported by the Edge. In the future our departure from EU will undoubtedly change procurement practice again, possibly for the better. But right now the Edge sees this report as the game-changer we have been waiting for and idiscussed how we might drive real cultural change and reform the expensive and extraordinarily wasteful processes that constitute public procurement today.

Chair: Dr Matthew Tulley, Development and Property Services Director, Great Ormond Street Hospital

Speakers:

Ann Bentley, Chair of RLB, Board Member of CLC and author of the Procuring for value report
Louise Lado-Byrnes, IPInitiatives, Collaboration without barriers
Kevin Murray, Deputy Director & Head of Property and Construction, Crown Commercial ServicesAlan Crane, Construction Consultant & Past President CIOB

Venue:

The Building Centre, Store Street, London WC1E 7BT

Downloads:

Event invite

Event presentation deck

Event handout