News analysis with BESA
Here we go again – Election 2017
Despite the delays and uncertainty caused by the shock general election, BESA chief executive Paul McLaughlin believes the industry’s key priorities will remain, largely, on track
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suspect quite a few people reacted in a similar fashion to the latest internet sensation ‘Brenda from Bristol’ when the PM shocked the nation with her announcement of a snap General Election. “What…not another one!” has been adopted as a slogan by many voters wearied by two years of unprecedented political turmoil, but will another election really make that much difference to us as an industry? Will the Great Repeal Bill be repealed? Unlikely. Will the ‘Brexit’ timetable remain on track? It has to. However, Mrs May’s announcement has already
knocked some things off track: The government’s Industrial Strategy and the Clean Growth Plan are being delayed again. These are important documents because the
former sets the agenda for delivering on the government’s construction and infrastructure plans; and the latter is intended to set out how it will meet the targets set in its Fifth Carbon Budget, which promises to limit the UK’s annual carbon emissions to 57% below 1990 levels by the year 2032. Gavin Barwell is the fifth Housing Minister in the last five years… and he won in Croydon with an extremely narrow margin in 2015. Will we be dealing with yet another change of direction on housing policy after the election on June 8?
Outcome
Whatever the outcome, the priorities for BESA members and the sector remain clear: We need to
see clear plans for public sector investment in construction and infrastructure projects; continued commitment to the new vocational training agenda; and clarification of the country’s post-Brexit legislative position. Those are our priorities, but they should also be government priorities as they are essential to underpinning economic growth. As is providing clarity on the impact of Brexit because Article 50 is triggered and the clock is ticking. Around 80 per cent of our environmental legislation emanated from the EU – and much of it has a direct impact on how building engineering services companies go about their work. However, the Brexit White Paper, which prepared the way for the Repeal Bill, made it clear that any legislation
projects most public sector clients have still not adopted it, but head of sustainability David Frise says the industry also has to change. Just 38% of centrally funded government work in the last year included BIM as a contractual requirement despite the government’s mandate, according to the Construction Manager annual BIM survey. One in four public sector clients admitted they did not ask for BIM and more than six out of 10 of all clients said they had not made it a requirement. The survey also revealed that just one in 10 private sector clients demand Level 2 BIM on all projects. Half don’t ask for it at all and, as a result, many small contractors have not made the necessary first steps towards adopting it. BIM is getting a bad press, but it’s not BIM that’s
the problem it is the way we are doing it. We are trying to adapt a digital process to an analogue world. We knew that was the problem when we embarked on Level 2, but we are still doing exactly the same things and expecting a different result. This means the government’s ‘BIM Big Bang’ has
not resulted in the surge of implementation we hoped for.
May 2017
AFTER THE BIG BANG, BIM LOSES MOMENTUM A
year after the government’s much heralded deadline for Building Information Modelling (BIM) to be used on all publicly funded
Benefits
The industry is collectively failing to make the commercial case for BIM despite its many potential cost benefits and its role in modernising procurement and driving supply chain integration. However, it is not all bad news. The CM survey did show that the professional end of the industry was embracing BIM more enthusiastically with 61% saying they had at least ‘some confidence’ and 22% saying they were ‘confident to fully confident’ in BIM’s effectiveness. This is an improvement on last year and, of those who are using BIM, six out of 10 respondents said it had saved them time and cost in the construction stage. However, there is a problem with contractors;
many of whom have a subliminal sign above their offices saying ‘we don’t do BIM’. It’s little surprise, therefore, that those companies are not being invited to tender for a growing number of projects. It is important for contractors to recognise the
positive role BIM can play in improving the efficiency of the project process, but at the moment there are unrealistic expectations about what BIM can deliver without the industry first changing the way it operates. The use of non-standard
specifications is creating confusion, pricing errors and the potential for contractual disputes, but all of these problems could be avoided if BIM was embedded into the industry’s working methods. Many of the specification templates used by companies are more than 30 years old and can’t be easily translated into the digital formats required to support modern construction methods. BIM relies on a concise, repeatable format that gives structure and order to the specification process. Paying more attention to how specifications are drawn up and prepared could make a huge difference and bring BIM adoption closer. However, sorting this out is still a work in
progress and sits in the ‘too difficult’ box for many companies especially because they are working at full capacity, but, as a result, they are missing out on the financial and process efficiencies on offer. BIM has a role to play from early design concept right through to the very end of a building’s operational life, but the penny still has to drop with many clients. It requires investment up front so the design process can include good asset information that delivers savings further down the line. Instead we are still living with the curse of ‘value engineering’ (i.e. leaving things out to reduce capital costs) which compromises the design and undermines lifetime performance.
www.heatingandventilating.net
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