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Two fundamental problems and challenges facing the industry in the past decade. Two figures with wildly different backgrounds and perspectives who come up with eerily similar conclusions. Step forward the unlikely pair - industrialist Sir John Egan and the architect Bill Dunster.
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Egan wrote his report, Rethinking Construction, ten years ago and there's a good catch-up on what has, and hasn't, happened since in last Friday's Building.
Egan attempted to grapple with the woeful performance of the industry, in terms of predictability, costs, productivity, profitability and safety. His solutions were partly to call for a revolution in the way the sector, and its constituent parts, worked - less reliance on a myriad of different team members and more use of production line techniques in putting buildings together.
The 'ten years after' review in Building offers a pretty bleak view of how patchy the industry response has been to the new blueprint that Egan, who had been at BAA before writing his report, was offering. The targets that he set, some of which were admittedly ridiculously ambitious, have all been missed. And while there are still bodies and leading companies that still espouse the principles, as Building editor Denise Chevin writes in her leader, the passion that drove the initial reaction to the report has dissipated.
There's no lack of said quality, passion, when you pop down to Hackbridge and sit down with ZEDfactory founder Bill Dunster. Talking through his ambition to make zero carbon a reality, it struck me how closely Dunster and Egan were in their assessment of the structural weaknesses within the industry (Bill has since told me he was very closely involved in Egan related activities post the report).
In producing the recently-released zero-carbon housing model, RuralZED, Dunster described the process as "going back to basics". So for him you need to design, develop and test the components that make the house to ensure there is certainty about performance and about price. "You take the risk out of the pricing," he says. You have to constantly challenge "the conservatism and risk management that exists in the industry" he adds. "We haven't achieved anything remarkable, we have just taken out a whole system, a layer of middle management, from the process."
This is where Dunster and Egan chime - how the sector need to truly embrace a more systematic production line mentality and to strip out what they see as unnecessary parts of the industry that add expense to the process but little else (estimators and QSs end up the whipping boys). Where they differ is on two main fronts: the cause of the problem and the importance of the environment. On the latter there were no targets set for sustainability, probably reflecting its lack of political significance at the time.
In terms of the former, the cause of the continuing lack of change, Egan puts the blame squarely in the corner of the government, which still remains a poor client and therefore fails to change the mentality of the supply chain. Hence the lowest cost mentality that bedevills the sector, leading to a lack of quality and certainty.
Dunster however sees more vested interests from the private sector, in businesses deciding not to change to retain their dominant positions. And he talks about the "re-politicisation of the industry" in responding to the challenge of cutting carbon. We probably need both Egan and Dunster to continue to pose difficult questions and put forward uncomfortable answers if we are ever to tackle the overlapping problems that have over the industry like a pair of dark and imposing clouds.
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