The Save Construction Initiative offers to lead a brand-new charge toward sustainability, meaningful collaboration, certainty, and trust. On Friday 20th January, The Save Construction Initiative hosted their long-awaited launch in the city of Manchester at HOME.
Within the 220-seater auditorium, gathered esteemed figureheads such as CEO’s OBE’s CBE’s and a Mayor along with professionals from every facet of the industry keen to join the movement that is stimulating discussions surrounding the challenges forcing business failure and which promises to influence positive change for the betterment of its people, their livelihoods, and their futures!
First to take to the stage was SCI’s Director, Tim Whitehill, who presented the grim statistics that more 3,000 construction firms enter administration annually and announced the prediction that some 6,000 businesses will become insolvent in the year ahead for 2023.
The shocking data alone gives substance to the reasons why the taskforce has forged alliances with MSA, RICS, CIOB, CIBSE and NFB to identify the root causes and eliminate the high-risk factors denying the sector a prosperous future.
Next to the lectern was Deputy GM Mayor, Paul Dennett who gave an in-depth overview of the “state of the nation” and particularly the Northwest and emphasized why it was so important to bolt and brace the sector that employs 2.66m people, leads the global economy and provides the services that society so heavily relies upon.
John Finlay, former procurement manager for Manchester City Council, shared his lessons learned from his time served with the council. He enlightened the audience with his honest appraisal of doing things the wrong way for half of his 40 year career before becoming a powerful advocate and practitioner of 2 -stage collaborative procurement via collaborative Construction frameworks and how he helped to change the mindset that contractors and consultants became ‘Constructor Partners’ and how the ‘Us and Them’ adversarial culture, was transformed into the ‘WE’ culture and ‘One Team.”
Paul Fitzpatrick, Director of Liverpool NHS Trust, compounded the message that there needs to be a procurement reform having been affected by one of the most publicized contractor collapses in history and one that cost the taxpayer an additional £295m and delayed patient occupation by 4 years.
David Mosey – Declared transformational change would happen if the Gold Standard frameworks created an aggregated and harmonised programme of work and users adopted the recommendations that would then improve value for money, efficiency, safety, social value, net zero carbon and whole life value.
His research within the report of the gold standard concludes that some frameworks have been falling short of the aspirational outcomes due to inflated ‘pipeline of work’, frameworks were being relied upon as a quick fix and the perception that clients/ advisers are not ‘consistent with fair selection, evaluation, award, measurement. His research also alluded that failure to comply was amplified due to the market being saturated with over 2000 public sector construction frameworks that needed revitalising.
CEO and Founder, Zoe Brooke – Zoe affirmed the sector is in crisis. She reiterated the statistics on insolvency, high rate of suicide, mental health, and skills shortage and instilled reasoning to take heed from the guidance for collaborative working from Construction Playbook, The Gold standard, Guidance for collaborative Procurement and the report commissioned by dept for levelling up housing and communities. During her speech, she shared the film created from the focus day event attended by key framework and business leaders and this again accentuated the importance of being accountable in reducing procurement costs, improving value, reducing risk, waste and duplication.
Tom Stannard CEO, Salford Council, has been an unyielding, steadfast advocate of the initiative in recent months and pledged to support the initiative going forward both in his role of CEO and newly appointed chair of IED. Tom reinforced the importance of addressing the skills shortage and skills gap in Salford and GM Borough and proudly shared some of the great work being delivered by the Build Salford apprenticeship programme.
The mic was then passed for Q&A and panel discussion initiated by Sandi Rhys Jones OBE, senior vice president of CIOB who presented solutions in a pragmatic manner to positively change the culture and ill behaviors, followed by Angela Mansell, MD of Mansell Build Solutions who encouraged the audience to change their language towards specialist suppliers and to say NO to practices that are not in the best interest of all parties and discourage collaboration.