By Zoe Le Grand at Forum for the Future
The notion of working together for a better outcome will be familiar to anyone that has worked in the construction industry over the last 15 years. Traditionally, building contracts were awarded to those contractors that offered the lowest price. The contractors, sometimes forced to bid for the contracts at below cost price, then tried to recoup their losses through litigation and by putting pressure on their sub- contractors to lower their prices. The result was poor quality buildings delivered late and way over budget.
Over the last 20 years, prominent business leaders like Sir Michael Latham, Sir John Egan and Andrew Wolstenholme were tasked with reviewing the sector’s performance, and have repeatedly called upon the industry to collaborate with their clients and supply chain partners to produce higher quality, innovative buildings at a fair price. They saw that where clients, designers, suppliers and contractors come together from the beginning of the project they were better placed to deliver high quality construction in a more efficient way.
The challenge of producing green, low carbon buildings requires even closer collaboration. The Low Carbon Construction Innovation and Growth Team report warned that sustainable building requires innovation and this won’t be delivered without collaboration across the value chain. Successful projects such as the Olympic Stadium brought together the whole design and construction team from the start and together they managed to produce one of the most sustainable stadiums ever built. I wonder whether this would have been possible without collaboration. Would they have decided to use for example, low carbon concrete and a steel structure made with surplus gas pipes if they had simply looked for the lowest price?
At Forum for the Future, we recognise that the combined challenge of a rapidly expanding population and rapidly diminishing resources can’t be met by one organisation alone. We have to work together to find the solutions which will set us on a path towards a fairer, more prosperous world. Since 2005, our Engineers for the 21st Century Project has been bringing together groups of young engineers from different organisations to tackle sustainability challenges together.
The call for collaboration is not new to the construction industry but it needs to step up to the plate and demonstrate leadership to the rest of the business world.
We’ll be exploring what working together for a sustainable future means for the construction industry at a joint event with the CIRIA Network on 8th December 2011. If you would like to know more, or are interested in attending the event, please get in touch.
This article originally appeared on the website of independent sustainability experts Forum for the Future.
Image courtesy of Paul Keller on flickr
