13.12.14
Public sector construction pipeline becoming more ‘predictable’ for architects
Source: Public Sector Executive Dec/Jan 2015
Adrian Dobson, director of practice at the Royal Institute of British Architects, talks to PSE about how confidence levels for workload forecasts in the public sector have started stabilising.
Architectural practices are becoming more optimistic about a more predictable pipeline of public sector construction expenditure, a recent survey by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) revealed.
In the RIBA Future Trends Workload Index for September, respondents pointed towards ‘solid’ order books for the remainder of the year – with confidence high across the UK.
Although the private housing (+30) and commercial (+19) sectors currently offer the best prospects, there have been modest increases in the public sector (+5) and community sector forecasts (+7) too.
Adrian Dobson, director of practice at RIBA, told PSE that at the time of the last general election it became obvious that the public sector pipeline was going to slow down considerably. This was on the back of commercial projects drying up after the financial crash.
For the last few years people realised that there wasn’t going to be real growth in this area, which led to a stage of stabilisation, said Dobson. “But because the government has been a little more forthright about the future pipeline, that has increased confidence a bit and there may be a little re-inflation of capital works. I think that is what is driving the positive forecast in the public sector,” he added.
“At the moment private sector housing and commercial are driving the recovery from our point of view, but the public sector is providing a bit of background stability.
“These are pretty modest numbers compared to what we are seeing elsewhere but, nevertheless, it does represent confidence that there is still some stability in that pipeline. Before this there was a lot of uncertainty, whereas people can now see a number of programmes getting established, whether in education or health, with information being put out there to plan.”
Rectifying procurement problems
The RIBA director noted that it is medium and larger practices, in particular, that are forecasting an increase in public sector workload.
“There is a sub-story behind that,” he said. “What we often call small practices, which are often ‘micro-businesses’ of 10 or less [employees], face quite steep barriers to get into public sector work.
“Typically they get kept out by things like high turnover and insurance requirements.”
However, the latest reforms to the European procurement directives, working their way through Whitehall, might improve that situation.
Dobson said that there is hopefully a move towards trying to streamline the pre-application process so they are not “ridiculously over-onerous”, and trying to get more consistency so that if practices gather data for a pre-qualification they can use it in the same format for another application – whereas currently every procurement is different.
Blurring the lines
“One of the other problems for us is that we ask people in our Index about their public sector workload, but it is increasingly getting difficult to define where public sector ends and the private sector begins,” he said.
“We would say that anything that is more than 50% public funded meets our definition of public sector work, but even then you get things which historically would’ve been classified elsewhere. For instance where do you put higher education spending on capital, which has been performing quite well?”
RIBA stated that it asks the forecast questions but, at the end of the day, it is people who allocate and interpret where they feel their work should be.
Although there has been a modest increase in confidence, RIBA does not believe there will be a major boom in the public sector pipeline. Dobson told us that in the next three to five years there will be opportunities for architects, even if they are not necessarily in public sector areas they would normally consider.
“One of the things we’ve been saying to our members is that we think there is a bigger role for architects in infrastructure and we’re trying to get our members involved with things like rail and small power generation because, arguably, there is not enough involvement of architects in some of these sectors,” he said.
“Going forward, we would say ‘think beyond some of your traditional public sector markets’.”
The RIBA director added that, for architects, the big unknown is social and affordable housing – this sector is one in which architects could have a lot of ‘skin in the game’.
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