We are all familiar with complaints about ‘red tape’ – needless bureaucracy that gets in the way of getting the job done. This is normally laid at the door of Government or ‘Brussels’ the point being that it is imposed by someone distant and unaccountable. But the truth is that in the construction industry we do a pretty good job of tying ourselves up in red tape with little or no help from anyone else.
It used to be that people complained about Health & Safety regulation in the construction industry, but this attitude has largely changed. Most people in the industry have become used to the regulations around H&S now and most do not find it burdensome. Few could question the aims behind the regulations or their necessity. The industry still causes more deaths than any other in the UK – 39 in 2013-14 according to the HSE. ‘The construction industry is the most dangerous sector in Britain. There is no trade like it. To put it in context, 448 British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001. Over the same period, more than 760 construction workers have been killed on British sites.‘ (The Observer, April 14 2014).
For some time, people complained about CIS – a scheme set up by the Government a decade or so ago to try and increase the tax take from the industry. The building trade had always been riddled with cash-in-hand subcontracting. By shifting the duty of collection on to the employer from anyone not registered, HMRC effectively ironed out a lot of the casual work practices. As it has matured the process has become (relatively!) streamlined, or perhaps we have just all become more familiar with it! In any case, although no one wants to pay more tax than they need to, it is difficult to complain about the Starbucks and Googles of this world and not expect one’s own industry to sort itself out.
But I didn’t start this piece to talk about those pieces of legislation. What annoys me is the whole direction of travel in construction management and contracting. Two events earlier this week prompted me to write this article. Acting as a landscape architect, I was asked to fill in a nineteen page form (for a commercial organisation, not a local authority) in order to get paid for my consultancy work – a completely unnecessary diversion of time and resources. It included questions about how often we review our equality and diversity plan, whether we produce an annual sustainability report, our anti bribery and corruption policy, what work we had done with this contractor before and ‘what we had learnt from that project’. etc etc. Should I really need to fill out 19 pages and send in three years’ accounts to get paid. The serious point here is that it works against smaller practitioners. I am all for weeding out the ‘cowboys’, but do we need to go this far?
The other incident concerned a job we were working on in Central London. There are multiple small roof gardens on this project, which is run on a construction management basis by a large firm. Over the last few months we seem to have been copied in to so many emails to do with every aspect of the job, by almost every consultant. Sometimes in these situations, people add recipients to the list to cover themselves – better be safe than sorry – but the result is that you end up receiving so much information, most of which is not relevant, that it is difficult to find the important bits that you do need to know. Despite this, the design was fully co-ordinated. Anyway, in amongst this avalanche of information, we had missed an update to the programme and had less time than anticipated to put the tender package for the landscape together. I was called in for a meeting with the management team to ensure I met the deadline (which incidentally we did, although it was an effort). What I found difficult to understand was that the landscape element wasn’t due on site for another two years – summer 2017. Programmes are clearly important, but two years? Funnily enough we only ever get about two weeks to price things…
Sometimes the bureaucracy is just an irritating but necessary task to carry out to complete the job. At other times, it actively gets in the way of you carrying out your job properly. As well as making the whole process more expensive, it also works against small firms and in favour of larger operators. Instead of blaming ‘The Government’ or ‘Brussels’ for red tape, perhaps we should look closer to home. And this is something that our industry should be able to sort out itself, without government stepping in.
The question is, how do we achieve that?
If you have had similar experiences, I would love to hear from you.
Thanks to Polly Wyer for illustrations – Polly Wyer https://www.behance.net/PollyWyer
February 22, 2015
