Last month, the government announced that it was launching a consultation, promising “a radically new building and fire safety system”. It is likely to place more responsibility and accountability on designers and constructors to manage building safety risks thoroughly.
As Dame Judith Hackitt identified in her independent review on Building Regulations and fire safety, improving quality is key to managing fire safety risk and sadly it’s an area where too many construction firms have been failing.
But do we really need to wait for the government to tell us what to do? Alternatively, we can identify within our own practices, teams, and organisations where we can improve on and get on and do it.
For the more enlightened contractors, quality has always been high up the agenda, in part because delivering quality is very closely linked to one’s reputation. Since Grenfell there has been a renewed focus on quality, particularly when it comes to the external envelope and fire escape routes because of the public health issues around them. In my view, the issue of quality is rising up the agenda in board rooms and general dialogue within construction organisations. This is extremely pleasing.
However, the construction industry needs to make more progress on quality, more quickly. There are some key questions contractors should be asking themselves:
Firstly, what are key the drivers of quality? As a response to growing insurance claims, all insurance companies are taking a far greater interest in contractors’ approach to quality. Rapidly increasing professional indemnity insurance premiums will reinforce the need to improve quality. We are seeing significantly more challenging questions from our insurance brokers regarding our approach to quality, which we welcome.
There are some key questions contractors should be asking themselves
We need to bring a culture of quality to our industry in the same way as we have safety.
Secondly, ask yourself if you have sufficient time and money to do what you have committed to do. Also, do you have the right resources to fulfil your commitments? The temptation is to overtrade in our industry, which produces a good level of short term positive cashflow, but often leads to long term problems. If the answer is “no”, then being able to walk away from a prospective job and admit that it is outside your skillset is crucial.
Finally, do you have the information you need to build to – is it coordinated? As an industry, we are too accepting of a poor starting point in terms of information on what the customer wants. We are too accepting of design change and too accepting of handing over a substantially rather than fully completed product.
At Beard, we still have too many snags at practical completion. We want to hand over a building that we are proud of and that the customer enjoys. If there is something that detracts from our customer ability to enjoy their new building, then it is a concern to us. To help us resolve this challenge, we have engaged a full-time quality assurance manager. Her first task has been to review and simplify procedures and processes to make sure that we do what we say we are going to do. We have a real focus on check and inspection plans for key elements of the building. We have taken the view that in addition to fire protection, a key area is around water. That means making sure roofs, cavity trays and drainage are built absolutely to specification.
We need to bring a culture of quality to our industry in the same way as we have safety. One of the additional things that we have done at Beard is to introduce monthly directors and senior managers quality visits around our sites. In our view quality and safety are closely linked; a well-organised site is not only safe; it gives the craftsmen an opportunity to produce a quality product.
A version of this article first appeared in Construction Manager.