A visit to a member company showed the good and bad aspects of the working in the thriving public sector construction programme.
The good is that, over the past two years, the impression is that partnering on public sector contracts is now a reality. There have been persistent claims over the years that the main contractors saw partnering as a one-way street where the supplier opened up and they took advantage. But it seems that, more than ten years after the Egan report, the main contractors have now taken the partnering ethos to heart, to the point where they run full open-book policies. Their demands are tougher, but everyone is reaping the benefit of greater efficiencies.
The bad was the persistent use of incorrect specifications for tenders. The company I spoke to was in the process of tendering for the second phase of a project, having won the first phase. However, they had found that the detailed specification for the first phase was incorrect and required considerable extra work to rectify, for which they charged. The second phase tender repeats the initial specification from the first tender, without the subsequent corrections. The company has been told that this is to ensure like-for-like quotes.
So now they face a dilemma: do they quote on the basis of the corrections they know must be made, and put in a higher price, hoping that the main contractor will remember that these changes are necessary and that the other tenderers will spot and quote for them as well? Or do they quote on the basis of the tender, knowing there is extra work involved, but risk being tied to the pre-contract price?
Not unfairly, they find themselves wondering why the main contractor couldn’t just have use the corrected specification (for which it had paid as part of the first phase) for subsequent specifications