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Andy von Bradsky - Soapbox - Building Design

01.04

Andy von Bradsky

As specialist housing architects, PRP is working in a time of acute need for good quality affordable housing. Local authorities, government agencies and other public sector clients are rightly putting enormous resources into trying to address the shortage of new homes.

Yet these same agencies are demanding levels of competition for selection of projects so intensive and so long-winded as to seriously hamper the delivery of this much-needed new housing. And in the process are wasting huge amounts of public and private money.

To explain. In competitions run by Government agencies, developers and their consultants - working for limited remuneration – are regularly required to prepare full architectural proposals to RIBA Stage C for sites being disposed of. In addition, full proposals up to Outline Design stage are required from all competing teams, despite the existence of a masterplan and supporting Design Codes drawn up in advance of the competition. This results in each team producing its own Full Plans version of the Code.

This naturally leads to four or five times the level of consultancy input than is necessary – at a time when the housing industry and its supporting consultancies are faced with a real shortage of skills to deal with the volume of work to address the housing shortfall. And to make matters worse, it is our experience that the financial offer is, in fact, of far greater significance to public sector clients than the design quality.

This waste of professional time is currently being taken to a further level with the introduction of a process known as ‘Competitive Dialogue’. One local authority, advised by its lawyers, now requires competing developer and consultant teams to work with the council departments, residents and other stakeholders over an extended period. Each team must prepare a submission to the level of a planning application complete with masterplan, Design Codes and planning statements.

The local authority can then pick and mix from the submissions to create its preferred scheme - from which each team is then required to tender. The overall process is due to take over nine months. We can assume that will be a minimum.

PRP were architects for one of the first housing PFI projects – an incredibly lengthy and drawn-out process taking literally years of work before the contracts were placed. Much could have been done to reduce the financial commitment and time incurred by ourselves and the developers, (who have to contribute to the costs of their professional teams) by reducing the obligation to undertake such high levels of detailed design at inappropriate stages in the process.

And of course, competitions do not always produce the best and most suitable design solutions. Much time is spent in competitions by the design team making assumptions without the necessary relationship with the client group or residents. In addition, projects are often considerably reworked and revalued after the appointment of the successful team, thereby rendering the competition process meaningless.

Setting competitions to encourage high quality design and achieve best value may be a legitimate route for public sector clients. And of course we are bound by the European Union requirements for advertising consultancy services and projects for the public sector. However, I believe many such clients are given inappropriate advice from civil servants, lawyers, financial advisers and others, leading to wasteful, time consuming, and costly activities that are disproportionate to the benefits that arise.

As a practice we have to commit our most capable and experienced people in order to provide the best support to our clients in their efforts to win projects. I would argue that, at a time of scarce resources, and with a heavy order book, we should be using them for the delivery of projects, rather than to compete for them.