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PFI In Practice
The principle of public / private partnership has wide support but the present PFI model urgently needs radical review. There is plenty of feedback recording the views of those at the receiving end of these submissions. Headlines such as "pricey, fractious, inefficient" and "endless contests won't solve housing" are responses to bitter experience and financial loss.
Key points from a long list include:
- Levels of competitive design input from developers and their architects lead to four or five times the necessary consultancy time - this is often from the most capable and experienced people who would be better used in the delivery of projects.
- Even when teams achieve a design quality threshold, the cash on offer for the land is the determining factor, well ahead of the design merits.
- Professional time is wasted with competitive dialogue - a new method requiring teams to work with council department stakeholders over an extended period. Each competitor is expected to prepare a submission up to planning application stage, with masterplan design codes and planning statements. The local authority then expects to pick and mix from submissions to create a preferred scheme and the bidders are asked to tender for the project which may include parts designed by other teams. The overall process can take nine months.
In this form of competition, teams have to make assumptions without the necessary relationship with the client group or residents. Finally the project is often reworked and revalued when a team is appointed.
These methods are often the result of inappropriate advice from lawyers and financial advisers which leads to wasteful, time-consuming and lossmaking activities. There is enough skill in the building industry to devise a better form of competitive invitation at a faster pace. If nothing is done, the best potential competitors will vote with their feet.
Research And Feedback
Ian Colquhoun's RIBA Book of 20th Century Housing, published in 1999, includes a 21stcentury agenda related to the need for a national programme of research. We simply do not revisit our completed schemes enough to learn from their achievements and failures using teams with a balanced mix of skills, including designers.
The universities have to demonstrate research projects as part of their funding bids but they are rarely able to engage in multidisciplinary projects of this kind. Course structures make it difficult for team research projects which also harness student energies and enthusiasm. It would be valuable for those who will be responsible for looking after and designing the communities of the future to take part in this kind of social and architectural feedback. We are too heavily reliant on organisations such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for their research publications which give high priority to understanding the human aspects of housing provision. Their initiatives and campaigning focus on areas of neglect and are a catalyst for change and improvement.
Just as analysis is needed to direct improvement, the Treasury review of housing capacity by Kate Barker highlighted how most buyers of new homes would not recommend their builder. Barker set a deadline of 2007 for the industry to show how it could stem falling levels of customer satisfaction and threatened investigation should it not come forward with a credible consumer survey.
The industry is divided between those who wish to see this research carried out behind closed doors to protect the reputations of those whose business model has been to build as cheaply as possible, regularly at the expense of consumers, and those who have tried to balance the needs of shareholders and customers.
It is disheartening to find that although the Barker review received funding from the ODPM and the Department of Trade and Industry, this study into one of her recommendations will have to rely on finance from industry sources. If the recommendations by Treasury appointees for research into clearly populist and political areas cannot attract government funding, what chance does all the other work needed on the fine detail of housing have? But if we do not carry out this work and reform procurement, the chance of failure will be much greater than it already is.
Research and development means just that. One without the other is not a way forward.
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PCKO's courtyard house for David Wilson Homes
The Ryde, Hatfield, experimented with new plan forms
Street elevation at The Ryde