For those of us that keep a watchful eye upon the macro-economic picture as a guide to likely shifts in this industry of ours, the Coalition government’s decision to pull the rug from under the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme came as no great surprise. David Cameron and Nick Clegg have inherited a financial black hole from the previous incumbent of Number 10 Downing Street. And, like the little Dutch boy who shoved his finger in a hole in a dyke to hold back the sea, the two of them are taking desperate measures to prevent this country being swamped by the financial tide.
The freezing of the BSF programme – latterly, one of the few areas of construction activity where Gordon Brown’s last-ditch spending had a positive effect upon UK construction – has of course been greeted with much wailing and gnashing of teeth within the construction sector and the last vestiges of media that still serves it.
But just how bad is this bad news? Well, there can be no doubt that the freezing of the BSF programme will hit the industry and hit it hard. However, its impact is unlikely to be universal and, through no design of Messrs Cameron and Clegg, it might actually help redress the balance of power here in the UK construction and building sector.
For all its good intentions, the BSF programme – like all such framework initiatives – favoured the large national organisations with the manpower and financial clout to take on multi-million pound and multi-contract works. The dismantling of the BSF scheme might yet prove to be good news for those smaller contractors with a proven track record in the education sector that saw their livelihood undermined by the rigorous demands of the BSF framework.
And what of UK PLC ; taxpayers like you and I whose hard-earned tax contributions were underpinning this ambitious scheme to ensure that the country stayed ahead of the technological curve in the coming months and years. Will we be getting a better bang for our buck?
Almost certainly. For while framework agreements work in the government’s favour by being relatively easy to manage and administer, they tend to create multiple layers of management, contractors, sub-contractors and specialist contractors with every tier looking to make a profit from the efforts of those immediately below them on the food chain. By allowing these sub and specialist contractors to compete on a level playing field with the UK construction elite, the coalition government has – perhaps inadvertently – given thousands of smaller contractors and opportunity to win work that had, until recently, been closed to them. And the competition that this will instill is likely to ensure that UK taxpayers see their education money spent more prudently.
So yes, the BSF news was bad; but, perhaps, not all bad.
