Whatever happened to …2005

Reform the Regs

In 2005 the government finally accepted that Building Regulations and standards were in danger of throttling the life out of the construction industry. It announced two weeks ago that building standards in future would be simplified and delivered in a more transparent and cohesive way.

The news was the culmination of Building’s Reform the Regs campaign which, with a growing tide of cross-industry support, spent six weeks lobbying the government for change.

The government will still have to make sure that a revamped system of Building Regulations is properly integrated with the Code for Sustainable Homes and sustainable planning policies, and Building will continue to lobby government for a regulation champion in 2006 to ensure that future rules and standards are introduced in a joined-up manner.

As well as the draft of the code, 2005 also saw the arrival of consultation documents for three Building Regulations. While Part B covering fire safety is a well-presented document, which promises more design flexibility. The related parts L and F, on the other hand, are complex beasts. While they will help the UK comply with European directives, they will cause sleepless nights for the unfortunate techies responsible for ensuring compliance

…High density, high pressure

2005 may go down as the year in which the government’s vision of high-density living turned sour. At the start of the year, apartments and maisonettes had risen to 47% of housing output and the Home Builders Federation was voicing fears of over-supply to the North-east’s regional housing board. By March, the HBF was again sounding a warning note, this time with research showing that apartment-living was causing young couples to delay having children. Over the remainder of the year, industry practitioners added to the chorus of concern. Earlier this month, concern turned to outright alarm, as lender the Mortgage Works announced it would no longer advance mortgages on new buy-to-let homes and chancellor Gordon Brown did a U-turn on SIPPs, which would have enabled wealthy fortysomethings to build up their pensions through residential property. Both will deny apartment developers precious investor-buyers, yet at the same time less well-off families are struggling to find homes that are big enough and affordable enough. That £60,000 house, promoted this year through English Partnerships’ Design for Manufacture competition, can’t come soon enough.

Building readers back the Tories

Tony Blair won a third term this year at the cost of fall in his majority of about 100 seats. Certainly, the construction industry didn’t want him back – in a Building readers’ poll, 36% said they would vote Conservative compared with 32% for Labour. Despite this, nearly half of those surveyed believed that Labour had the best policies for construction.

During the election we also followed then-construction minister Nigel Griffiths as he tried to hang on to his seat after boundary changes threatened his majority in Edinburgh South. The minister told our reporter that his campaign would be positive – forgetting that minutes earlier he declared that he was “ruthlessly” attacking his Lib Dem rival. Griffiths scraped home, only to be replaced as construction minister by Alun Michael.

Who’d be a contractor?

This year several contractors suffered heavy losses and others have had disappointing results. Among the hardest hit were:

• Gleeson: Pre-tax loss of £13.2m. In 2004 it made a pre-tax profit of £17.6m.

Result: The contracting division, which made a £44.1m loss, was sold off to management.

• Mowlem: Pre-tax loss of £73.4m on its interim results, after £6.8m profit in the same period in 2004.

Result: Subject to a firm takeover bid from Carillion and a potential bid by Balfour Beatty.

• Amec: Pre-tax profit of £35.3m in its interims, up just £0.2m on the comparative period in 2004.

Result: Is selling off its French services division, Spie, and reorganising the rest of the company into a simpler structure.

• Kajima: Lost £80m on PFI schools contracts.

Result: Is pulling out of construction work in the UK.

Cool as a cucumber

Jean Nouvel trumped Lord Foster’s erotic gherkin in July with the similarly cucumber-shaped Torre Agbar on the edge of Barcelona’s city centre. It’s a bit flashier: the outside of the £91m building is covered with a multicoloured mural punctured with small windows. At 144 m and 35 storeys it’s also a bit of a big boy. Nouvel promised it would “become a new symbol of Barcelona, the international city”.

Get cartels

Cartels became an issue this year, after the Office of Fair Trading launched several dawn raids on contracting firms. In March, seven flat-roofing firms were found guilty of collusive tendering, leading to fines totalling £471,000. The OFT has concluded that construction lends itself to such practices, due to its regional structure and numerous smoky-room committee meetings. So watch out: with their powers of intrusive surveillance, including bugging devices, you will get caught …

£390m later …

Despite coming in £390m over its original budget, nearly a tenfold increase on its original £40m budget, the Scottish parliament building designed by Enric Miralles and RMJM controversially won this year’s Stirling Prize for architecture. It beat off competition from five other buildings including Alsop & Partners’ Fawood Children’s Centre in Harlesden, north-west London, and Bennetts Associates’ hotly tipped Jubilee Library in Brighton.

Building’s readers seemed less than convinced, one suggesting: “A more popular and productive boost to Edinburgh tourism could have been achieved by spreading 40 million £10 notes about the city’s streets.”

Bolkestein’s monster

The proposed European Union services directive, founded by former single market commissioner Frits Bolkestein, struck fear into the industry this year. The directive proposes that companies, such as contractors, that pitch for work in other EU states do not have to abide by that country's regulations. Instead, they only have to work to their own country's standards, which might be far lower. Construction unions fear this could tear up collective bargaining agreements and lower safety standards.

All change

The construction landscape has gone through a seismic shift this year. It kicked off with builders merchant Travis Perkins buying Wickes for £950m, and a few months later the Cherry family took Countryside Properties private. The Miller Group became the seventh biggest housebuilder by volume when it snapped up Fairclough Homes for £264m and Persimmon gobbled up Westbury to become the first housebuilder to enter the FTSE 100.

Other deals included:

• Hanson snapped up brick manufacturer Marshalls Clay products for £65m
• Lend Lease bought Crosby Homes for £270m
• Arcadis acquired consultant AYH for £16m
• Kier landed Ashwood Homes for £23.5m
• Saint Gobain bought BPB for £3.9bn

Building shares the love …

In October, we launched Projects Reunited, the online service that helps former colleagues catch up and reminisce about their shared experiences on past schemes. To celebrate the launch, we arranged get-togethers of the team that brought us the Millennium Dome and the motley crew that delivered the so-called “Wobbly Bridge” (pictured). Nuggets from these reunions included the discovery that Andy Bow, the Arup man who led the research to get rid of the bridge's wobble, has a marathon personal best of 3 hours and 37 minutes. To add your name, details and project to the service, hit the Projects Reunited thumbnail on the left.

What’s in a name?

Jarvis chief executive Alan Lovell said the company might consider changing its name, given the problems it had suffered over the past few years. Naturally, Building organised a renaming competition, which was won by the suggestion “Accidenture”. The entrant described the entry as “looking both backwards and forwards. Backwards because they were accident-prone in the past, and forwards because I don’t think they’ll have teeth.”

Busy times ahead …

The long-awaited government review into public sector demand on UK construction was finally unveiled in May. It showed that the North-west and Greater London would be the most squeezed until 2008, with 130 and 90 public sector projects respectively. The job now for the Office of Government Commerce is to ensure that there will be sufficient contractors and subcontractors in these areas to deliver the government’s ambitious programme.

The Graduates

“I want to be an associate by the time I'm 30, a partner by between 35 and 40 and to get as much experience as possible,” said Vicki Burley in September, neatly encapsulating the take-no-prisoners attitude of Building's new Graduate Advisory Board. We picked Burley, an assistant project manager at EC Harris, and nine other young professionals to generally put the industry to rights. Board member architect Tarek Merlin wasted no time in getting stuck into the ODPM's housing policies in his November column, accusing it of backing the construction of “shoddy little houses” that “might as well have been built out of soggy cardboard”.