Egan à la carte

"Have you heard of the Egan recommendations?" I asked a prospective client when looking over a substantial piece of residential property he had just bought near Lord's, in north-west London. "Egan?" he said. "Isn't he the chap who failed to stop Jaguar being bought by the Americans?" The Egan message seems to be aimed at a very rarefied sector of the construction industry: great big clients with acres of clout trying to pay the rest of us even less than usual; the sort of client that still manages to sell lamb at £9.22 a kilo when the poor chap breeding it organically five miles up the road can't get more than 79p for it. "You understand, of course, that if we are not successful with this planning application, there will be no question of paying your fees? I mean, we don't get to be in the top 20 commissioning clients by running a charity, now, do we?" Egan can suggest any number of savings from the professional team, but the most wasteful element in the construction process is competitive tendering. With some publicly funded clients, the most important part of any building project seems to be that part in the process when you open all the envelopes with the tenders in them and automatically award the contract to the lowest tenderer. "Well, if he says he can do it for this figure … " This is because the person who writes the cheques is not usually the person who has to put the building up, or run it when it's finished. It may well be the same person who has to write the claims cheques at the end of the day, but, by then, the construction costs seem so modest by comparison with the legal fees that it all looks like value for money.

The problem doesn't stop with clients. If Egan is after collaboration rather than confrontation, a visit to his nearest planning department might well break his heart. Problem number one is simply getting access to the right people. It is quite all right for Jo Public to upbraid the duty planning officer for hours at a time, yet an architect cannot have a 20-minute informal appointment with the planning officer likely to be dealing with a particular project.

Perhaps the planning officers are too busy waiting to be given design commissions from some pond-life amateur developers who want them to knock their schemes into shape. Perhaps they are too caught up with their ethnic monitoring audits to speak to the only professionals who actually understand all aspects of the construction process.

One can usually have informal meetings with building control officers that save enormous amounts of time, so why not with planners? I once built a temporary building for which the planning process lasted longer than it did.

So, does Egan show any way forward for the industry's silent majority? Well, yes, but some of his proposals are more relevant than others. Partnering would be a good place to start implementing the proposals, because it means a regular supply of work.

The Egan message seems to be aimed at a rarefied sector of the construction industry: great big clients with acres of clout

The continuity of commissions is more important than the standardisation of the product. Every job that practices like mine do is different (thank God). The site is different, the money is different, the client is different. The whole point of proper architecture is that you are making something site-specific. It doesn't have to be on the front page of all the glossies to be an imaginative piece of construction from which the client will derive the most benefit.

  My practice already attempts some Eganite streamlining by operating a modest form of partnering. This means selecting contractors at a very early stage on a horses-for-courses basis, and negotiating contracts on relatively sketchy information and a lot of shared experience. This leaves the builders to do what they do best, and leaves me more time to persuade my clients to procure the best standard that they can reasonably afford.

But this will never work well with competitive tendering. Trying to sell a client something they decide not to buy is infinitely less time-wasting than trying to ensure that the contractors build something for a price with no profit.

Many of Egan's panaceas, such as supply-chain engineering, are all very relevant if you're turning over half a billion, but, from where I'm sitting, what we need most is a bit more public awareness about what construction projects involve and a bit more support for the professional from the town halls.