We whole-heartedly agree with Mr Perry's letter (11 April, page 34) about partnering and its existence as a business philosophy only.
We recently asked clients to score their attitude towards partnering, ranging from "We don't do it at all" to "We're real advocates". Rather disappointingly – but not unexpectedly – we received just one response. Unsurprisingly our only respondent was an "advocate".

We suspect that many people embraced partnering after the Latham report, found it didn't work, and gave up. True partnering is likely to fail unless projects are based on one of the new generation of contracts. More traditional contracts seem merely to underpin the old habits of driving down costs. Perhaps Building would like to run a survey on the subject, and see if more than one person replies …