Prime contracting is such an idea. In a previous incarnation, it was called a design-and-build or turnkey contract. It was a form of contract much used to build power stations, where consortia of specialist contractors were formed and the electricity companies bought a package deal: a working power station. The regional electricity companies knew a great deal about the power stations they intended to buy, and this was the secret of the system's success.
The problem of a kitchen bought by the Ministry of Defence that did not work, mentioned by Defence Estates' quality director Clive Cain (11 June), will no more be solved by prime contracting than the problem of a customer in a supermarket who finds he has bought pickled herrings when he intended to buy fillet steak.
If you are buying kitchens, you should know what sort of kitchen you need to buy. However, there is no doubt in my mind that prime contracting will be a considerable success.
For a large part of my life, I tried to get the clients of my family's construction company interested in prime contracting. The involvement of a contractor at the beginning of a project does produce savings and increase efficiency. The snag is that the intention to truly involve the contractor is more often a pious wish than a fact.
Another refinement that the MOD might try is to use a co-operative form of contract for placing these prime contracts – a form where the builder tries to save money and the saving is then split between the client and its contractor. It is self-evident that if a building is designed to be easily constructed, it will cost a lot less than a building of similar size that has been designed with no thought as to how it will be built.
Prime contacting, like every other idea in the industry, has its uses. It is, however, of no more universal use than a screwdriver, a fine implement for fixing and removing screws but a poor tool for making tongues and grooves in timber.
Prime contacting, like every other idea in the industry, has its uses. It is, however, of no more universal use than a screwdriver
Prime contracting also has the advantage that it allows the contractor to get to know the client and the type of building it wants. This is why it worked with building power stations. For the general run of buildings purchased by the MOD, it is a splendid way to go about achieving shorter building programmes and lower costs.
But for the prestige, one-off building where the architect must be king – architecture being the point of the whole exercise – prime cost contracting is not the way to achieve the best result. Negotiating a contract in such circumstances, however, is a system that allows the client, its architect and the builder to tackle the problem of what is to all intents and purposes a prototype building.
The idea of using prime contracting is a good one, but, like so many good ideas in construction, its credibility will be destroyed if it is used universally, and on projects that are unsuitable for this kind of approach. This is, perhaps, strange advice to give a government department, a body not known for undue haste, but the MOD would be well advised to move slowly on this project, at least until it sees if it really works in its context.
The novelty of prime contracting in the context of public sector clients, however, lies not in the nature of the contract that is proposed, rather in the attitude to purchasing. There has, it seems, been a sea change in the attitude to public accountability over the past decade.
In the past, the problem with choosing 100 contractors that will, it seems, be allocated a series of contracts was that public officials needed to be sure they were buying at the cheapest price.
In the past, the attitude of these worthies was one of "put it out to tender and then no one can accuse me of paying too much". This attitude prevailed even though those involved in putting the work out to tender knew that in the end they were buying a packet of trouble.
Postscript
Lord McAlpine is a writer and former treasurer of the Conservative Party.
