Since 1 August he has worked for the Treasury as construction director of the Office of Government Commerce – a unit created in April to shake up the purchasing habits of 200 government departments and agencies. As costcutter-in-chief for construction, he is a key player in the government's drive to save £1bn a year by disseminating procurement best practice. The figures alone make Eke's responsibilities awesome. But he'll also have to watch out for the snipers who are already zeroing-in on both the policy and the man himself.
The new policy was unveiled in May in a joint directive from the Treasury and the newly formed OGC. It stated that when central government clients want new buildings, they have only three choices of procurement method: PFI, design and build, and prime contracting. These "integrated procurement strategies, where members of the supply chain work as a team", are deemed "to provide the best solution for the client". The message from on high is clear: government departments will only be able to use traditional procurement methods if they can prove that they offer better value for money.
What put the industry in a flurry, though, was the announcement that the directive would come into force on 1 June 2000 – a year earlier than expected. Refurbishment and maintenance contracts will have to conform from 1 June 2002.
The man who dropped the bombshell was Eke's predecessor Mike Burt, former head of the government procurement practice division, which was subsumed by the OGC. Burt left in May, leaving Eke to deal with a dense and prolonged barrage of flak. He has recently had to defend the preferred procurement routes from attacks on all fronts. One such assault was mounted last month at a Downing Street reception for leading architects, contractors and civil servants. Host Tony Blair and guests – including Eke himself – heard Sir Stuart Lipton, chairman of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, warn that "some unbuilt PFI hospitals may become blots on the landscape".
The following week, design and build contracts came under fire when Lipton told the Design Build Foundation conference that their industry was "full of second-rate designs" and that "novating architects to external contractors usually … takes all the quality and detail away". As for prime contracting, the version published by Defence Estates caused a spat last month when the Construction Confederation pointed to clauses that it claimed asked contractors to shoulder too much risk.
Controversial past
Eke came to Whitehall from a post as deputy group construction director at BAA, where he was instrumental in setting up the company's framework agreement – a template for partnering arrangements with lists of preferred suppliers. Under the agreement, suppliers put resources into meeting key performance criteria on the promise of an enlarged workload. He was director for BAA on the design of the £6bn Chek Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong for 1993-4 and construction director on Terminal 5 at Heathrow from 1994-6.
It appears a good pedigree – but it will have hands reaching for daggers in some quarters. The framework agreements were associated with swamps of bureaucracy, huge extra expenses and endless changes on BAA's part. With Terminal 5, meanwhile, a project that began with a spectacular Richard Rogers Partnership design turned into a herculean struggle to control costs, which soared from £900m to more than £2bn without a brick being laid.
Eke now acknowledges that BAA did not get it right from the start. "The reluctance to change is one of the big challenges. It has taken six years to turn BAA around," he says. Having decided to leave behind the travails of Terminal 5 to join the OGC, Eke sees "a great opportunity to take what we have done in BAA and develop it within the public sector … The Terminal 5 situation really started us thinking about how BAA could do things differently. I put the supply cluster together around delivery teams for distinct elements of the project. With government, I want to focus on making the client more involved in the relationship with the suppliers and in delivering the construction project." Industry critics say that in moving from BAA to the public sector, Eke has gone from a bureaucracy that struggled to establish and maintain effective partnering relationships to a worse bureaucracy. A former consultant on the Terminal 5 project who worked under Eke's regime says: "He recited the Egan mantra, but there was no original thinking going on. On Terminal 5, BAA did not change from its traditional decision-making process, which relied on hundreds of checks and balances. It needed clear decision-making up front, instead of relying on process to sort out problems."
Man of Egan
With that kind of background, Eke is used to quarrels like the one between the Ministry of Defence and the industry over the details of the prime contract. The homily he issues on the dispute seems to have taken Sir John Egan's report as its text: "You can get hung up and sidetracked by those sorts of issues. I think they are very important, don't misunderstand me. To use a simple analogy, when people enter into marriage, they don't have the divorce settlement in their back pocket. Most people hope that is going to work and put some effort into making it work. Why don't we do the same in construction?" With sentiments like this, Eke might not be expected to set Whitehall alight. But in any case, he is constrained by the Treasury's policy framework laid out in March 1999 in its Achieving Excellence initiative – the three-year plan to make government a better client of the construction industry. Closely aligned with Egan's Rethinking Construction, Achieving Excellence requires government clients to work with the industry to cut waste, with the twin aims of achieving greater value for money for the taxpayer and greater, more secure profit margins for suppliers. It sets out targets for government performance for the years 2000, 2001 and 2002.
Eke is upbeat about the initiative: "We have got going-on 20 departments signed up with action plans, committed to the targets in Achieving Excellence. We have had expressions of interest from another 20-odd departments." He says his biggest challenge is, "to borrow a phrase from the Highways Agency, to permafrost this management-change culture, to ensure consistency and continuity in best practice by big-spending departments that are trying hard to make Achieving Excellence work and push down as far as we can into other departments. I need to open the eyes, minds and hearts of the occasional client like the Cabinet Office, which has suddenly found itself with one major project." One of the mechanisms at Eke's disposal is his role as chair of the Government Construction Clients Panel, a body made up of 50 government departments with an involvement in construction. "I am now building on teaching programmes for the Government Construction Client Panel. Over 80 investment decision-makers from government departments have already been through a project-sponsor course at the civil service college. I am planning further initiatives to ensure we have the continuous improvement theme," says Eke. He also hopes in the medium term to reach local government with roadshows of demonstration projects.
He expects to draw on his experience of trying to make BAA a better client. "The client needs to create a greenfield environment within which suppliers can do what they are good at doing," he asserts.
By a "greenfield environment" he means that the client takes care of "things like managing the restrictions on the project, taking the pain out of getting security passes, sorting out the logistics of how suppliers can get to the site and how they can make their deliveries of materials while managing security risks. Those things are not what suppliers are good at doing. That is when clients can really make a difference."
Good ideas but no figures
Eke has met with government architecture champion CABE to discuss co-operation in educating government departments on procurement, including the value of good design. Eke says he "pinched" the idea of recruiting project enablers from CABE. "At the moment I have two project enablers – myself and one other. I aim to recruit up to five people, already experienced in project delivery, perhaps from the big spending departments like NHS Estates and MOD, to provide strategic advice at departmental level and on a project-specific level. They will help government departments understand and assess contracts on a value-for-money basis." He expects the project enablers to rule out the need for some new buildings entirely: "There was a case recently where a client was helped to understand how through hot-desking, and reorganising the space within the existing building, it did not need a new building. We need that focus on front-end business planning, rates of return and user requirements. We need to be absolutely sure, up front, that you really do need the project. It is simple – it is not rocket science." Eke is long on small initiatives, discussions and packaging but short on action, thus far. An indication of where he is now is given by his Treasury PR chaperone, Graves, who steps in to shield him from being drawn on the precise savings targets he is expected to achieve in construction procurement.
"We have been careful not to determine which sector will recover x amount of pounds. We haven't actually identified the savings but we are confident that we will make those savings over a three-year period. I'm not sure you would be equipped to know, Deryk, where there is a percentage there … And I'm not sure we would want to be drawn into that at this point. We've only been going six months." Saved from the dangers of quoting hard figures, Eke sums up the soft targets he has been set. "I just want to provide strategic advice at departmental level and short, sharp project-specific advice, as well as setting up training initiatives. The client has to raise the profile of the industry."
