Treading carefully

CM How many framework agreements are you involved in?

SM I think framework agreements are a bit of a myth actually. We are a preferred contractor, category 1, for tiling with HBG and that's it.

We do up to £1m of work a year with them.

The benefit of frameworks is you get a known performance for a relatively known price. But there seems to be an underlying suspicion in the business that your price won't be competitive because you are always going to get the work.

For us it means we can invest in the company we are working for and commit a bit more management to the job. We go onto an HBG job and consider ourselves to be HBG, not WB Simpson.

CM Who will you work for?

SM We will work for anybody if the price is right. Underlying that there's the reputation of the company, whether they're financially stable and whether we like working for them.

There are a bunch at the top we will do anything for. Then there's some in the middle who we will do anything for if the price is right. Then there are some at the bottom we won't work for.

We won't work for [a well-known fit-out firm]. They are on the phone all the time, trying to grind the price down. They always have ‘programme issues'. We had been on site for a week and we were already a month behind according to them. They suggested we ‘negotiate the price for a quick and proper payment'. We want to do the job and get paid for it.

CM Do the main contractors' QSs still try to screw you?

SM I don't think it's as deliberate as it used to be. There no longer such deliberate moves by the majority to screw us out of what we are owed.

If the job goes badly we are at the end of the line with the carpet man and the ceiling man. They are trying to squeeze a bit out of the last finishing, a bit of that goes on. But we tend not to work for firms that we think or know do that to companies.

CM Do you have problems with late payments?

SM Things have improved and our customer base reflects those who pay us on time. In any month we get around 80% of the money I have predicted. HBG, Robert McAlpine, Multiplex at Wembley, Norwest Holst, Costain will tell you the dates when your application is due, when they do the valuation and when the cheque will come.

I don't mind if a cheque is a couple of days late or a week late or if they send me a note saying your application was £30,000, we are going to pay you £28,000 and we need to talk about the rest. What I can't deal with is not getting any of it and then when you phone up you get a barrage of excuses with all the old clichés.

CM Do you use adjudicators?

SM We have used an adjudicator on at least 20 occasions. It's a big lever. It often never gets much further than appointing one. Then you find there's a flurry of telephone calls, the director turns up at the door and a cheque follows. We have used it in frustration rather than as a deliberate policy because we have exhausted every other way. We try to avoid it. After that we either never work for the firm again or we work for them all the time because we've gained a new respect from them.

They tend to put the least experienced men in charge of finishes. If the finishes are bad, the job looks bad.

Steve Medhurst, WB Simpson

Main contractors are not as commercially aware as they make out. At site level they don't know what adjudication is about. You often reach quite a senior level before you find someone who does.

CM What do you think of the management of sites?

SM They tend to put the least experienced men in charge of finishes. Finished is the job, it's what everybody sees. If the finishes are bad, the job looks bad. As a result of lack of experience, the finishes are often not quite right.

Take decorators. If you don't get the decorating team in at the right time, it gets spoilt. We have often put a floor in before a room is painted and you get paint splattered on the flooring.

CM Do main contractors down-spec materials?

SM They try to do it before you start, depending on the contract type. If it's a speculative build you might have £100/m2 Carrera marble changed to £22/m2 flooring from Johnson. That does happen. Sometimes we have turned up to do terrazzo and it's decided there's no time.

CM Will the Olympics mean more work for you?

SM Whether we work on Olympic projects or not, we will get drawn in. There will be lots of development around that part of London and the city. It will be a bit like Canary Wharf was five or six years ago. At that time you couldn't get labour in London because Canary Wharf had sucked it all up.

CM Will you use foreign workers to plug the gap?

SM We are already a bit like the United Nations. We have Polish, Bosnians, Portuguese, Spanish and Italians working for us. Paul [Valler, a director] went over to Poland to find 10 workers for the Wembley job. He wanted to find out what they could do. They get paid exactly the same as other people.

CM Are main contractors serious about health and safety?

SM I believe some are, and some don't really care. If you take the top tier - HBG, Bovis, Multiplex, Costain - they are pretty good and that has forced us to rethink the way we do things and brought a different attitude in our men. With the second tier of contractors, it's in place but they're only paying lip service. When you get down to the small builders and shop fitters you're wasting your breath.

We do a lot of work on the Tube and there it's the first priority. The work is secondary in many respects. Although it's a building process, we are a component of the underground.

CM If you could change one thing about main contractors, what would it be?

SM I would ask for a bit more integrity, a bit more trust and belief in what the specialist contractor is trying to do. Rather than coming at it from the basis that we are dishonest, and trying to limit how dishonest we can be, make the assumption that we are all honest and we are trying to do a decent job and work it from there.

There is still a suspicion that we are a bunch of fly-by-nights: as soon as we get the cheque, we'll be off.