Spare a thought, if you will, for our hard-pressed MPs and parliamentary candidates. They’ve entered politics for any number of reasons: perhaps their starting point was ideological, or rooted in local issues, or it catalysed around the NHS or social justice. But in their pre-election hustings and post-election surgeries, they need to have a line on any number of complex issues beyond their personal experience.
So what do they say to the construction SME director complaining about lack of access to public sector contracts? What response do they offer the family at the bottom of the housing association’s waiting list? How best do they advise the young trainee whose brick-laying diploma at the local college led precisely nowhere?
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If you’re a typical MP, your responses will be drawn from the library of construction policy cliches. You might sympathise with the SME rather than advise on BIM adoption; the idea of lobbying the HA to pursue faster and cheaper offsite construction is unlikely to be top of mind; and you might give the trainee a little pep talk about the 182,000 new jobs the CITB tell us will open up by 2019, before advising them to apply for a job at the above-mentioned HA’s new site.
In other words, your responses would be geared to supporting an industry-wide status quo: long and inefficient supply chains, conventional methods of construction, ineffective training mechanisms and a sense that part of the industry’s raison d’etre is to provide a high volume of jobs in traditional craft skills.
The new CIOB Guide to the Built Environment offers a correction to some of these embedded views, presenting our industry in a more updated light. It’s a worthwhile project that should hopefully initiate, then develop, conversations between the CIOB and our elected representatives in the coming months.
But the document is only the starting point of a new drive to engage with the political process that goes beyond the 2015 General Election campaign and individual MPs’ surgeries.
Once we have a new government, there will be an ever-increasing range of policy issues where the CIOB, as the voice of qualified, skilled construction managers, has a contribution to make. There’s BIM, of course, and pursuing a multi-strand approach to training and education. There’s the increasingly globalised world we operate in (highlighted by new vice president Paul Nash), and how about the implications of the “circular economy” on public procurement?
It’s not as if the CIOB can unilaterally influence policy on these issues. But if it can do more to position and promote itself as a well-informed voice with sensible ideas to add, then the industry and membership should undoubtedly benefit.
Elaine Knutt, editor
