Forth Road Bridge

Originally Posted by Bibio

yup and look at it. 3 lanes on each side and its empty, hows that for forward planning. us on the other hand = crap, overpriced never on budget or time. the rest of the world must laugh at us as i know i do.

Just occasionally we manage it. The A3 Hindhead Tunnel is opening early and under budget. Although, to be fair, it's bl00dy rare!!

Originally Posted by -Ralph-

I get the point of the thread though TBH, and there was always going to be the "well things are much cheaper in China" which they are, but it still costs us several times what it costs the Spanish to build a mile of motorway. Public sector projects in this country are just one great big gravy train for job creation programmes and consultants.

Being one of those supposed gravy train consultants, I take umbridge with this (get it!) One of the main reasons things cost so much here is the planning, public consultation, land costs, legal fees and all of this can take years before a JCB gets near the site. In china somebody drew a line and the chinese government just agree to build it end of story. Investment like thsi will employ thousands of people and keep at lot of peoples heads above the water. We coudl always spend it on doll money ! Just to note that engineers in this country are typically poorly paid compared to anywhere else in the rich developed world.

[mattSV]

Will the trams go over the new bridge? They just as well, as they ain't feckin going anywhere else.

Originally Posted by Rog

Being one of those supposed gravy train consultants, I take umbridge with this (get it!)

Yep, got the joke, but forget comparisons with China as a justification, it's a Daily Fail bit of spin used to sensationalise and nothing more.

I work on IT projects across all sectors, so get to do direct comparisons between the same projects between public and private sector, the result is always the same I'm afraid. I don't know anything about civil construction, but I find it hard to believe they are much less of a gravy train than in IT.

When I do public sector projects I'm a the gravy train consultant too, I'll happily take the money, because if I don't one of my competitors will, but I'll advise against spend where I don't think it's necessary, and it doesn't make me any happier to see my taxes wasted when the customer insists on a nonsense requirement being fulfilled.

I once met a competitor who was sitting surfing the web all day in council offices, he didn't know why he was still there when the project he was working on completed a year ago, but nobody questioned what he was doing, nobody told him they didn't need him anymore, and they kept paying his invoices, so he just kept turning up!

[MisterTommyH]

Consultants in the construction industry are typically not the same as in other industries.

The people who get labelled consultants are architects, structural engineers, mechanical engineers etc. These people, myself included, should be more properly called designers. The people who are actually consultants in the real sense of the word at planning consultants, environmental consultants - I.e people who know processes, give advice but at the end of the day don't actually do any design or take much responsibility.

From what Rog was saying he sounds like one of the design side consultants - and we are being screwed. Fees are now well below 1% of the project cost, which is bugger all considering the time you put in, the responsibility you take and the ever increasing demands put on you by clients. In fact we are treated more like sub-contractors now than consultants.

Construction in the country is more adversarial and contractural than anywhere else in the world. We are trying to move to a more 'partnering' mentality like the rest of the world, but old habits die hard.

This isn't helped when projects like Building School for the Future employ additional consultants (so called experts) to double. And triple check everything to ensure that the design consultants and contractors are doing it the most efficient way, but end up taking millions of pounds of fees themselves. It's a false economy, but it's not fed by the majority of the industry professionals, but rather the government departments that require double ad triple checks to cover their own backs.

[Bibio]

Originally Posted by -Ralph-

Public sector projects in this country are just one great big gravy train for job creation programmes and consultants.

i completely agree.

look at the good old USA if it not done on time and on budget the company that is doing the work is fined heavily. this i know as Heart (Crudens) the builders nearly went bust building a shopping mall. but this country is a case of toooo many fingers in the one pie and think that any public project of this size is looked at as being a cash cow. i hate to say it but Edinburgh has not got a good track record for being prudent with cash. i can guarantee that the figures at the end of the day will be tripled. and don't give the excuse of land being expensive yada yada as its all taken by a compulsory purchase order and the owner is given peanuts for it.

its going to be yet another red face for scotland i'm afraid to say. i hope i'm proved wrong but our track record says different.

[MisterTommyH]

Originally Posted by Bibio

i completely agree.

look at the good old USA if it not done on time and on budget the company that is doing the work is fined heavily.

Just to expand on what I said above. Many delays are caused by cost cutting at the feasibility stage, meaning that a clear brief is not often given to the developers, problems that should have been identified at this stage are not (meaning delays later), and client changes are often made at a late stage, where 'private' clients would accept it does bot make financial sense to waste their money for relatavely little gain.

For a project to run well you need a professional client, who will not try to scrimp on initial investigations, which is a false economy and often ends up costing much more in the long run. This type of client is a rare thing within public bodies.

[Bibio]

so why do company's falsify the costs in the initial pricing?

to get the job then shaft the public for more money as once the project is undergoing then we have no alternative but to pay the robbing currents. if there were contracts put in place that dictated that all costs above the initial were responsibility of the contractors then i think you would find things got done a bit better.

Tommy H is right on the money. In our industry we have a very litigious system where everyone is screwing each other for money because the margins are so small. If a job overruns normally there are hefty (LD's) Liquidated damages and these can run into the hundreds of thousands a week even on relatively small contracts. In buildings your biggest nightmares are whats in the ground, things not being where you thought they were or things that werent supposed to be there in the first place (gas mains, electriclty and the like). Also the weather can play havoc to wet or to cold and you cant lay things like concrete, tarmac etc. Ill give you an example, recently happily building a roundabout, on time on budget and BAM we find a cast iron water main. it runs across all teh works we had planned and hit our critical path (i.e. works that have to be down to allow other parts to continue) so we loose two weeks while we wait for the water company to pull its thumb out of its ass and come and look at it, test it and offer solutions. No one knew it was there but its cost two weeks time and of course everything is on site for an extra two weeks so who pays?..... Thats where the fun starts

[MisterTommyH]

Because you can only price on the information available to you.

'falsifying' costs is illegal, but if important information is missed out that causes additional costs the contractor cannot be expected to pay for the clients mistakes.

If the client only does half a study to get it on the cheap, but this does not reveal, say contaminated land, is it fair that the contractor should make a loss because the client was cheap early on?

If the client pushes the contractor to start on time, but them makes changes, or does not make the important decisions in time, despite being asked the questions in plenty of time, thus causing delays and additional costs - should the contractor be made to pay for this?

And you can't make an allowance for this error, because then someone else will win the tender, someone who hasnt made the allowance. They always seem to go for the cheapest, even if that is not the bid offering value for money.