Two members of the new Construction Leadership Council – due to meet for the first time on 21 October – have been describing its role and aims to Construction Manager.
The new body will concentrate on five main workstreams – people and skills; smart and innovation; green and sustainability; exports and trade; and supply chain and business models – with the CLC members in charge of each area pulling in expertise and advice from elsewhere in the industry.
The workstreams will also be supported by a “secretariat” of civil servants from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, able to compile any necessary evidence, research or outputs to support the CLC’s work.
Meanwhile, new CLC member Simon Rawlinson, head of research and insight at Arcadis, explained that his focus on a sixth topic, “industry communication”, will help to ensure various industry viewpoints reach the CLC, and also explore the linkages between the different workstreams.
"I will be putting the workstream group together with the help of UKTI. We really want to support the major contractors that have gone overseas."
David Cash, CLC member and chairman of BDP
And he also stressed that he had been appointed to represent the interests of the Strategic Forum, rather than in an individual capacity.
“I am highly honoured to have been asked to take on that role, but mine is possibly slightly different to others around the council, as I will be facing off on behalf of the Strategic Forum. In the world we live in, things [at BIS] will have to be done in a fairly streamlined way, but we’ve already had offers of resources from the Strategic Forum.
“BIS is interested in what I could bring – alignment with the Strategic Forum and providing an overview of how it all fits together.”
He cited the example of the underlying linkages between payment problems – falling under Bouygues’ Madani Sow’s investigation of supply chain and business models – and the work on skills shortages that falls to Laing O’Rourke’s Anna Stewart.
“At Arcadis we recently did a report on the linkage between the business models in housing, and the barriers that creates to having robust apprenticeship and training schemes. So We’ll be starting to join all the parts together to see how the industry should respond.”
BDP chairman David Cash, who will head the “exports” workstream with support from officials at UK Trade & Investment and led an exports push at the practice in 2008-12, told Construction Manager that the “new government was keen to have a focused council, not a talking shop”.
Simon Rawlinson: “honoured”
He explained: “Each of us has been given a specific workstream to build up, and mine is specifically on export and trade. What I know sits more comfortably with the professional side of the industry, but my brief covers overseas contracting as well. So I will be putting together a broader group, drawn from all areas of the industry.
“I will be putting the workstream group together with the help of UKTI. We really want to support the major contractors that have gone overseas.”
“I’ve got a day job – as chairman of BDP – but I’m more than happy to dedicate a fair amount of time to this,” he added.
Asked if the slowdown in the Chinese economy boded ill for UK professional services companies working there, Cash stressed that the firm’s Shanghai office was still seeing new projects still coming forward in large numbers.
“We’re talking a about a growth rate falling from perhaps 13% to 6.5%, and if you can imagine experiencing that, it’s a dramatic change. But it’s still an impressive growth rate, and a lot of the reduction will be in housing, which was already completely overheated.”
