‘Clients wanting to control cost should look at design’

On the Suffolk coast, one of the UK’s largest and most strategically important infrastructure projects is taking shape: Sizewell C nuclear power station will comprise two EPR reactors capable of generating 3.2GW of electricity, enough to power around six million homes.

The £38bn project extends far beyond the power station. Alongside the reactors will come major enabling infrastructure, extensive civils, mechanical and electrical packages that will continue well into the 2030s.

For Malcolm Dare, supply chain executive director at Sizewell C, the scale of delivery creates challenge and opportunity: build critical national infrastructure, while strengthening supply chains, improving productivity and leaving a lasting capability legacy for UK construction.

“By using UK companies with proven track records and helping them become more efficient, they become more capable businesses beyond Sizewell C,” he says.

Procurement at Sizewell C is necessarily shaped by “replication”, Dare says, for cost and safety reasons. Much of the nuclear equipment supply chain mirrors Hinkley Point C, sourced from established European manufacturers.

However, Sizewell C’s target is 70% of construction spend in the UK, with at least £2bn in Suffolk and a further £2bn across the rest of East Anglia.

The £10bn main civils programme is being delivered through a four-party alliance bringing together Sizewell C, Balfour Beatty, Bouygues and Laing O’Rourke. Then there is the £4.5bn site delivery programme, which includes new roads, a rail link and the marine import facility – some 60% of construction material deliveries will not use local roads – which will be delivered through as many as 300 contracts.

“The alliance is building the civil structure of the power plant. The alliance companies also need to develop their supply base and they have the same stringent criteria as we do for using local and UK suppliers,” says Dare.

“We repeatedly say to the supply base, we’ll never compromise on safety and quality, but we have to deliver to cost and schedule. And to do that, we need innovation and productivity,” Dare says.

One example of this comes from HS2’s Colne Valley Viaduct. “HS2 has a poor public perception, but there are some great innovation stories we can learn from,” Dare says.

“We’re expecting to use around 300,000 tonnes of reinforcement steel and vast quantities of nuclear-grade concrete during construction at Sizewell C, so what we’re trying to do is drive offsite manufacturing.

“HS2 created a rebar factory for the viaduct sections. So we’ve bought those rebar manufacturing sheds and we’ll be working with Laing O’Rourke to see how we can generate rebar cages effectively in a factory environment, rather than building the rebar cage on site.”

Pipework installation provides another example.

“Bilfinger is a German company, but they have a factory in Hull, where they’re building pipe modules,” explains Dare. “So that means when pipes come to be fitted, instead of fitting, say, 50 individual pipes, the contractor will be fitting five modules.

“Plus, the productivity in the factory is far higher because the welding, the quality, the safety standards for building the pipe module is far higher than if you’re trying to do it in a room in the built civil structure.”

Galliford Try’s work on the plant’s new highways infrastructure also reflects Dare’s emphasis on productivity-led delivery models – and a willingness to bring in thinking outside the construction industry. The contractor was appointed to deliver the 6.8km Sizewell Link Road and a new dual carriageway bypassing two local villages of Farnham and Stratford St Andrew.

“Galliford is working alongside Curzon Consulting, which is a management consultancy who I knew when I worked in the highways sector [at Highways England] improving productivity on standard activities such as drainage and asphalt installation by 20-30%,” says Dare.

“What we’re trying to catalyse here is innovation, bringing new ideas in that can improve the norm in construction. The reality is productivity in the sector is not as good as it should be.”

Logistics is another area where Dare sees infrastructure lagging behind.

“One of the learnings from Hinkley,” he says, “was that logistics capability came later than it should have done. So we’ve appointed Wilson James as a logistics provider and will use their ‘Control Tower’ approach to integrate road, rail and maritime logistics.”

The Sizewell C project is also establishing around one million sq ft of warehousing near Ipswich, to act as a supply chain hub, alongside European logistics capability in Vissingen, in the Netherlands, supporting marine transport equipment flows from the continent.

“What we’re trying to do,” Dare says, “is apply manufacturing logistics thinking into infrastructure.”

He points to Heathrow Terminal 5 and the London Olympics as examples where integrated logistics models supported successful delivery.

Dare has spent much of his career outside construction – in manufacturing, logistics and defence – and he believes the industry still struggles with a problem other sectors tackled years ago: the disconnect between design and delivery.

“There’s an old manufacturing rule of thumb that I learned many years ago,” he says. “Seventy per cent of cost is designed in. And that applies with construction too.”

The principle is simple. By the time physical delivery starts, opportunities to remove cost and improve productivity are significantly reduced.

“As a client, if you really want to control cost,” Dare says, “you’ve got to look at the design phase.”

His frustration is that infrastructure procurement often separates those responsible for design from those responsible for building, creating inefficiencies that become difficult to recover later in a project lifecycle.

“In manufacturing businesses, product design and manufacturing engineering sit together,” he says. “In civils, the design is often done by designers and the people that build it are completely separate from it.”

There are examples where companies are beginning to move towards a manufacturing mindset, Dare thinks.

“Balfour Beatty’s relationship with Atkins,” he suggests, “creates stronger integration between engineering and delivery thinking. Elsewhere, Kier, Skanska and Galliford Try have strengthened internal design capability or changed how design teams operate to bring greater focus on production engineering and buildability.

“Where companies have done that,” Dare says, “they’re controlling the design, and they can really start to influence the cost. At Sizewell, we have to control some of the design because of the safety case. But where we can improve is the production engineering, the delivery that comes from the design. That’s the thinking with the rebar offsite manufacturing.

“With the amount of money that’s going to be spent on infrastructure in the coming years, this is an opportunity that the industry cannot afford to miss. But if it does not collectively stand up and drive that productivity agenda, you’ve got to question whether we deserve the money.”