Sustainability not possible without teams, say leaders
The building services sector will have to operate within integrated supply chain teams if the country is to get the sustainable low carbon buildings it needs, according to Chief Construction Adviser Paul Morrell and new CIBSE President Rob Manning.
Mr Morrell (pictured) told a recent meeting of the CIBSE Patrons that it would not be possible to deliver low and zero carbon buildings if the industry continued to work in the "same old way" of fragmented supply chains and adversarial tendering. However, he cautioned that the industry should not keep coming to the Government for help - the sector has to come up with new collaborative models.
“The Government only exists to provide solutions to citizens, not to provide work for the construction industry,” he said. “We have been saying for more than 10 years that integration is the way to go, but it is not happening so someone clearly doesn’t agree."
He condemned main contractors for saying they believed in integrated working, but then "sliding back to opportunistic pricing" and he also criticised the sector for the fact that "there’s always someone prepared to give them that opportunistic price.”
Mr Morrell also said that the m&e sector had to sweep away its anachronistic structure that perpetuated the old "hierarchies handed down to us by the Victorians" and make sure all the right people were sitting around the design table. He particularly called for the inclusion of product manufacturers at an earlier stage in the
Part of the challenge is to retrofit the entire domestic building stock at the rate of 2,000 homes per day, every day, until 2050 at a total cost of £250bn.
New CIBSE president Rob Manning also made teamwork and greater collaboration key themes of his Presidential Address on taking office last week.
"The time has come to really prove that we are taking carbon dioxide reduction and energy efficiency in buildings seriously," he told the Institution's AGM. "As engineers in society, regardless of the outcome of inter-governmental discussions such as those in Copenhagen we need to ‘just do it'. Just do the real engineering required by our national governments. I believe we must recognise all the individuals who make up the project teams. The only way we can meet the demands of comfort, environmental and safety aims, cost and time is to have the right people with the right interests in the project teams from the beginning.
"Furthermore as an industry we need to better communicate and incentivise the environmental objectives so that all construction professionals are recognised for their part as the key deliverers of engineering excellence."