Willie Miller's Blog

Willie, couldn't agree/despair more. I've got files full of madness - for instance a doorstop tender document for a nice, wee, important exercise in environmental improvements for a needy Council estate where I'm to supply Financial Ratios like "Return on Capital Employed" (eh?), "Gearing Ratio" (whit!) and the funtime "Liquidity Quick Ratio" (****!). Such dreary-circuses soak-up energy, time and care, making it likely that sausage-machine contractors win and the built bit is thoughtless rubbish. This is all a direct result of 30 years of Governments who's overwhelming care is to pour our taxes down the throats of big business, and into the pockets of the industry that defines, controls and milks these processes.

We couldn't agree more especially with the first part of your article. We looked at the tender for a project in Helensburgh for the regeneration of the town centre. Again 30 pages of nothing with no relevant question about design or theoretical working. No wonder we have such rubbish on our streets when all they want is number crunchers or as you say the re-use of someone elses ideas.
Big practice should be barred from work for along time to come especially those who takeover small ones to get the good staff only.
I would really like to talk to you Willie and i will see you on Thursday evening Malcolm.

Entirely agree with you here Willie, even approached Jim Mather and Mike Russell about the issue just last week!

It's great that we can all access public contracts online but it's pointless if there is no incentive given for those in procurement to use smaller and innovative practices.

Surely better advice can be given from Government on PQQ's, surely it can't be that difficult for those procuring services to be able to give 'credit's by using smaller practices and demonstrating value for money through innovative solutions that require a degree of design input at an early stage rather than PQQ box ticking.

Unfortunately there is a huge vested interest in retaining the status quo, all it does is stifle young scottish talent.

How do we take this forward?

Is it worth creating a collaborative grouping of SME's that can advise and lobby for changes to government procurement policy and thus provide 'best practice' models for procurement that will filter down to RSL's, charities and other public bodies.

I'd certainly be happy to contribute.

New York's Public Procurement has undergone a transformation over the last decade, which is of interest in this case. It recognised that innovation and quality was lacking in its publicly procured projects and that a fee bias in the procurement strategy was partly to blame for this. The new process is called Design and Construction Excellence (D+CE), NYC seeks to select firms based on qualifications, contemporary vision and experience, and to pay fair and reasonable fees for design services. The result has been to increase competition for City public projects by attracting a widerpool of entrants and securing higher levels of service. It is generally agreed that the quality of NYC's new buildings has increased as a result.
A COUPLE OF KEY POINTS ARE:
Projects are given to appropriate sized firms, i.e. projects under 10 million USD are only given to practices of 10 employees or fewer (rational - these 'small' projects will receive more attention and involvement of a Director in a small practice than they would in a larger practice, therefore quality will be improved)
Set fees for a project are published in the tender, then all of the tender submission is based on quality (rational - fee bidding / slashing reduces quality and time input, competitive element is retained in the quality submission, in the long term it improves the building quality)
Uses peer review and Design Quality Indicators to assess quality of submissions and projects.
A full outline of the D+CE is available here.

I firmly believe that Scotland's public procurement could be adjusted to a new quality based model, to inspire better buildings, higher quality design services being valued and more innovation and creativity in Architecture and Design. The side effects of this change could see an increase in smaller practices, increase in design talent remaining in Scotland, increased enterprise and more younger professionals starting creative design practices.

Matt

All of us in the smaller consultancy businesses now fall foul of the procurement industry. As ably outlined by Willie and subsequent contributors we are now in a situation where small firms can’t front up the financial and insurance information that will get past the first stages. This leads to several pernicious situations:
• Small firms will gather under the banner of a big company which is often there just to front up the job. That company then skews the way that the job is to done to give itself a role. Performance suffers as the original professional client (the Planning or Community Development Department etc.) get a skewed variant of what they originally wanted. Some local authorities bemoan the fact that the firms that they might want to do the job are not submitting and are setting criteria that they hope will exclude the big management companies. Unfortunately the procurement rules on turnover and insurance have already excluded the people they want.
• The present financial climate means that large firms that would not have thought of going for small consultancy jobs now do. This can produce massive competition for which local authority staff are totally unprepared. The way out of this dilemma is often to scrutunise bids for the slightest deviation from the brief conditions. A recent bid process had over 100 expressions of interest resulting in 17 submissions of which 10 were excluded for not conforming to insurance conditions that had been set ridiculously high. The “high risk” job for which such cover was required was masterplanning.
• The way round exhaustive tendering has been to set up competitive framework agreements that produce lists of eligible consultants. The trouble with this is that the agglomerations of small practices that might make the best team to do the job will not make it onto these lists which are full of big but less appropriate firms serving up teams of people that they happen to employ rather than tailored to the job.
• A recent brief for a strategic planning consultancy emphasised the need for a PhD to lead the team in what looked like a bid to break the hegemony of the big firms.
Now of course all this sounds like sour grapes from a small consultant hungry for the work. Too bloody right it is! There is a good case to made for declaring these procurement practices to be anti-competitive.
These can include (Wikipedia):
▪ Dumping, where a company sells a product in a competitive market at a loss. Though the company loses money for each sale, the company hopes to force other competitors out of the market, after which the company would be free to raise prices for a greater profit. - (Big firms lowering rates to get the job and being assisted by the procurement exclusions).
▪ Barriers to entry (to an industry) designed to avoid the competition that new entrants would bring - (excluding the innovation that comes with small firms)
▪ Refusal to deal, e.g., two companies agree not to use a certain vendor - (using irrelevant job criteria to exclude small firms)
▪ Regulations which place costly restrictions on firms that less wealthy firms cannot afford to implement (evident!)
Now, I’m not an expert in anti-competition legislation but some of these things sound oddly familiar!
In criticising any practice or profession a first step is to see how it is defined. Interestingly, Wikipedia defines procuring as:
“the facilitation or provision of a prostitute .... Pimps are known under the law as procurers”
Hmmm....

Couldn't agree more. We did one for Inverclyde Council recently. The time involved cost a significant amount and the feedback was a long time in coming and completely useless. I must look into their feed back obligation. At that point I was so sick of the whole process I couldn't face wasting anymore time pursuing feedback.

The need for something to change for the better is undeniable - the question is how to make that happen. I think we've to make the link between changing procurement practices (such as Matt explains has been happening in New York), and making the link with the Scottish Government's holy grail of sustainable economic growth.

I explain the argument a bit more in the blog posting on my website.

We then need to work with other small business sectors to make sure that politicians, civil servants and local government officers actually implement the Scottish Government’s new Scottish Sustainable Procurement Action Plan, published in October on the Scottish Governments's website.

The Action Plan purports to be about helping small and medium sized businesses flourish… so there's a policy justification for change.

Thanks for the review. It’s very informative.

The recent announcement that the competition for designing the new V&A in Dundee will be advertised in the European Journal can only mean one thing...prequalification! This will rule out nearly every small practice in Scotland being involved. The same thing happpend with the GSA competition. I keep hearing that small practices should team up with larger practices but why does this need to happen for an open competition? If a small practice produces a winning design they can enter into negotiation with a larger practice at this stage where roles can be clearly defined and agreed and, with a commision in place, insurance can be arranged without risk.

Pre-qualification questionaires also rule out small practices getting together, as all the same problems with accounts/insurances/experience will be there. Architects from the early years of their education are designing building of this scale and complexity, just because the projects have not been realised should this mean they are not capable.

Some time ago at a lecture in the Concert Hall in Glasgow, Sir Norman Foster stated that a huge pecentage of his work was won in competition. I asked the question if he thought some of the competitions were won by the name foster and not necessarily the designs. His answer was that competitions are anonymous and it could not be just the name, a bit lame really when an architect like Fosters design is as good as a signiture on a drawing! The point being though that competition should be about design and being a small practice should not exclude us from competition or tendering opportunities.

Absolutely agree with you, Willie, and with the other comments above. Many, many ludicrous documents clog up our office.

Anonymously is the only fair way of procuring design but it's track record that everyone's interested in.

It's the sheer wastefulness of the process that gets me. It's a waste of everything - time, paper and, worst of all, intellectual capacity and creativity. Imagine if that effort were directed towards solving real problems and creating fantastic places.......

My impression is that public sector commissioning clients who go through these procurement hoops are also frustrated, sometimes confused and often toiling with the workload, but seem unable to influence or do anything about it. Scot Gov has now put in place Public Contracts Scotland which may help to streamline / standardise the process but will duly become a centralised behemoth that further distances local authorities / organisations from influencing / innovating the process of procurement of architecture, design and the built environment. If you think it's bad now.....

Question is - how do we influence this when everyone involved hides behind European / WTO regulations? The thresholds seem ludicrously low, for example: who sets these and how are they determined?

NYC' s D+CE presumably complies with WTO rules. Its process is interesting and offers a small ray of hope / sense. Maybe we should invite Dave Burney (who trained in Edinburgh by the way and knows Scotland well) to come over and explain how he commissions public projects for NYC and demonstrate the positive outcomes that ensue.

Now, who are the key players who should hear him?

Let's go ahead now and form a campaign group to reform public procurement in architecture and design. I don't think we have an option!

'Extend government procurement to small and medium-sized businesses by cutting administrative requirements, with the aim of seeing 25 per cent of government contracts go to SMEs;' taken from the conservative policy on business. I think it could be time to look at seeing how we can inform this policy in relation to architectural procurement?

We only have decent morals, our society will turned out to be much more wonderful. So great, if we work hard together, we will come true the dream. It's a great program. Is it right?