How can we improve our skills to deliver better construction outcomes?

My work tends to focus on organisational change, and in particular the cultural element of this. Survey any room and we’ll all agree that change is inevitable, it’s happening all the time, the pace is increasing, and to change is a good thing. I’m not sure how deeply we believe it’s a good thing; we know it's inevitable, and agreeing it’s a good thing is probably a sensible way to show willing in a room full of colleagues and possibly senior execs. But I think Alistair Dryburgh nails it: “Schumpeter famously talked about ‘creative destruction’, but let’s not forget that for every person turned on by ‘creative’ there are 10 turned off by ‘destruction’."

I want to consider this in the context of social housing. I have worked the social housing sector since 2005, starting on the Decent Home Programme then moving into sustainability.  During the course of my career my focus has shifted from day-to-day project and programme management onto what we are actually trying do, how objectives align, how we understand, define and value outcomes, and our role as construction clients.

During lockdown I have remained heavily engaged with the construction sector, both as a member of the Construction Leadership Council and regionally through Constructing Excellence and other forums, so I continue to see what is happening at a national level and how the narrative is changing, and how social housing as a construction client group remains largely divorced from this.

This is unfortunate because there are some very exciting, transformative developments happening now in construction. These are largely orientated around value (not cost) and outcome (not process and handover), and this creates much more opportunity than I have personally seen before to both achieve meaningful construction outcomes and reset our engagement with government. So why isn’t this happening?

I think we tend to see ourselves as a social service that happens to use buildings, rather than a construction client that can deliver outcomes which align with our core purpose and social values by using our construction clienting power effectively. Very few people come into social housing due to the opportunities associated with being a significant construction client; empathy with social services and local government is more common, and this creates a different focus and culture. But construction clienting and its potential to map across to organisational values are a mechanism to deliver in an exciting and meaningful way on the values inherent in social housing. And the fact is that no-one gets up in the morning to build a building that doesn’t break the law at lowest cost; we want social and human outcomes, and we are missing this opportunity far too often. This is the change that we are struggling to engage with, and represents a threat to our comfort zone which is much more focussed on subsidy and regulation.

To support this journey – and let’s be clear that it is our responsibility to lead it – we need Homes England to also focus more on construction clienting skill, practice and outcomes. An example is the Strategic Partnerships programme; while these are a sensible, more collaborative way to use grant better to build more homes, they remain fundamentally focussed on numbers of units. This is a missed opportunity for a significant strategic pivot, given the potential alignment with value and outcome in government. But the Construction Playbook has just been published, and its remit includes Homes England, so value and outcome are coming our way. This is absolutely a good thing – so let’s get ahead of the agenda and do what we are going to need to do anyway; take an honest look at our role as construction clients, how that maps with our core purpose and build the clienting capability and culture that delivers construction outcomes that are fundamental, not incidental, to our core purpose.