Mace is spending £2.5m per year on technical services in preparation for new building-safety measures, one of its senior leaders has revealed.
Gareth Lewis (pictured), the contractor’s chief executive of construction, told the CN Transforming Construction conference that the company was spending that amount on a team to improve its safety performance and align its operations with new building-safety rules.
“That was a big decision,” he said. “However, we don’t want a disaster on our hands, so we took a risk-based approach to this and we improved our business.”
Lewis said he believed that the contractor, which has been increasing its safety measures in recent years, made the right call with its investment because of the learning it has entailed. “I have to say that it was one of the best decisions we ever made,” he said.
Mace turned over £1.9bn in its latest financial year ending 31 December 2021, on which it made £38.3m pre-tax profit, the company revealed in September.
The conference, formerly known as the CN Summit, heard that firms are recognising that their obligations under the Building Safety Act will require more people and cost money. Starting next October, contractors will need to demonstrate evidence to regulators that building safety has been covered in the design and construction of buildings.
Bob Wolstenholme, group health and safety director of developer Ballymore, said that working towards new safety regulations had brought to light issues with the demonstration of compliance on older projects.
The loss of hard copies and fall-outs with former contractors were among the reasons that made it hard to source documents on projects that were 15 or more years old, he said. Photographic evidence was also found to be missing in some cases.
Wolstenholme said: “What that’s pushed up, for me, is that our strategy moving forward is that we, on the construction side, need to add more resources for our admin and our documentation.”
He added that the firm would support the SMEs in its supply chain with their administration and document control as they often lack the resources to do this themselves.
The treatment of information in the future, he said, would require digital technology to maintain a seamless flow of information.
He said that Ballymore has invested more than half a million pounds over the past 18 months in new digital systems.
This investment has provided databases and other digital solutions that are interlinked so that evidence can be easily retrieved when making a case that building-safety standards have been met, according to Wolstenholme.
Mace’s Lewis said that the tier one contractor had faced similar issues on its legacy projects. For new projects, the contractor is running more rigorous design reviews and adopting a proactive approach.
He maintained that although there was a cost attached to building-safety compliance, “We’re seeing it as a value equation rather than a cost equation. Yes, there is a cost, but there is a massive value.”
Earlier in the conference, delegates heard from the Health and Safety Executive’s operational policy head for gateways and building control, Colin Blatchford, about the legislation. He recently told Construction News that contractors should be prepared for early scrutiny of their plans for high-rise residential builds, and urged them to start considering the scheduling implications as soon as possible.
