The problem of the competence utopia and the promise of investment

Why viewing increased competence as the fix to all the ills of the construction sector is a mistake, and some grains of hope in Reeves' new budget rules

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Over the last few weeks I have been running through the views of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry panel on various key members of the construction job which refurbished the tower. 

You can read them here: the fire engineers, the architects, the cladding subcontractor, the main contractor and the building manager and building control. 

Very broadly, the inquiry found serious and causative faults with all of them, but used the strongest language in relation to the architects, as they were the ones who chose the dangerous materials which ultimately turned the building into a death trap. 

The summaries do not make pretty reading, and you can understand on reading them why so much focus has been placed on competency in construction. 

The fire engineering consultant was not a fire engineer. The lead architect had never refurbished a high rise before and the architect who worked up his plans into practical designs didn’t actually have the professional qualifications to call himself an architect. 

The cladding subcontractor appears to have been confused by the basic rules covering cladding and appointed a sports science graduate in his early 20s (who also happened to be the son of the company director) as project manager. 

The main contractor lied about the experience and qualification of its team, all of whom were doing their roles for the first time and the building manager was too inexpert and naive to properly oversee the work of its contractors without specialist help (which they chose not to appoint for cost reasons).

Even the building control officer had never done a complex job like this before and relied on the professionals to get it right without his input.  

Put all of this down in black and white and you can see why many people in the worlds of housing and construction are being told to go back to college, gain a qualification or prove their competency. 

“The Grenfell Tower refurbishment was marked by a serious lack of competence on the part of many of those engaged on it,” the panel said. 

“We were surprised at the limited knowledge of the Building Regulations, the statutory guidance and indeed industry guidance displayed by their employees, for whom a working knowledge of the regulatory regime should have been a fundamental requirement.”

It was explicit that it thinks these problems are likely to be more “widespread” than the Grenfell Tower job alone. “The way in which the Grenfell Tower refurbishment was handled raises serious questions for the whole of the construction industry,” the panel said. 

On the face of it, this is hard to argue with - and I’m not intending to. 

What I do dispute is a view that sometimes crops up, pushing this argument one step further into the suggestion that a lack of competence is all that is going wrong and if we can simple make people more competent, all our problems will disappear. 

But this does not stack up, on the basis of the evidence of Grenfell - let alone elsewhere. 

Take Daniel Anketell-Jones. As design manager for the cladding subcontractor, he held a pivotal position in the project. Here is the specialist at the specialist contractor - the person in the job who really has least excuse for not knowing about the technicalities of cladding and the regulations which cover it. It is literally his job. 

The trouble is, though, that he probably was competent. He had an MSc in Structural Engineering and had begun studying for a further MSc in Facade Engineering. In 2014, he’d attended an industry conference which covered the technicalities of fire risk from cladding systems. Shortly after the conference his brother and colleague at Harley sent an email to their main cladding supplier (Arconic) asking for details about the fire performance of their cladding. 

Daniel also, at one stage, queried the insulation manufacturers’ claims about its product with an email which displayed a fairly clear understanding of the technical understanding of the regulatory requirements. 

And, most notoriously, when he was frustrated by building control’s insistence on two hour fire breaks for the cladding system, he wrote in an internal email: “There is no point in ‘fire stopping’, as we all know; the ACM will be gone rather quickly in a fire!” 

The report was firm in deciding that Mr Anketell-Jones was, in fact, a good deal more competent than he had tried to let on during his cross examination. 

“It is difficult to believe that Mr Anketell-Jones was as ignorant of matters relating to fire safety as he would have had us believe,” the report said. “Accordingly we can place little reliance on his protestations of ignorance or lack of expertise.”

He was not the only one. Neil Crawford, the architect who could not call himself an architect, may not have finished his exams, but he knew enough about cladding and fire to write in an internal email that  “metal cladding always burns and falls off”. The inquiry said it was satisfied that he knew the material he was using was combustible. 

And while Terry Ashton may not have been a qualified fire engineer, he worked with people who were more properly qualified, who worked on the strategy for the building pre-refurbishment. 

But their objective, as stated in their own emails, was to help the client “massage the proposals into something acceptable”. The quality of their work meanwhile, was savaged by the report for the minimal amount of time spent on it - apparently driven by a desire to clear their desk before going on holiday rather than any particular lack of qualification. 

The manufacturers of the materials meanwhile were not so much incompetent as dishonest. Most knew the functions of the regulatory regime well and were well aware of the weaknesses of their products and the dangers of inappropriate use. They just chose not to tell anyone to avoid damaging their sales. 

And so we start to paint a different picture where incompetence is a part of the problem, but so is dishonestly, venality, indifference to safety and straightforward laziness. 

The trouble here is that behaviour of this kind requires a different fix. Going back to college won’t cure it. So what might? 

This is where we enter the realm of philosophical, economic and political argument. 

Since the 1980s, construction has been governed by ‘functional regulations’ - where a performance standard is set and it is up to the industry to work out how to meet it. 

This is distinct from ‘prescriptive’ regulations - where the government provides a clear list of mandatory building codes covering what is legal and what isn’t. 

Essentially this is a question of privatisation versus nationalisation. Is the question of how to build a safe building best decided by private sector fire experts, engaged by the builder, or by civil servants and officials working for the government? 

Those who support the functional requirement model face a confronting truth in the Grenfell Tower story, and the wider cladding scandal which has emerged since. Industry did not use its freedom to raise standards while allowing nimble, innovative change to emerge without the crippling hand of the state holding it back. Instead, it used it to cut costs wherever it could and to protect or boost its ultimate profit margin. 

But instead of embrace this difficult reality, defenders of functional regulation fall back on the argument of competence. If only everyone was more competent, the functional system would work. If fire engineers advised on every complex job, if building control were all more highly qualified, if everyone in the construction had to prove their competency, then the problems would disappear. 

This is utopian thinking. The cost-drivers which come from a low-margin industry and price-based procurement will continue to undercut standards, regardless of what NVQ level those in the value engineering meeting hold. Laziness and dishonesty are not the preserve of the unqualified. 

For me, the evidence of Grenfell does call for more competence. But it also calls for more accountability. It calls for larger and more immediate consequences for failure. It calls for more oversight and more transparency. And it calls for tighter regulations for an industry that has proved incapable of regulating itself. 

Some of the behaviour we’re talking about here is criminal. And just as you don’t fix shoplifting by sending perpetrators to college to learn the definition of statutory theft, we will not fix construction with qualifications alone. 

Investment in the future

It’s Budget week, friends. And a significant one, as a new government balances tax rises, spending cuts, borrowing requirements, fiscal rules, the expectations of a public promised ‘change’ and the view of money markets who crushed the last chancellor to try and rip up the rule book (albeit, very clumsily). 

There probably don’t feel like many reasons to get excited about a budget which the party itself seems desperate to talk down.

But there are a couple of little gleaming gems of something which you might tentatively call optimism - at least if you care about social housing and public investment (which I do). 

The first is a £500m boost for the Affordable Homes Programme. This is quite a limited uplift, but it is very necessary - money had been about to run dry with the development of new affordable homes about to completely collapse as a result. It is not a huge sum of money, and the bigger question will be how much Labour find for the next round of affordable homes. 

But in a budget where everyone had their hats out asking for money and there was little to go round the fact that affordable housing (which will now include higher percentages of social rent) got its foot in the door at all is a good sign. 

The second is a broader point. The decision to change fiscal rules to consider assets as well as liabilities converts government spending from the much maligned “family budget” analogy which took us through the austerity years, to treating the national balance sheet more like a business. 

The point of this is that the government will distinguish (as it always should have) between capital investment and revenue spend. If you borrow to building something which you will own and has inherent value, and grows the economy by more than the amount you borrowed to build it, that’s investment. If you borrow to cover day-to-day spending on medicines, salaries and pensions, that’s more of a problem economically. 

But previously chancellors have treated both the same, which has put a major brake on what is possible and held back investment that we really need in the public sector, which has been left to (literally) crumble in too many cases. 

This change won’t fix everything. We still need to work out how to meet the day-to-day costs of criminal justice, education, local authority budgets, health, pensions and so on and so on. 

It is also possible Reeves will adopt a narrow view of this accounting which only considers financial assets, not physical ones.

But if the approach was followed boldly, it would allow us to invest in building things we need for the future. And - for my money - social rented homes, which provide a direct economic return to the state through rents, boost the economy, reduce the benefit bill, lower NHS spending and provide all manner of social good, should be the place to start.

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This content is not behind a paywall, but since it takes time to create and upload each piece, do please consider becoming a paid subscriber (especially if this project is something that you value, and you have the means to do so), which is either billed monthly at £3.50 or annually at £35. A paid subscriber has full access to the back catalogue of posts.

If you pay £40 or more for an annual subscription, I will send you a signed copy of my book. Or you can buy a copy here.