For those in the built environment, Private Public Partnerships continue to raise huge challenges and opportunities.
RLB’s Partners, Jamie Marsh and James Hutchinson talked to Partnerships Bulletin about their move to RLB and discussed PFI handback, through educating the future tech-savvy generation, to global expansion.
RLB has significantly grown its Built Asset Consultancy offering in the last year, with Hutchinson and Marsh both arriving from WSP in March to build its PPP capability. Both believe now is the perfect time to make the jump from an engineering behemoth to a global independent construction, property and management consultancy.
Both highlight the convergence of the current timings around PFI expiry & handback, and the desire of the incoming government to be bolder on bringing the private sector into the infrastructure space once more.
“The challenge now is around some of the challenging behaviours and wording in existing contracts, and working to ensure that they don’t influence later projects,” says Marsh. “There will be a few years of pain, education and learning, but once we all come out of that, the industry should be in a better place. And as we come out of that phase, we should be looking at new projects that have an evolved risk share profile model.”
However, before we get to that point, Marsh and Hutchinson are keen to use their expertise to navigate a way through the expiry and handback process for the PFI world. With a deluge of contracts due to expire over the next decade, it has long been suggested that the surveying market will struggle to cope – not least because so many of those involved in the sector have moved away over recent years, due to the dearth in projects.
“As an employee-owned business, it means we are able to flex our independence,” says Marsh. “We can be providing the education piece that leads to the collaborative approach that is required. It is about smart collaboration, not simply for collaboration’s sake.”
Hutchinson also points out that the surveyor of the future will work very differently to that of the past, with a range of new technologies coming to the fore to create completely new ways of working.
“One thing we at RLB have embraced is the excitement and drive for digital technology,” he says. “Looking at how we can use that technology better – for example smarter ways of working and using data insights – that is one of the ways to attract new talent.
“As an industry, it is only in the past four or five years that we have transitioned from pen and paper to relying on big data sets. There are a lot of new careers in the sector, for example data scientists and data analysts. The new pool of talent will have that as the default: it gives them a career path in construction consultancy through vocational courses, which is a powerful driver. It is not about putting one brick on top of two – although many people still think of it like that.
“We need curious minds.”
Global horizons
Hutchinson and Marsh believe that, once the industry gets to grips with the PFI handback programme and is able to navigate that, there will quickly be opportunities to export this knowledge around the world. By using their experience of the handback process, as well as in supporting public and private partners in the progression and development of new schemes, both believe that they are well-placed to help grow the business outside the UK.
Furthermore, they believe they can leverage RLB’s existing relationships in many of these locations to open discussions about helping projects, whether through the early stages of development or during their operational and handback phases.
“The evolution of technology will coincide with the expiry and handback process, and the next round of PPPs in the UK.”
Hutchinson and Marsh know that there is a big prize at the end of their journey in building out RLB’s team – whether that’s in the UK’s PFI handback deluge or in new projects, here and beyond. The next few years will be critical for the firm, the surveying profession, and the PPP marketplace.
This is an abridged version of an article that appeared in Partnerships Bulletin. To read the whole article please visit their website.
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