The future for building surveyors

What are the drivers that will affect the work of building surveyors in the future? James Woudhuysen, professor of forecasting and innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester, issues some predictions - and a call to action. He warns that the surveying profession seems to be turning to initiatives that will prove to be self-displacement activities.

Clients, like building surveyors, are likely to be driven by pressures to cut costs. Even in British services there is disinflation, while in world manufacturing China now ensures that the price of goods tends to fall outright. Clients will be in a price game, and will themselves expect the very best value for money they can get from building surveyors.

To increase revenues in deflationary times, when buyers are not forthcoming, clients will have to move into new kinds of sectors, properties and geographical areas. So a new, inquisitive kind of worldliness will be required of building surveyors.

More important than these two obvious but rather economic forces are matters of human resources and of transport. Since Enron, the crisis of trust that surrounds the management of human resources issues has grown. Work is the butt of more people's dissatisfaction. Management strategy is often seen as an oxymoron. On top of all this, the British find it hard even to get to work. Result: expertise in the psychology of the site, the office and of the contract negotiation will become as vital to building surveyors as their traditional skills.

A fourth driver is simply the growing weight of the law among clients and in the surveying business itself. Government provisions for work-life balance are now in force. An enormous weight of employment legislation from Brussels bears down on every firm. There will be more lawsuits and more paperwork around landlord and tenant, Arms Length Management Organisations in public housing, and general perfomance among builders and architects. From asbestos and polystrene composite panels through disability to the use of energy in buildings, regulation and litigation will detain building surveyors much more than ever before.

Since more and more building surveyors are personally liable, and face escalating costs for professional indemnity insurance, they know the power of the law. However since 11 September 2001, sensations of risk have, like developments in human resources, undergone a qualitative shift. The Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Ryle, seriously believes that mankind has embarked on its last century on earth. In this kind of climate, clients will tend to hold risks to be global and immediate.

In fact the end of the world is not really nigh. But building surveyors need to realise that many people believe it to be so.

New Labour fears about social cohesion in cities, and the environmentalist, NIMBYish panics whipped up by Lord Richard Rogers, together ensure that every building must now be assessed for political and ecological correctness. It will be deemed risky, profligate and immoral if it fails to:

• be part of a mixed-use, high-density development
• encourage community and good health
• discourage energy and transport use

On the face of it, the five drivers I have discussed might seem favourable for surveyors. Quantity surveyors will benefit from the impetus to control costs more closely. There is money to be had around regulation and litigation, and public sector opportunities in general will be significant. The RICS has also carved out a global niche for itself as gurus in the sustainability of buildings. There is also business to be built around the whole area of risk management.

Good opportunities - at face value.

But genuine innovation, in either the technology of buildings or the professional practice of surveyors, is not well placed among the trends sketched above.

Where is the focus on productivity in construction, raised by Sir John Egan way back in 1998 but now widely forgotten?

Where is there evidence of a move to better supply chain management in the industry?

What about the application of building modelling, or of mobile data?

And, given Britain's housing crisis, is it not now time to take a leaf from the world automotive industry and think about the mass production of customised homes?

Before building surveyors revel in the risk consciousness that now surrounds construction, they might ask themselves how long it will be before their own conduct is seen as risky, worthy of a court case, or at least fairly illegitimate and untrustworthy.

Look at medicine after SARS, or railway engineering after Hatfield: there, inflated fears, drummed up by avaricious consultants, fanned by Non Governmental Organisations and pandered to by governments, have worked so as to demobilise rational action, innovation and progress.

Too much of the surveying profession appears to be about:

• defining and redefining different branches of the discipline
• accreditation, certification and codes of conduct
• health and safety, corporate social responsibility, the Considerate Constructors Scheme

All of these things represent attempts to take the risks out of life. All can very easily distract from genuine innovation.

But perhaps the silliest hope surveyors have - and they are not alone in this - is that Key Performance Indicators can also 'de-risk' their trade. A recent RICS report rightly attacked Regional Development Agencies for being more preoccupied with measuring performance than delivering objectives. Yet the KPI mentality is now so ensconced that the Construction Best Practice Programme's wallchart on KPIs (and the CBPP has now been subsumed into Constructing Excellence) is completely uncontested.

That's a pity.

The CBPP/CE wallchart consists of 11 charts on which one can plot such ephemerals as client satisfaction (a score of 5/6 means 'neither satisfied nor dissatisfied') and such precise variables as construction time (although a footnote tells us this is subject to 'normalisation', which is a statistical method '... for removing the effects of location, function, size and inflation'). Just how objectively 'client satisfaction' can be measured is not discussed. Instead, building surveyors can wrestle, too, with:

• the DTI's Design Quality Indicators, complete with two kinds of trained and registered DQI Facilitators
• the Strategic Forum for Construction's KPIs for payment within supply chains
• a construction industry website, www.kpizone.com, devoted to no fewer than 69 separate and free sources for indicators, and a further 54 sources '... for which there may be a charge'.

The end result of all these KPIs is that enormous efforts are required to keep tracking them.

Construction 2034: New Labour's vision realised

Yet it is not just KPIs that building surveyors need to contest. The communitarian, therapeutic perspective for construction must be debated. In cities it means that risk-averse social engineering is preferred to the structural or civil sort. In building it means that touchy-feely 'respect for people', non-adversarial negotiating, stress, training, team spirit, and self-esteem are taken more seriously than IT.

In addition, the naturalistic perspective for construction must be interrogated. How many building surveyors have really read the Kyoto agreement, understood and agreed with it, and therefore can really justify all the energy provisions upon which the EU will shortly insist? Green strictures on growth, development, transport and construction, after all, don't just mean more work for surveyors. They also cast every new building as a potential threat to the planet. They are bound to stigmatise the work of surveyors in the long run.

Both therapeutic and naturalistic perspectives distract attention from efficiency and effectiveness in building. Both reduce the ambitions that used to surround architecture. Both also compound the backwardness of the building trade by inviting new government regulation, as part of a constantly rebranded series of government initiatives in construction.

There is innovation in building, but not enough of the sort that can really tackle humanity's problems. Instead, displacement activities dominate.

It is time for building surveyors to critically assess much of what they take for granted, before they displace themselves. The future of the surveying profession is at stake. James Woudhuysen

First published in the RICS Building Surveying Faculty, Issue 7 June/July 2003, and kindly reproduced here.

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