UK Government Construction Playbook mandates effective contracting and endorses 'FAC-1'

This week the Government launched its ‘Construction Playbook' https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-construction-playbook, providing new guidance on sourcing and contracting public works projects and programmes. This guidance is designed to improve safety, to focus on whole life carbon reduction and to promote social value in ways that can tackle economic inequality, promote equal opportunities and help communities to recover from Covid-19.

The Construction Playbook sets out a total of 14 progressive procurement policies that have been developed in consultation with the construction industry in order to deliver 'better, faster and greener solutions', and these policies are mandated on a ‘comply or explain’ basis. They include longer-term contracting for portfolios of work, harmonising and digitising demand, embedding BIM, procurement using early supply chain involvement, outcome-based performance measurement, benchmarking for better understanding of costs, and effective contracts that are structured to support exchange of data, to drive collaboration, to improve value and to manage risk.

The Construction Playbook promotes the use of frameworks as an efficient procurement method but emphasises that a 'successful framework contract should be based around principles that align objectives, success measures, targets and incentives so as to enable joint work on improving value and reducing risk'. It goes on to say that the 'FAC-1 framework is a good example of a standard form framework contract that can achieve this and many of the ambitions set out in this Playbook'.

FAC-1 creates a framework alliance that offers collaborative systems to integrate the activities of team members engaged on one or more projects or programmes of work. It has been adopted by Crown Commercial Service as the basis for all their national and regional frameworks with consultants, contractors and modular suppliers. FAC-1 is being used by the Ministry of Justice on its New Prisons programme, a pathfinder for implementation of the Construction Playbook, to create an alliance that integrates the work of contractors, sub-contractors and offsite manufacturers, and that operates as a collaborative BIM Protocol compliant with ISO 19650..

There is a lot to think about in the Construction Playbook, and significant industry buy-in as a result of the consultative approach. Signatories to the Playbook's Compact with Industry comprise Bam Nuttall, CECA, Costain, Kier, Tideway, Osborne, Rider Levett Bucknall, UK BIM Alliance, Federation of Master Builders, Project 13, King's College London , Mixergy, CIC, Skanska, ACE, Bryden Wood, Imperial College London, Bam Construct, Builders Merchants Federation, Laing O' Rourke, Home Builders Federation, Willmott Dixon, Taylor Woodrow, CIH, Balfour Beatty, Beard, Mott MacDonald, Mace, British Property Federation, Graham, St Gobain, ICE, UK Power Networks, Amey, Construction Products Association, National Federation of Builders, Atkins, Hack, Speller Metcalfe, CITB, HSE, Lendlease, Arcadis, Wates, Electrical Contractors' Association, Build UK, Keltbray and Turner & Townsend. A short video is available at https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/cabinet-office_public-sector-projects-will-be-delivered-activity-6742023887996903424-7tcG,