Sixty-Four Years of the Same Report

His report contains a sentence that has been rediscovered roughly once a decade ever since: in no other important industry is the responsibility for design so far removed from the responsibility for production.

Two years later the Banwell committee examined how construction contracts are placed and managed, and concluded that if advantage is to be taken of the skill and knowledge of those who build, the point in time at which they are appointed becomes important. Banwell also left behind a smaller sentence that deserves to be carved somewhere: time well spent can mean time and money saved.

The reports kept coming. Sir Michael Latham in 1994. Sir John Egan in 1998. In 2009, reviewing what a decade of reform had actually delivered, Andrew Wolstenholme found that the Egan targets had not been met in the industry as a whole, except in relation to profitability, with only safety and productivity showing reasonable progress. In 2016 Mark Farmer's review of the labour model gave the old diagnosis a deadline: on workforce age and entrant numbers alone, a 20 to 25 per cent decline in the available labour force within a decade. In 2018 Dame Judith Hackitt, reviewing the regulatory system after Grenfell, found ambiguity over where responsibility lies, exacerbated by a level of fragmentation within the industry.

Six decades, successive governments, generation after generation of appointed reviewers, and a remarkably persistent family of findings. Design and production held apart. The people who build brought in after the deciding is done. Responsibility divided until it is nowhere. The reviews were commissioned for different problems and returned different recommendations.

What recurs is the diagnosis underneath them.

Industries do not usually store their hardest-won knowledge in decennial reports. They build it into how the work is organised. Medicine turned its findings into protocols. Aviation turned its accidents into checklists and its checklists into law. Construction turned its findings into forewords for the following review, an archive of agreement with no mechanism attached, and carried on procuring as before.

It is tempting to read that shelf as an indictment, and most people who quote it do. There is a more useful reading. An industry that commissions the same review once a decade and receives the same answer every time has not been failing to learn a hard truth. It has been unable to act on an easy one, which is a different problem, with a different remedy. Because the answer has been on the record almost as long as the question. Appoint the builders early: 1964. Hold design and production together: 1962. Structure the collaboration instead of assuming it, measure what was intended against what arrived, feed the result forward. Version after version, review after review. What none of those reviewers could supply, from Emmerson to Wolstenholme, was today's integrated equipment to act with: a shared vocabulary for manufacturing-led delivery, a measure for it, a process standard, a mature information-management framework, and a legal structure attaching duties to names.

That is the thing that has quietly changed, and it has changed inside a single decade. Since 2019 there has been a published vocabulary, the seven MMC categories, so a delivery strategy can be named without a preliminary argument about words. Pre-manufactured value gives intent a number. PAS 8700 gives the process a British Standard. ISO 19650 gives the information an order. The competence frameworks attach capability to named roles, and the Building Safety Act attaches statutory duties to named people. Emmerson's readers had a diagnosis. This decade's readers have that diagnosis alongside a far more codified toolset: MMC classification, pre-manufactured value, PAS 8700, ISO 19650, competence frameworks, and statutory dutyholder and gateway regimes. Not every part of it is new. The codification is.

Underneath the committee prose, all of these documents were about the same thing. Not process for its own sake. Homes: the rooms people rent and buy and grow old in, and the distance between what was promised at planning and what was handed over at completion. Somewhere across those sixty-four years, a home to be proud of drifted from an ordinary expectation into a privilege. No report on the shelf says it in those words. Every report on the shelf is about it. The residents never commissioned a review. They received the findings anyway, one handover at a time.

And the shelf holds one more finding for the patient reader, the most encouraging one. On the occasions the industry has actually tried the old answer, collaboration structured rather than assumed, the measured results reported from those trials have been positive; the trials have simply been rare. Rare is a solvable condition. It is not ignorance, and after sixty-four years it cannot fairly be called lack of notice.