Examination of Witnesses (Questions 660
- 679)
WEDNESDAY 27 OCTOBER 2004
SIR JOHN
EGAN
Q660 Mr Chaytor: Will it be?
Sir John Egan: I am hoping so,
but I am not sure whether it is. It was taken out of my hands
and other people are doing it. I would also like it to be a centre
for interchange of experience. I would also like it to be expert
on one particular area which is how to listen to people and how
to sell high quality solutions to them. When it comes to, how
do you get all these difficult things done, they are the same
world-class skills that you require to run any big difficult organisation.
They are the world-class skills of communication, of leadership,
of vision, of process improvement, of project management and so
on. These are the world-class skills but they will be absolutely
homed in on a particular thing which is achieving improvement
in sustainable communities and I think there will be a particular
expertise and language of its own growing up around this. I think,
in a way, the whole agenda of Government's relationship with communities
and with local government could be spelt out in this sustainable
community agenda. I said right at the beginning when I first spoke
about it that it is not often that governments come up with big
ideas or with good ideas but this one is rare indeed because it
is a big, good idea.
Q661 Joan Walley: Can I press you
a little further on how it is going to come about. You mentioned
that it would be linked to one of the big universities.
Sir John Egan: I hope so.
Q662 Joan Walley: Which university
do you have in mind?
Sir John Egan: There are a number
that I think could do this very well. I would not like to mention
any one in particular but I would like to see a university which
is noted for high quality research. Can I just go into this a
little deeper. I think that universities should spend far more
time working with business and other representatives in their
local areas. They should learn how to do research for the good
of various kinds of people and there is nothing more important
than the local community in which they live and I think they would
get a huge sense of belonging to a community if they worked more
closely with them and nothing is more important than planning
the future prosperity of a community. So, I think it would be
very, very important that we see how well it could be done.
Q663 Joan Walley: Are you talking
about a virtual national centre of excellence?
Sir John Egan: Both. I think it
should have a physical presence and it also should have a virtual
presence as well.
Q664 Joan Walley: My fear is that
many of the areas where regeneration is most needed would tend
to be areas away from the south east and away from where all the
emphasis is and, in a way, they are the ones which are least best
represented to be part of ongoing developments and perhaps are
the ones who have most to gain from going about things in a different
way and in an innovative way and in a fresh way.
Sir John Egan: I do not think
we are talking about one community here and just one university.
Every university in the country should be working with its local
community to help plan the future prosperity of that community.
We should be turning these great big brain boxes actually into
use for the local community. It does not really matter where the
centre will be as long as it is connected to a very good research
university and there are very good research universities in the
north of England as well as in the south.
Q665 Joan Walley: What about in heart
of the country? I am just thinking of the Advantage West Midlands
promotion yesterday on connectiveness and really looking at innovation
in terms of the rest of the country.
Sir John Egan: There is no question
in my mind that one of the excellent ones would have been, for
example, Warwick University.
Q666 Joan Walley: What about North
Staffordshire?
Sir John Egan: It was not the
one that first came to mind!
Q667 Joan Walley: No, but it might
come second to mind! Can I just ask you now about the lack of
skills. How much do you think that the current lack of skills
to which you have referred to deliver this whole agenda could
be a limiting factor? Plumbers who do not understand about electricity
or project managers who simply do not exist or house builders
who do things the way they have always done them because they
have not realised that the world and the opportunities have changed.
Sir John Egan: That is not the
key skill. The real key skills are to do with developing vision
for an area and a plan of how to get there. That is the key thing
that the local authority has to be able to develop. It seems as
though some people can effortlessly do this and, when you actually
talk to the people who have created the huge changes in places
like Manchester and Birmingham, you can see why things have happened.
The men in charge did actually have vision, they had drive, they
had energy and they got the job done and that is the kind of thing
we are looking for, but they got it in by buying in, they got
everybody to buy into their vision and these are the world-class
skills of leadership and that is more of what we need.
Q668 Joan Walley: Much of those skills,
as I think you mentioned earlier, have been linked to the city
centres, the very high profile regeneration and investment and
they have not been about communities where people live and homes
where people go to doctors' surgeries and go to schools. They
have not been about the places where people live, they have been
about where businesses wanted to invest and wanted to be able
to get a lot of profit out of what is happening.
Sir John Egan: Increasingly, that
is happening certainly in Manchester and Birmingham, so I think
they have spread. It is interesting. I think the first thing to
do is to get the prosperity going, get some growth there and that
is what they concentrated on first, but they are into now developing
the cities and especially places for people to live as well, but
they started on prosperity which I think was the right thing.
Q669 Joan Walley: You do not seem
to be emphasising at all the day-to-day skills, the construction
skills, the awareness that is needed in environmental sustainability
in terms of the way construction goes ahead.
Sir John Egan: Come on! We did
not decide to put the retail centre here and the business centre
there and the hospital there and the schools over here and the
houses over there. Those were not clever things. They were just
very poor thinking of the whole programme. We did not need brilliant
architects to make such huge mistakes. Those huge mistakes were
the lack of vision of the local authority leaders. They did what
was easiest. They zoned it all because it was easier to do it
that way.
Q670 Joan Walley: Or maybe they just
answered to the tune of big business because they were the only—
Sir John Egan: I do not think
they were dancing to anybody's tune. They were simply dancing
to the tune of whatever came next. Somebody asked for planning
permission for a retail centre, so they gave it. Somebody needed
to put a hospital somewhere, so they did it. That is not what
the sustainable community requires.
Q671 Joan Walley: I am getting to
the detail of how the new buildings are going to be built; what
about the construction skills? Are you saying those are not important?
Sir John Egan: They are extremely
important and I did spend a lot of time writing a report on how
to achieve world standards and it is relatively straightforward.
It is not impossible, it is relatively straightforward as long
as you have the will to do it.
Q672 Joan Walley: Given that there
is a will to do it, where are Government falling down?
Sir John Egan: Unfortunately,
the Government still spend too much of their money on lowest cost
tendering which means that you get a random group of people coming
together to build a one-off project and some departments cannot
be shaken away from this. The PFI projects themselves are also
won on a lowest cost tender basis or tendering basis and you cannot
build complicated buildings in this way. To know what a building
costs, you have to design it before you know how much it is going
to cost. You cannot guess at it. So, you have to create your team
before you start construction and that is the one thing the Government
generally speaking do not do.
Q673 Joan Walley: How is that going
to change? Are we going to lose this opportunity that we have?
Sir John Egan: It is of great
annoyance to me and of great sadness to me that we are going through
this huge construction programme where we will probably be very
little better at building hospitals when we have finished than
when we have started because the programme has not been well designed.
Q674 Joan Walley: Why has your report
not been able to influence that?
Sir John Egan: I do not know.
It influenced Tesco and it influenced BAA and it influenced all
of the private builders because they do it but the Government
are only haltingly getting there.
Q675 Joan Walley: Is it the ODPM's
door that you are knocking on?
Sir John Egan: No. There is no
point knocking on his door because he does not spend the money.
You have to go to the departments which spend the money, which
are health and education at the moment. I have spoken to both
Secretaries of State and I must say that one of them did actually
understand what I was saying.
Q676 Joan Walley: Which one?
Sir John Egan: Alan Milburn did
understand and he did make Procure 21 which is a very large step
in the right direction into a national programme.
Q677 Joan Walley: Is the NHS not
exempt from the Government's policy in respect of procurement?
Sir John Egan: No, nobody is.
Procure 21 is a sensible step in the right direction and many
buildings are being built with that system, but I would like to
see all Government departments embracing the Rethinking Construction
report and I think they would save a huge amount of money if they
did.
Q678 Joan Walley: What do we do when
half of the chartered civil engineers are expected to retire in
the next ten years and looking at the number of people who have
been through British universities at the moment? Is that going
to lead to the same kind of problems that we have with the recruitment
of GPs or other professionals? How are we going to overcome that?
Sir John Egan: I can now speak
with a career of 40-odd years in business and I have seen so many
scare stories about shortages of this, that or the other. I can
say two or three things. We always seem to find enough people
in the end.
Q679 Joan Walley: Was it not your
evidence-based review of skills/your report that actually alerted
us to this shortage?
Sir John Egan: Yes. I am trying
to give you an answer. Eventually, we will find ways of recovering
the problem but there is no problem right now. Right now, there
are enough, as it were, to do the job that is being done today.
If we could only do it much more efficiently and stop having developers
putting five or ten plans in on the same project because of the
infrastructure changes or that they do not know what is going
to please the planning committee, then indeed we would not need
quite so many people. What we do today is extremely inefficient
and much of the time and effort is wasted.
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