The UK government’s Build Back Better initiative highlights a move away from our long-held and narrow focus on efficiency.

Buyers can be assured that the products meet the specifications and will be reliable and consistent.The choice of vendor will then be dependent on what a client values more, which could be: cost; location (to limit travel miles); overall carbon footprint; or the number of apprentices they take on, for instance..

The ‘Defining the Need’ report is a fantastic first manifestation of the ‘harmonise, digitise and rationalise’ policy.But the use of cross-sector data hints at even more powerful opportunities in the future, such as:.Longer term pipelines..

The Construction Playbook includes policies for publishing commercial pipelines and developing long-term plans for key asset types.The data set developed by the Hub could be expanded (‘upwards’ from spaces into assets and complexes and ‘downwards’ into sub-assemblies and products) to create a holistic data set that would allow suppliers to carry out their own analysis and forecasting.. Where better to publish this data than on a digital marketplace?.

Searching the data for ‘SL_90_10_47 Lifts’ would show the exact number of lifts in the five-year pipeline and allow government to place contracts for the manufacture, installation and assembly of bulk orders of lifts, creating economies of scale;.

Open sourcing this data set would then allow third parties to develop their own goods and services (in exactly the way that open source data published by Transport for London, OpenStreetMaps and others has allowed the creation of common apps such as Citymapper, Bus Checker and Waze).Ultimately, a mandate would create leverage, commitment and confidence as the industry moves towards change, with the government then able to look to build this into future frameworks, or to pursue new mechanisms for procuring our buildings.. Shaping the future of construction.

The next five years will be an exciting time for construction, as we continue to lean into this significant shift.We have to recognise that it will be a process of iteration and development, and that we must bring everyone along on the journey with us.

Trudi Sully says that when looking back at where we’ve been so far, of course there are things which could have been done differently, but she reminds us that the point of learning, development and feeding back, is that it enables us to refine and make valuable changes over time.The backing from the government to progress this is significant, and it’s incredibly important that we have that support..