Background

Chartered Surveyors and their businesses provide a wide array of critical, professional services across the asset life cycle in the construction and property sectors. They lead teams and ultimately organisations. They work on the consultant or client side for customers that vary in sophistication from mums and dads through to governments and tier one contractors.

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) has the responsibility as the caretaker of this global profession to maintain and promote the usefulness of Chartered Surveyors. This includes assuring their services are provided to customers with adequate skill, integrity and level of cover.

Why is this important?

Because we want a better built environment. And, in choosing the high level of service from Chartered Surveyors, customers achieve two key things. First, they enjoy protections commensurate with the quality of service, and second, they lock in a much-needed advantage to the public, now and for subsequent generations.

Thematic scope

BCC2020 was an evolution of this thematic scope first advanced in the inaugural BCC2019.

The series has now established itself as an important voice in the wake of the Building Confidence Report (Australia), from which BCC takes its name. However, whilst the genesis is local, the relevance is regional and we are pleased that BCC is now resonating through the geographic neighbourhood.

From a practical standpoint, Chartered Surveyors and their businesses are often not limited to any one market and this is reflected in the increasingly open nature of supply chains that impact procurement decisions. There is therefore much regional knowledge to be shared and good reason to provide a forum for this exchange.

To do that, we assembled a world-class talent pool. Speakers brought their diverse perspectives, knowledge and experience in the construction and property sectors across SE Asia, Australia and New Zealand, working either on consultancy or client side within industry, government and academia.

Discussion points from the day

Discussion throughout the day reinforced that ‘building confidence’ in the construction and property sectors is not about any one problem or solution over another. There are many challenges and opportunities for the sectors to tackle and a rich intersection of roles, responsibilities and focus that have been hereto resilient to change.

‘Building confidence’ was pitched as a project to progressively upgrade a weary machine that once worked well but now needs an overhaul. The machine is losing capacity to meet evolving requirements (more collaboration and transparency, greater reliability, less resource intensiveness and time on site, greater value, less disputes and delays) and sometimes abjectly fails (major defects, non-compliance, enforcement oversight).

The failures are well reported and are driving reform along with the understanding that machines for other sectors (retail and hospitality) have leveraged technology to upgrade and deliver substantial benefits. The opportunity to create new roles, new business models, greater productivity and orient output around customer satisfaction equally apply to construction and property.

There was a common desire on the day to explore mutual dependencies (competence and risk management, ethics and productivity, professionalism and insurance, data and assurance) and how the many elements that comprise the sectors may better work in consort to drive an outcome responsive to the needs of customers.

Dr Jon Lamonte FRICS and Dr Simon Longstaff book-ended the conference, providing an important frame around people, teams and collaboration. It was great to have these topics approached from different directions. Jon explained how he is delivering Australia’s largest public transport project with focus on fairer risk allocation, pipeline transparency and industry collaboration on procurement models. Simon offered a six-point checklist to assist businesses put ethics at the centre of operations. His formulation implied open communication within businesses was important if policy ‘from the top’ was to be implemented.

With Singapore, Australia and New Zealand all facilitating greater involvement of industry in government led reforms particularly in the past 12 months, it was no surprise that collaboration featured in many discussions. The NSW Building Commissioner praised the work of RICS around championing recognition of competencies particularly for those specialisms involved in assuring construction and building work – quantity surveying, project management, building control and building surveying.

Skills training was identified across the board as an essential pillar to address risk factors and improve productivity. This was complemented by a general interest in removing barriers to attracting and retaining new talent. Speakers also agreed that new roles will likely emerge as business practice incorporates new technologies (in the workplace and on site) in response to evolving end-user expectations, and as insurers and regulators pursue more sophisticated models for compliance.

Australia’s federated structure provoked a timely discussion around coregulatory reform, particularly given the reduction in consumer protections caused by inconsistent recognition of competencies and associated role descriptions across licensing regimes. It was agreed that Australia must embrace internationally recognised competencies for surveying specialisms and, as the ABCB goes about steering implementation of recommendations from the Building Confidence Report, it was reassuring to hear the Hon Alan Tudge MP encourage an appropriately inclusive view.

The Minister also struck a positive chord, confirming that Australia has positioned itself strongly post COVID-19 and will double down on commitments for a substantial infrastructure pipeline. This underlined the essential status of the construction sector as a productivity engine and will likely encourage sustained domestic and foreign investment.