Building Magazine’s Best of 2023: Alliancing ‘hailed as the future of big construction projects’
Building Magazine’s second most-read feature of 2023 outlines the significant impact of alliancing on the Ministry of Justice's (MoJ) approach to the construction its new prison estate.
Building Magazine’s second most-read feature of 2023 outlines the significant impact of alliancing on the Ministry of Justice's (MoJ) approach to the construction its new prison estate.
“The power of four: how UK’s biggest builders are working together on £1bn prisons programme” profiles a £1bn initiative to introduce over 6,000 contemporary prison spaces, emphasising safety, security, and rehabilitation.
Implemented through an innovative alliance contract, the scheme involves collaboration among four key contractors: ISG, Kier, Laing O’Rourke, and Wates. Referred to as the “power of four”, this partnership leverages the expertise of the UK’s top building firms, offering benefits to both the programme and the contractors involved.
The collective approach sees each contractor work together on the operations, planning and materials procurement for the programme of four prisons. With guidance to the programme team regarding the required materials, benchmarking the projects against existing prisons, and all four contractors successfully aligned behind a price.
“After an initial competitive appointment stage, the MoJ brought four contractors (ISG, Kier, Laing O’Rourke and Wates) to the table, with other professional partners, and asked them to share everything, to collaborate, innovate and learn from each other in order to deliver the most efficient, sustainable and values-driven new prison estate.
“Underpinned by Construction Playbook principles, alliancing at a stroke opened the door for genuine collaboration between four of the UK’s biggest construction brands. It actively brought together MoJ delivery veterans with individuals entirely new to the justice sector – but with extensive knowledge of what works in comparable arenas,” explained ISG’s Craig Battye in a previous Building Magazine article from October 2022 - ‘126 reasons why we should get excited about alliancing’.
Despite perceptions of an adversarial culture among major contractors, the programme consolidated resources, talent, and expertise, blending the strengths of each organisation to establish a new approach for delivering prison infrastructure. Notably, the pooling of talent has significantly broadened, attracting diverse skills, experiences, knowledge, and innovation to a unified platform, aligned towards common goals.
With this, confidence and trust levels have soared, evidenced by an increasing number of alliance members operating from former competitors' offices, optimising operations and fostering stronger collaboration.
“The MoJ’s decision to engage four tier-one contractors to collaborate through an alliancing form of contract is both innovative and bold. This procurement approach for the prison programme serves as a powerful case study showing built environment experts, working together collaboratively, can deliver value way beyond the sum of their parts. This way of working facilitates greater deliverable innovation, as partners come together and share the best of their attributes for a common goal – fostering an environment of trust and knowledge share that advances better built environment solutions.”
Alistair McNeil, Sector Director for Justice at ISG
The alliance has delivered a number of innovations. After just a couple of months of collaboration, the working group presented 126 big ideas. These improvements looked at every aspect of the design, delivery, longevity and future maintenance, usability and environmental performance of the accommodation, incorporating pre-fabrication, circular economy and embodied carbon principles, as well as social value enhancements.
‘The power of four: how UK’s biggest builders are working together on £1bn prisons programme’ was originally published in Building Magazine in March 2023. Read the full article here.
