The chair of one of the UK’s leading construction consultants has said she would be ‘horrified’ if procurement advice is being motivated by consultants’ self-interest.

During our Construction Frameworks Conference session on delivering a world class framework Rider Levett Bucknall’s Chairman Ann Bentley said: ‘’I would be horrified if you found that professional advisers are advising in their own self-interest rather than in the interests of their client or the industry.’’

The Construction Leadership Council, which she sits on, is trying to bring the industry’s professional bodies much more closely together so that clients do not receive different procurement advice from different consultants.

She said: ‘’You should not work with those trying to keep you back in the 19th century. The professions need to stand up and be counted. It’s very easy to pass out the same advice you have been giving out for 20 years but the industry has changed fundamentally in 20 years.’’

Bentley said that developing hubs of best practice around well managed frameworks should help to improve quality across the industry, whilst also stating the industry should accommodate itself to the political nature of public procurement frameworks adding: ‘’Frameworks must work in a political system. It makes life easier if you accept that.’’

Also highlighted were the tensions between the objectives of the Government’s industrial strategy goal of improved productivity and wider Government efforts to encourage SMES as ‘frameworks tend to push you down the route of a smaller number of trusted suppliers’.

Many clients also ‘’remain reluctant to opt for a framework solution when procuring a contractor,’’ Bentley said, adding that ‘’every client feels on their particular contract that they will get better value if they tender it.’’

On the same panel discussion Sam Ulyatt, Strategic Category Director at the Crown Commercial Service (CSS), said that the number of frameworks could be ‘significantly lower’ than the 7,5000 which another speaker estimated exist in the UK.

But the diversity of clients’ needs meant there would be a continued demand for many frameworks, said John Skivington, Director of LHC: ‘’Lots of clients see things very differently. The plethora is because clients’ needs are different and we have to reflect that.’’

Keith Heard, Framework Manager for the Southern Construction Framework, said many architects brought projects in too late in the design process, whilst highlighting the fact that offsite manufacture construction provides an opportunity for a revival in the use of construction management procurement.

He said: ‘’No single provider can pull together all the different strands of off-site. Construction management is a clear way of pulling them together.’’