No disputes, no cost overruns, a chart-topping safety record — we’re surely not talking about a public project on these shores are we? Denise Chevin meets the man who’s turned the 2012 Olympics into a showcase for British construction. Portrait by Peter Guenzel
Who better to tour round the Olympic Park with than the man who knows it like the back of his hand? Someone who knows how every bit of steelwork was erected, and how every bit of cladding has been detailed and fixed — from the playful meringue-like fabric stretched round the Basketball Arena, to the burnished copper on the new centre for handball (whose elegance is slightly cheapened, we both agree, by annoying red window frames — sorry, Make).
Howard Shiplee, the Olympic Delivery Authority’s construction director, must have done this tour hundreds of times, and with plenty of big-wigs. “Yes, I’ve shown round ministers and politicians. I took the American ambassador around last week.”
“Don’t forget Dizzee Rascal,” our accompanying press man chips in.
Dignitaries, construction professionals, the public (140,000 have been bussed round), everyone has been drawn to what’s going on in Stratford. It’s the Olympics, after all.
But what could have been a familiar story of a public project gone wrong is now the torch bearer for British construction at its best. It’s been forgotten that in the early days, no one wanted to touch the job. The industry was still taking a bashing over Wembley, for one thing, and was overloaded with easier work. The fact is, it’s run like clockwork, for which its 63-year-old construction director should take a bow.
Shiplee is in charge of all the construction operations across the park and other venues around the country, through delivery partner CLM whose contract he administers. He also takes the reins on procurement, security operations, employment, training and equality and diversity.
Over a cup of tea in Shiplee’s modest Canary Wharf office, we chuckle about the trials and tribulations of the Olympic Deliverance Authority — as it is dubbed in the BBC4 mockumentary Twenty Twelve. “It’s good not to take yourself too seriously,” he says. “And the clock was nothing to do with me,” he adds.
Shiplee is one of life’s enthusiasts, and he positively bursts with zeal talking about building the 2012 venues. There’s the exemplary efficiency, not to mention the workers’ welfare and health and safety. The site has not only been at the top of the leaderboard in terms of standards for the construction industry, it is out-pacing the safety record across industry generally. For example, there have been 22 periods of one million hours worked without a reportable injury accident.
There have been few disputes under the NEC contract, says Shiplee, and with a final bill of £7.2bn it will in fact be £800m under the last official budget, which had been set at £8bn.
Save some unfortunate last-minute catastrophe, the project is proceeding to the finishing line in an orderly fashion.
As they are completed, venues are being handed to a newly formed team, called Park Operations, which will be in charge of FM, and to the London Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG), to get on with any necessary fit-out for the 2012 Games. We can expect the Aquatics Centre to be the next venue handed over (see timeline overleaf) to mark the significant date of one year before the Games opens.
There’s still a 12,500 workforce across the Park, but you wouldn’t really think so driving around. Most of the construction activity is now focused on the interiors, while everywhere around the Park landscaping is under way in earnest. This is a colossal task in itself, creating one of the largest urban parks to be built in Europe in 150 years.
“By the time we’ve finished, over 30,000 people will have had the chance to work on the Olympics programme. We’re peaking now at about 12,500. Originally we thought we‘d peak at between 15,000 and 18,000 people, so we are using far fewer than we anticipated because the project has been run so efficiently,” says Shiplee. “There is virtually no waste on the project at all, in terms of materials. There’s been no waste in terms of re-work. There’s been no vandalism. We haven’t seen the standard of facilities and welfare like this before. And everyone’s been very respectful of each other.”
You don’t have to talk to Shiplee for very long to see he’s someone who plainly lays great store by systems and process, such as re-writing 1,500 method statements to help improve site safety, logistics and consistency.
As one industry heavyweight who has worked closely with him before comments: “Howard would have been good in the army. He’s a brilliant organiser. He’s great at delivering other people’s ideas. He approaches projects in a logical and disciplined way.”
He also has a reputation for being an astute political operator and is “extremely capable at reading what’s going on amongst a group of people”.
He was the obvious choice for the post in so many ways, having notched up a string of mega-projects already in the UK — including Ascot racecourse, Thameslink and GCHQ — and in the Middle East and Hong Kong. At the time, if you were a betting person, you would have probably put money on Shiplee or Bernard Ainsworth, who later landed the Shard.
Shiplee got into management in 1968 through the OND/HND route, working for Alfred McAlpine. He was named Construction Manager of the Year in 1994 for building Terminal 2 at Manchester airport for Amec. But it was the one after Manchester, as project director at the Hong Kong Airport, where he was seconded by Amec between 1995 and 1999, which really set his name in lights.
His long career in construction has been exclusively in the private sector and he admits that switching to a public sector body — particularly one as high profile as this, has been a bit of baptism of fire. For example, with his an annual salary of £287,000, he is one of those civil servants often quoted by the tabloids as earning more than the prime minister.
His five years at the helm have, he says, shot by and he’ll be moving on in the autumn when his contract ends. That’s likely to be back to the private sector with, one would hope, his own medal.
A year and counting: bird’s eye view of the Olympic Park under construction | Anthony Charlton
Pedal power: the Velodrome was completed in February this year | Anthony Palmer
What did you personally want to achieve?
“I felt that there was an opportunity here for the industry to do what I believe many of us believe it can do — and that’s excel. It just had to be properly led and have a client who knows what it’s about.”
Waking up to that headline in the Sunday Times about the thousands you’d racked up in expenses — taking 10 people from JCB out for dinner — can’t have been much fun?
That was in the early days and I must admit I did find that quite trying — the presumption that you’d gone and done something that wasn’t right.
Sir Anthony Bamford (JCB’s chairman) gave us £1m worth of equipment. And with that we’ve trained over 700 people, of which 500 got work on the Olympic Park as a result of that.
That training school is still running now in the Royal Docks providing a legacy for London. I took out only two JCB officials plus a number of other people who had also put money into it; I thought that was the right thing to do. The answer is, with all of these things, if you get up in the morning and can look in the mirror and know you’ve done nothing wrong then that’s the end of it. We don’t try and hide any of it. What it does is make it very difficult to encourage people to transfer into the public sector from the private sector. I think that’s a loss.
Was it worrying that British firms showed little interest to start with?
Yes, it was in the early days. We only got one company —Sir Robert McAlpine — who wanted to build the stadium. In September/October of 2006 when I started talking to supplier chains they all said they were very busy. They also said the job is very public; it’s a big government contract; and it has a fixed end date, and we don’t like that. And they said we were an untried team; why on earth would they want to come and work with the ODA?
We had to be an excellent client, which we demonstrated by launching our Construction Commitments.
How do you respond to critics who have asked why a delivery partner was necessary?
The truth is we couldn’t have done without them. Someone has to run and manage a massive job like this. We are a very small non-governmental organisation, with a very short lifespan, but we needed a lot of expertise. If we had gone to the market to get that expertise it would have taken a long time to assemble. We wouldn’t have got the quality of people we needed who were job-ready, as it were.
By using CLM we got a team who have become rapidly engaged with the processes — and they’ve brought processes with them. Look at the other way round: the value its brought — almost no disputes, knowing we’re getting value for money because the National Audit Office audits us regularly and the project is run so well. Just imagine the cost if this project had gone off the rails.
The use of a delivery partner has been one of the fundamental successes. You can’t tell the difference between who works for the ODA and CLM, we’re highly integrated. When we have been awarding tenders we’ve wanted to see integrated teams at the start of the process.
So apart from using a delivery partner, what else is the success down to?
Logistics. We provided bussing, roads, fuel, the concrete. All the timber comes through our frameworks. As a client we decided to become very involved in the process. We wanted the Park to run in a certain way in what we call “look and feel”. We wanted it to look efficient and we wanted the workforce to feel completely engaged.
And what about the budget?
After the scramble in the early days when the budget got sorted out, we finished up with a realistic sum, but by no means an overly blown one. It was important the way the risk and contingency were managed. We had three levels of contingency: project contingency, programme contingency, and funders contingency held by the government.
We made a lot of savings in the design process and through value engineering – and because we had these unspent contingencies we were able to use them to fund the Village and the Press Centre when private funding dried up.
Diving in: July’s handover of the Aquatics Centre marks a year to the start of the Games | Anthony Palmer
Play on: the Basketball Arena is characterised by the meringue-like structure surrounding it | Anthony Palmer
But recession must have helped in terms of bringing the costs down?
We did most of our procurement at the back end 2007/08. The real hit on the construction market hadn’t kicked in at that stage. So I think we were buying sensibly and being very careful about procurement. But going into a recession brings its own difficulties. The operation becomes riskier as the market becomes unstable. One substantial contractor has regrettably gone into receivership at the Village. But we’ve deliberately spread our risk.
There’s been criticism that suppliers on the Village have been nailed down too hard on prices. What’s your view?
We looked at the procurement strategy Bovis Lend Lease had put in place when we took over at the Village [Lend Lease was due to fund the scheme initially until the market collapsed and finance dried up and its contracting arm was set to be the construction manager]. We took the opportunity to go to the market but not take stupidly low prices.
It is a competitive market out there. But all that said, tier one contractors and their subcontractor supply chains are turning out a fantastic product. If they weren’t being treated fairly we wouldn’t be getting that sort of performance.
Most will come out with a decent margin then?
My hope is that they‘ll come out with what they expected to make. The main thing is that we get it done to our levels of satisfaction.
What will the industry take away technically from the project?
There was a great deal of innovation. The most technically challenging aspect was a project no one sees: constructing 12km tunnels to house cables from overhead power lines. It’s more to do with the organisation and relationships and the whole way we’ve managed to ensure complete alignment with contractors.
Will the legacy purely be valuable for large projects?
We’ve got a legacy learning programme of more than 100 workstreams. You certainly need a critical mass of £500m-£700m to do all of the things we’ve done here. And then you‘ll reap substantial benefits.
At the other extreme, we’ve had 30,000 people working on the Park who’ve become accustomed to working in a very sensible way. I gave a talk to 600 supervisors and told them: “You have to understand your power to say in future ‘I’m not going to work like that’.”
At the Olympic Park we’re the first construction site in the UK to have a dedicated team of health experts to work on preventing ill health. The site is tidy, everyone is well equipped, they know what they’re doing, they’ve been briefed properly. All that is reflected in the high levels of safety. That is a huge thing to take away and you can apply that to any site – even the little job around the corner.
So what’s next? A nice long holiday?
I’ll take a couple of weeks off with my wife at home in East Sussex. I’m certainly not going to retire. I’m having conversations, and we’ll see what happens in the autumn.
The project in numbers
10% previously unemployed before starting work on the Olympic Park
4000 smooth newts, 100 toads and 300 common lizards relocated off the Park, as well as fish
10,000 pages in outline planning applications for Olympic Park
100 hectares of new parklands
80,000 seats in the Olympic Stadium
30 new bridges
5 jumbo jets could fit in the International Broadcast Centre
