Improving Visibility
Improving the visibility of public sector construction programmes is a continual request from industry so that they can better plan their businesses and better meet the needs of their clients.
Introduction
In responding to these needs, CEW, working in partnership with the WLGA, have been producing an annual 4 year forward programme of planned local authority capital works since 2012.
This year’s published forward programme provides visibility to almost £3bn of local authority capital investment in Wales over the next four years.
It also provides a link to a new programme, based on the major local authority projects in the WIIP pipeline, to further assist visibility of the pipeline in Wales.
Constructing Excellence in Wales (CEW) produced the ‘No Turning Back’ report in October 2010. The Minister of Finance subsequently endorsed its recommendations and set up the Construction Procurement Strategy Steering Group under Value Wales to take the report forward.
The first of the recommendations was to improve the visibility of the forward programme in Wales. In August 2011, the Steering Group requested CEW to research this aspect, particularly with respect to local authority programmes. A first composite ‘all-Wales’ local authority capital programme, indexed by ten sectors, was produced in autumn 2012. This research and pilot project was the subject of a CEW report published in July 2013.
We continue to liaise with industry representatives as to how to improve the visibility of the future pipeline of work and consult with the wider industry. The responses from the industry have overwhelmingly supported the continuation and development of the programme. Furthermore, the CITB inform us that the Construction Skills Network welcomes any improvement in the visibility of the forward programme; it assists it in developing its forecasts of employment requirements within the industry for a range of occupational groups.
This current booklet collates the information which was collected by the WLGA from the authorities in April 2015 and sets out a four year ‘sectoral’ programme to 2018/19. The data is provided from each local authority’s approved forward capital programme and includes all projects and programmes from all funding sources. Each project has then been coded to one of the CEW sectors for aggregation.
Further copies of this booklet, together with previous years’ programmes and the research report are available on the CEW Website.
We have recently produced a ‘sector-based’ programme for the major local authority projects (£2m+) that are in the updated Wales Infrastructure Investment Plan (WIIP) pipeline which can also be found on the CEW Website.
These pipelines, together with the WIIP pipeline itself gov.wales/funding/wiipindex provide significantly enhanced visibility of the forward programme in Wales. It is hoped to add further sectors of construction to the visibility of the programme during the coming year.
All of the above mentioned can be found Construction Procurement Task Group
Capital Programme: 2015/16 – 2018/19 Booklet
If you have any queries on this information or have any feedback on how the data can be improved please e-mail us with your thoughts.