Congratulations to the City of Cape Town for taking away top honours in this year’s South African Institution of Civil Engineering (SAICE) Western Cape Branch awards. Their work on the Phola park stormwater upgrade was scored the highest by the panel of judges combined with the popular vote. This attests to the quality that can be achieved by government in house design teams and perhaps to the benefit of being the owner and maintainer of the assets.
This is one way on which SAICE provides competitions where engineers can showcase their projects amongst their peers and public and inspire each other to achieve better projects.
Many client bodies such as the City have initiatives to further develop in house capacity as there appears the opportunity to provide value to the public on this way.
Design and management services for of consultants in the recent past has been driven by clients such as the City’s interpretation of legislation as being primarily on a price based competitive basis. As per competition based theory there is a perception that this will provide service to the public at the lowest cost.
Competition theory has also recently become more aware of state entities often a having protected status and therefore not being as efficient for the market if not having to procure work under the influences of competitive forces.
In the consulting engineering sphere private companies have been appointed primarily on price, carry tender process costs, and then having to cost the work at a level they know their competitors will not go to which is often divorced from the cost of actually doing the work. A state funded in house design team would then be operating under different budgetary constraints.
The recently published Treasury Standard for Infrastructure Procurement and Delivery Management provides a sound project management framework for infrastructure delivery. It also leaves open mechanisms for complying with current legislation and then promoting quality as a final criteria, not bound by price, as an independent “gate” that can be applied to make sure that quality will be reasonably achieved.
It could be said that due to South African engineering space being a weakly regulated we have been on the cutting (or bleeding) edge in terms of pushing the procurement envelope. Whilst often implementing best international practice, local peculiarities and constraints have resulted in less than optimal outcomes being achieved.
Our experiences over the last few years, if investigated, could provide valuable insight into how to achieve a level, healthy competitive environment across the private and public space that provides value for money in the near and far future for the South African public.
At the moment there does not appear to be a clear guidelines or procedures developed for local government bodies to achieve this “independent” quality check. It appears up to the implementing agent as to how to achieve this in a justifiable manner.
