New Civil Engineer ran an interview at the end of August with Kay Slade, Managing Director of Balfour Beatty's UK Regional Civils business, on how to take risk out of infrastructure schemes. Her answer, in short, is early contractor involvement, long-term client relationships and a willingness to have hard conversations before anyone has poured concrete.

None of that is new. The industry has been talking about ECI since before Latham. What caught my eye was not the argument. It was the assumption sitting underneath it.

The argument, briefly

Slade's case runs like this. Get the contractor in early, and you find the buildability problems on paper rather than on site. Work with the same client repeatedly, as Balfour Beatty has with Cheshire East Council on the Middlewich Eastern Bypass, and you build enough trust to say awkward things before they become expensive things. Create what she calls "safe spaces" where new methods can be trialled without the client fearing it will cost them time or money. And measure it all, in Balfour Beatty's case through the Productivity Value Index, so productivity stops being a feeling and starts being a number.

Read the full piece if you have an NCE login. It is a sensible, grounded interview from someone running a regional business at a time when local authority budgets are stretched thin and every scheme has to justify itself twice.

The assumption underneath it

Here is the question the interview never quite asks. Early contractor involvement de-risks the scheme. Who de-risks the room?

Every benefit Slade describes depends on a small number of people being able to do something quite rare. They have to walk into a client meeting at concept stage, with no contract signed and no tender to hide behind, and tell a council that its preferred alignment does not work, its programme is fiction, or its budget is missing a zero. They have to do it without losing the relationship. And they have to do it early enough that the client can still change course.

That is not a process. It is judgement. And judgement is the one thing you cannot write into a form of contract.

I was a Commercial Manager when I left contracting. I sat in enough pre-construction meetings to know the difference between a contractor who is "involved early" and a contractor who is actually useful early. The first sends a bid manager and a planner to nod along and capture the client's wish list. The second sends someone senior enough to be wrong out loud, commercially literate enough to price the consequence of a design choice in their head, and secure enough in their own position that they will risk the client's displeasure to save the client's money.

How many of those people does a regional civils business have? How many does a council have on its own side of the table? Because ECI is a two-handed exercise. A contractor can turn up early with the best intentions in the world, and if the client's team cannot hear a challenge without treating it as an attack, the safe space closes before it opens.

Repeat work is a people strategy in disguise

Slade is right that long relationships make hard conversations easier. Cheshire East and Balfour Beatty have history, so a difficult conversation lands as candour rather than as posturing. But look at what that relationship actually consists of. It is not a framework agreement. It is a handful of people on each side who have worked together long enough to trust each other's motives.

That is fragile in a way the interview does not acknowledge. Frameworks last four years. People move. The regional civils sector has been through a run of leadership changes in the last two years, and every time a Pre-Construction Director or a Commercial Director or a Framework Lead leaves, the trust that made ECI work walks out with them. The client's Head of Highways retires and the new one wants a different contractor. The contractor's regional MD is promoted and the replacement has never met the council's chief executive.

If you believe, as Slade does, that trust is the mechanism that de-risks schemes, then retaining and replacing the people who hold that trust is not an HR matter. It is a delivery risk. I would put it on the register alongside ground conditions and utilities diversions.

The measurement question

The Productivity Value Index is interesting, and I would like to know more about how it is being used. My instinct, as someone who spent years being measured against cost-to-complete and earned value, is that any productivity metric is only as good as the people interpreting it. Numbers do not have conversations with clients. They do not tell a council that the reason productivity dipped in month six was a design change that should have been caught in month one. Someone has to read the index and turn it into a decision.

So the tool is welcome. But it moves the question rather than answering it. Who on the team can look at a productivity figure, work out what it actually means for the programme and the fee, and then say so to a client who might not want to hear it?

A note on who is running these businesses

One detail worth pausing on. Slade came into Balfour Beatty as managing counsel, having previously spent time at Costain in legal and corporate roles. She was a lawyer before she was an area director, and an area director before she was MD. She is not a civil engineer.

I do not say that as criticism. I say it because it tells you something about what the sector now thinks a regional civils business needs at the top. Not the person who can design the culvert. The person who can manage risk, read a contract, hold a relationship and, in her own words, bring the expertise in the room together.

That is a different leadership profile from the one most contractors were promoting a decade ago. It has consequences for who gets developed, who gets hired and what a succession plan looks like. If you are a Commercial Director or a Pre-Construction Director wondering whether there is a route to running a business, the answer this appointment gives is yes, and the route runs through exactly the judgement I have been describing.

The question I would put to any client thinking about ECI

Before you procure a collaborative model, ask yourself three things.

Who, by name, will sit in the room for us, and can they take a challenge without taking it personally?

Who, by name, will sit in the room for the contractor, and are they senior enough to be worth listening to?

And what happens to the scheme if either of those people leaves in year two?

If you cannot answer the third question, you have not de-risked the scheme. You have moved the risk somewhere you are not looking.

Early contractor involvement is the right idea. It always was. But it is not the contract that takes the risk out. It is the people the contract puts in a room together. Fund the process by all means. Just do not confuse having a process with having the people who can make it work.