Supporting innovation across the public sector

The Centre for Digital Built Britain outline the work of the Construction Innovation Hub and how it works to drive innovation across the construction and infrastructure sectors

Launched by government in 2018 with £72 million from UK Research and Innovation’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, the Construction Innovation Hub (the Hub) brings together world-class expertise from BRE, the Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB) and the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC).

The Hub’s transformative programme aims to create better outcomes by driving the adoption of manufacturing, value, assurance and digital approaches that improve the delivery, resilience and performance of built infrastructure both retained and new.

Embracing these new ways of working being developed by the Hub will transform the built-environment sector, giving it the tools to tackle the challenges of tomorrow today as we work to build back better and nurture a better future for us all.

We are driving digital transformation across the built environment and have developed a wide range user-friendly guidance, training and tools for the public sector to encourage more organisations to benefit from data-driven decision making and secure, resilient data sharing.

Policy context
The publication in September 2021 of the Government’s Transforming Infrastructure Performance and its Roadmap to 2030 (TIP Roadmap) underlines the importance of the collaborative work being undertaken by the Hub. This includes a refreshed Information Management Mandate (IMM). CDBB, as a partner in the Hub, provided the foundation on which the new IMM is built through the UK BIM programme and is working with BSI and the UK BIM Alliance to co-ordinate and embed awareness of the requirements of the UK BIM Framework which offers guidance and support to organisations of all sizes and at all levels of digital maturity.

This new mandate, which is applicable immediately, sets out a range of requirements for centrally procuring government projects and will accelerate the shift from BIM Level 2 towards the ISO 19650 series and its focus on better, more security-minded information management, especially defining information requirements and then consistently procuring and managing information through the whole-life of infrastructure assets.

Building on this digital approach, the Hub’s digital estate framework can help organisations deliver on ‘the roadmap’s Focus area 5: Optimising the performance of our existing built environment’ through our information management-led approach to retained legacy estate.

The Hub programme, its digital tools and guidance, will support the TIP’s Roadmap to 2030, to achieve better and more sustainable outcomes aligned with net-zero targets, which have taken centre stage in the policy debate due to the government’s ‘Levelling Up’ agenda and the Glasgow Agreement signed at the COP26 summit.

The Construction Playbook provides a best practice approach to test the decision making and delivery process adopted by a client organisation. It sets out in 14 key policies how the government should assess, procure and deliver public works projects and programmes which all central government departments and their arm’s-length bodies are expected to follow on a ‘comply or explain’ basis. The approach provides an audit record of decision-making that will ensure public money is used to best effect.

This approach is extremely helpful, enabling an organisation to review practice and process against the 14 policy statements to identify gaps that could be constraining supply chain engagement and therefore competition and ultimately benefit delivery. An effective engagement mechanism for local authorities is to use the playbook policy list as a challenge to projects and to consider their impact and any action required.

In Scotland, digital strategies are being embraced as part of the Scottish Government’s transformation of the planning process, giving planning authorities new tools with which to shape project and places and developers confidence and certainty in projects in a post-pandemic world. It is projected that adopting a digital strategy could give Scotland an economic boost of around £200 million.

Government Soft Landings
The implementation of Building Information Modelling (BIM) across the public sector, from delivery through operational handover, facilitated by the adoption of Government Soft Landings (GSL), has resulted in greater collaboration, productivity and efficiency in the design and delivery of construction projects delivering both social and economic infrastructure.

Government Soft Landings (GSL) is a tool that helps to ensure that interventions in our built environment deliver the right outcomes for both society and the natural environment.

The Hub has worked closely with public-sector bodies including NHS Scotland, the Ministry of Justice and the Environment Agency in the roll-out of GSL with guidance documentation and interactive navigators to help build capability and align with the UK BIM Framework.

These guides provide a framework and reference for government departments, local authorities, healthcare providers and other public-sector clients to create their own specific plan which responds to their organisational priorities and business processes.  

Supporting local authorities
The Hub’s Local Authority Digital Working Group (established in 2019) is made up of representatives from a number of councils and other organisations including Crown Commercial Service and the UK BIM Alliance.

It strives to tackle the obstacles experienced by local authorities in their journey to BIM adoption by producing information tools and guidance to help local councils embrace the transition.

Local authorities are under increasing pressure to deliver carbon reductions and  improve local services in the face of tightening budgets. Local authorities also need to consider new and pending legislation that will impact asset owners, including the Building Safety Bill, Fire Safety Bill and the new planning gateway process.

Embedding a GSL approach to capital project delivery will help local authorities to comply with new legislation and wider statutory obligations and policy drivers.

The Local Authority Government Soft Landings (GSL) Interactive Navigator  has been developed by the Hub in association with the National Association of Construction Frameworks (NACF) and the Local Government Association (LGA) to help councils to get the most out of their buildings and estates.

The navigator provides a stage-by-stage guide, checklists, templates and roles and it can be used across projects of all sizes and by organisations of various levels of capability and size of programmes. It asks and answers key questions about how a building or asset will be used to ensure that user needs are central to the design and construction process. It also supports a smooth transition (soft landing) between design and construction teams and the people that operate and use public buildings and facilities.

The GSL navigator forms part of a suite of tools to enable digital transformation in local authorities. These include the BIM Early Steps Roadmap which will make the switch towards a data-led approach to the management of buildings and estates easier than ever. The easy-to-use resource allows estate management experts to develop a low-cost proof of concept trial which can be tailored to suit their information needs and capabilities. This could, in turn, be used to unlock efficiency savings and ensure that councils have better access to information that helps them to respond to challenges ranging from responding to the Covid-19 pandemic to meeting carbon reduction targets.

Case study: Cambridge City Council
The Cambridge Investment Partnership (CIP) was established in February 2017 to support Cambridge City Council in addressing its acute housing need by providing high-quality brand-new council homes and market sale homes, along with commercial and community facilities. As part of the £70 million Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Devolution Grant, CIP committed to start on site to build 500 new council homes by March 2022.

Cambridge City Council has taken a strategic look at their delivery requirements and developed a multiyear programme that has enabled intelligent and effective engagement with delivery partners.

Cambridge City Council has developed requirements that reflect the TIP Roadmap ‘systems of system’ approach. The houses delivered and planned provide positive impacts on the natural environment creating developments that benefit those who live and work around and within them. The projects provide affordable housing which delivers against the council’s core social value outcomes. There has been an approach to standardisation which delivers against the TIP Rodmap and the Construction Playbook drive for increased use of offsite manufacturing. Cambridge City Council’s approach to testing the market to ensure that their chosen partner aligns to their values, to align risk between the parties and create management mechanisms that ensure all those party to the partnership are represented and have a voice to steer outcomes to maximise delivered benefits, are great examples of the Construction Playbook policies being implemented in a local authority setting.

Case study: NHS Scotland
The Hub is working with NHS Scotland to accelerate the digitalisation of Scotland’s healthcare estate.

As one of the largest estates in the UK, with thousands of assets and properties, NHS Scotland is transforming the way it manages data across the 14 territorial Health Boards and eight national Health Boards.

The Hub collaborated on an interactive toolkit to provide a framework for the design, build and maintenance of NHS Scotland’s built assets.

Other collaborative work includes a newly published bespoke Digital Twin Navigator to provide a framework for organisations to consider digital twinning into a project. The new guide will help inform a clear Digital Twin strategy throughout the lifecycle of a build.

The initiative brings positive change across the NHS Scotland estate from rural GP surgeries, to state-of-the-art city hospitals. While different in scale they share the need to manage and access high quality data to allow for quality decision making. This, in turn, allows them to operate and achieve targets better, using the data around them to test and monitor their performance. It will also positively impact the environment and improve the patient care and user experience.