CIOB Client of the Year 2024: Ministry of Justice (MoJ)

The MoJ’s achievements as a construction client were recently recognised by the CIOB, who awarded them Client of the Year 2024.

What impresses most is the way that they are using their considerable influence as an important government department not just to adopt the spirit of the Construction Playbook but to implement it too. The MoJ’s approach proactively provides pipeline visibility, innovates on procurement, drives transparent collaboration, adopts innovation, and blazes a trail on their environmental, social and governance ambitions.

Underpinning everything they do as a client is an openness to continuous improvement, collaborative problem-solving, and fairness, all focused on better long-term outcomes.

Craig Battye of ISG said: “The MoJ has produced a real change in behaviours between clients, consultants and contractors. This has delivered a roadmap for best practice which other government departments and the industry can learn from.”

What is MoJ?

The MoJ is a central government department with responsibility for HM Prison and Probation Service, HM Courts and Tribunal Service, National Probation Service and other government agencies.

They face many challenges but in the context of construction, their primary objectives are twofold. First, they must respond to increasing pressure on prison places, and second, because their portfolio is the oldest Crown estate in the country, their buildings have an urgent need for extensive modernisation.

In doing so, their aim is to deliver positive social value both in how they go about procurement and in the outcomes they achieve. They see the mutual benefit in supporting their suppliers’ growth by investing in jobs and skills while holding them to account. More importantly, perhaps, is that they aim to improve rehabilitation and reduce reoffending while keeping the public safe.

How are they intending to meet their objectives?

Their dedicated client team is currently delivering the MoJ’s largest ever expansion programme. The objective is to increase the number of prison places in the UK by 20,000 – from 80,000 to 100,000 – through a £3.8bn capital programme. Known as 20k Places, it includes building four new prisons, new houseblocks on existing sites, and reinstating closed facilities.

How do they procure projects?

Since March 2023, MoJ’s client team has been procuring projects using innovative collaborative approaches to reduce procurement durations, improve collaboration and give better pipeline certainty.

Their approaches vary according to project cost and complexity. Projects over £30m are typically procured through Crown Commercial Services using the FAC-1 Alliance and NEC contract forms.

Projects under £30m are procured through the Constructor Services Framework (CSF) using PPC2000 partnering contracts. This framework is worth £2.5 bn and will last 5 years.

Finally, projects under £5m will be procured under a recently introduced new band to the CSF (Framework A). The idea here is to speed up and improve efficiency using single-source tendering with a preferred contractor, named professional services providers, and MoJ representatives. This framework will last 4 years, giving suppliers a predictable pipeline of work and thus the confidence to invest and grow.

What targets do they aim for?

As you would expect of a government department, MoJ encourages social value. On the 20k Places programme, for example, they aim for each project to offer a minimum of 50 work opportunities for prison leavers, apportion 40% of their spend to SMEs, and for the project team to carry out 1,000 hours of voluntary work.

Wherever possible, they try to use MMC/platform design and to aim for net-zero carbon emissions. Indeed, they’ve set a gold standard for energy efficiency by specifying ‘aspirations’ for BREEAM Outstanding on all new buildings and BREEAM Excellent on all refurbishments.

What features make them stand out from the crowd?

Early contractor involvement and collaboration

Earlier involvement of contractors and better collaboration have long been known to improve buildability and outcomes in construction projects. Keen to reap these rewards, MoJ’s client team now holds formal market engagements for every large tender, including all 20k Places programmes, to seek contractors’ feedback before issuing final tenders.

This engagement has already borne fruit. For example, MoJ worked with the A4NP alliance, which included Mace, WT Partnership, ISG, Wates, Kier and Laing O’Rourke under the FAC-1 contract, to improve an existing design for four new net-zero carbon prisons. The team collaborated to present 126 improvements – addressing longevity, maintenance, usability, environmental performance, pre-fabrication, social value, circular economy and embodied carbon – to the typical houseblock design.

The extent and speed of these improvements was truly revolutionary. Instead of taking decades under business-as-usual approaches, this work took mere months. Just as impressively, the new system cemented the alliance together by increasing levels of mutual trust and confidence. Today, many alliance colleagues work from each other’s offices to promote efficiency - a previously unimaginable set-up between commercial rivals.

A focus on quality, not lowest price

Too many clients are attracted by the lowest price, a practice that comes back to haunt them later in claims, delays and disputes. To avoid these risks, MoJ has changed the way that it assesses bids to reward quality over cheapest price, thereby promoting fairer margins for contractors. This ‘price per quality point’ mechanism was used under the CSF recently: prices deemed abnormally low (i.e. 10% below the mean price from all bids) were rejected.

Fair payment

The construction industry has a reputation for having crippling payment terms that threaten the viability of subcontractors and, of course, that risk disrupting the smooth progress of projects. On its 20K Places programme, MoJ is mitigating this unethical risk by mandating project bank accounts and terms aligned to the fair payment charter to ensure fair and prompt payment for all tiers of the supply chain. Indeed, using this system is a key performance indicator, used to encourage positive behaviours.

Fair risk allocation

To avoid taking on liability, project teams (including clients) are often motivated to pass on risks to others. Without due governance, though, these risks can end up with those least able to bear them. Again, this can come back to bite the client when things go wrong and there are no realistic avenues of redress.

MoJ recognises this problem and in response has adopted a ‘whole team’ approach to risk allocation. They review the risks and discuss their allocation transparently during contract negotiations, ensuring that it is fair and will protect the public purse in the long run.

Standardising

Wherever components are repeated across a building or an entire estate, it makes sense to standardise their design and specification and thus simplify their procurement as far as possible. This means one design or specification deployed multiple times, speeding up the project and producing economies of scale.

The A4NP alliance adopted this approach for the MoJ’s new prisons by setting up a bulk-buying and supply chain workstream. In return for sales pipeline certainty, specialist suppliers (for windows, security doors and fencing, for example) were able to offer MoJ savings on procurement.

Elsewhere, another MoJ alliance is developing a standardised design for houseblocks for roll-out across 11 prisons using lessons learnt from A4NP. Even on projects where there is no formal alliance, MoJ is encouraging cross-contractor collaboration via special interest groups and other forums to standardise outputs.

Driving MMC

By moving work offsite, modern methods of construction (MMC) is not only making building sites healthier and safer but improving supplier efficiency, distributing economic wealth, reducing disruption in operational prisons, and producing better quality outcomes.

For these reasons, the use of MMC is widespread on MoJ’s 20K Places and CSF projects. For example, Cat D Phase 1 utilised prefabricated modular houseblocks, and Cat D Phase 2 and the Women’s Programme intend to use light-gauge steel frame panels for their houseblocks.

Adopting digital best practice

Construction projects involve the creation, storage, tracking and communication of a huge amount of information. Adopting best practices in its management can greatly improve both the process of construction and eventual outcomes.

MoJ has long recognised this value. It adopted PAS 1192 back in 2014 and transitioned to the ISO 19650 standard for the 20K Places programme.

Elsewhere, by redesigning rooftop services in Revit, the A4NP alliance successfully reduced the number of hours operatives would have to work at height by 60%. This not only improved safety but is predicted to save £1.2m, or £50,000 per houseblock. MoJ plans to apply this approach on the Small Secure Houseblocks programme, which is predicted to save a further £1.1m.

Rewarding innovation and sustainability

The MoJ client team recognises that innovation can add value and so they reward new ways of working in their tender assessments. This applies not just to MMC and standardisation but also to reaching MoJ’s goals for sustainability, including achieving net-zero carbon emissions. On CSF projects, for example, those that can demonstrate value-adding and evidence-based commitments to innovation and sustainability are awarded the maximum score.

This is paying dividends. MoJ’s HMP Millsike in Full Sutton, will be the UK’s first ever all-electric prison and is set to use 68% less energy from the national grid than even the newly built HMP Five Wells, and draw 18 GWh less energy every year than HMP Belmarsh. (To put the impact of this energy saving into context, 18 GWh can power 1,200 homes for a year.)

Quality management

The high-security nature of prisons means that revisiting work to resolve defects can be extremely difficult. In response, MoJ insists on zero defects by tracking the quality of installations and their supporting information using their innovative Government Soft Landings Navigator tool. The A4NP alliance used Dalux and Ynomia integration software to track components using geo-tagged data, allowing them to respond to risks in real time.

Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI)

MoJ is dedicated to creating an inclusive workplace and to providing fair and accessible services. Its values of purpose, humanity, openness and togetherness extend to its procurement practices. Suppliers must evidence their commitment to EDI and demonstrate best practice to reduce the risk of modern slavery. MoJ also runs a Special Interest Group for suppliers to encourage them to address the skills gap through upskilling.

Social value

Proposals for adding social value constitute 20% of the MoJ’s bid scoring system, which makes a point of rewarding schemes that offer work opportunities to prison leavers. Bidders’ offers must be realistic and backed by evidence and quantifiable action plans. On ISG’s HMP Liverpool Major Refurbishment, for example, ISG has already delivered many positive social value outcomes, including:

• Providing 351 hours of education to prisoners
• Placing all of its order with SMEs
• Spending 62% of its orders on businesses less than 25 miles from the site
• Engaging 69% of its workforce from those who live locally
• Finding one prison leaver a job
• Upskilling 147 of the workforce
• Sustaining five apprenticeships

Raising the bar

Weaving these strands of procurement excellence together in one client team is challenging but working. Because contractors are treated well by MoJ, they are more trusting and motivated to collaborate, driving better value for money.

In being brave enough to adopt the principles enshrined in the Construction Playbook, MoJ is raising the bar for construction clients everywhere.

They are truly deserving of the CIOB’s Client of the Year award 2024.