Thames Tideway Central, East & West
PROJECT SUMMARY
Client - Balfour Beatty / Carillion Joint Venture (BB / CJV)
Budget - £35,000,000
Timeline - 2018 - Ongoing
Location - London
Expertise - Tunneling
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Reliable Contractors (RC) supplied labour on all three sections of the 25km long Thames Tideway Tunnel.
Scope of Supply
£35m invoiced to date. Provision of sustained labour supply across a large site – covering all aspects of civil engineering labour supplied.
Timescales / Duration
2018 – Ongoing, over a period of 3-4 years (as part of a 6-year programme).
Reference
Juan Martinez, Project Director – jmartinez@tideway-central.london
Richard Gill, Construction Superintendent – richard.gill@bamnuttall.co.uk
The Tunnel will ensure the capital’s sewerage system is fit to support its projected population for at least the next 100 years and will tackle the issue of discharges of untreated sewage that currently enter the River Thames on a regular basis.
The Thames Tideway project highlights our capability to spread resources over a large area whilst cohesively working with several large Joint Venture (JV) partnerships and Tier 1 contractors.
This project demonstrates our ability to manage complex logistical challenges, as often seen on large infrastructure projects, where working across a large area, and a diverse, skilled workforce is needed over a 6-year programme.
We are highly experienced in providing all aspects of civil engineering labour personnel and we are currently providing skilled labour including carpenters, steel fixers and concrete finishers. The project also demonstrates our ability to manage specialist skilled pools of labour across the large site area, for example, we supplied supervisory personnel for the pre-cast factory at a remote location on the Isle of Grain.
Risks and Mitigations
We identified the risk of other Tier 1 contractors potentially sourcing from the same labour pools as each other.
The risk of labour moving from one project to another has been managed through retention plans for our people, and ringfencing resources for certain trade requirements as part of our forecasting process. As the only contractor working across all three sections of Tideway, we have worked throughout the contract to increase collaboration across co-suppliers and the managing JV organisations.
Opportunities
We were instrumental in coordinating the recruitment into the first cohort of apprentices for the Thames Tideway Apprenticeship Scheme and overall, we received 293 applications for just 16 roles – a testament to the preparation and engagement work we undertook across various mediums, such as fairs. We were heavily involved in shortlisting the candidates to ensure the best people were chosen to provide best value for Thames Tideway.
RC took on 25% of the apprentices employed as part of the scheme, supporting them through onboarding, site training and college work. Our office locations placed us at great advantage to engage with the local colleges and employment centres. The candidates we took on from the first cohort have cohort have completed their apprenticeships and are now permanent RC employees.
We identified progression and learning opportunities for our workforce as a key opportunity, offering career paths for our people over the programme. We directly employ our workforce and have full control over project allocation, facilitating clear career paths and progression for our workforce. RC operates using a ‘project-to-project’ or ‘phase-to-phase’ approach, where our workforce moves from one long-term project or programme to the next.
We are excited about being part of a lasting positive legacy and the past two years has seen us work tirelessly with various community stakeholders such as Women into Construction, BuildForce, and BounceBack to realise the opportunities the programme brings to local areas. We recently offered permanent employment to a local candidate in collaboration with Thames Tideway; his strong work ethic and great enthusiasm was recognised, and he was accepted onto the Thames Tideway apprenticeship scheme.
We recognised there was an extremely high demand and interest in specialist roles when we engaged with local colleges and employment brokerages offering diversity, fairness, and inclusion.
Learnings we will bring to future projects
As identified above, managing risks around labour suppliers drawing from the same pools of labour brought key learnings around working more closely together and promoting alignment between JVs and Tier 1 contractors across the programme. Over the past few years, we have been an integral part of the step change within the whole labour supply chain, which has seen suppliers working more closely together and involved in early ‘roundtable’ discussions. We champion labour desk models and working together as co-suppliers to ensure the very best outcomes for the programme.
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) in place amongst suppliers would have allowed standardised rates to be used across the contract and prevented any ‘person-marking’ or uneven playing fields across Tier 1 Contractors.
Carrying out quarterly 360-degree reviews between the Tier 1 Contractors and our supply chain improved communication and strengthened alignment. This included reviews of performance, health and safety statistics and issues, commercials, and project processes and procedures including the effectiveness of contract conditions and change control mechanisms in managing project costs. We have since incorporated this into our implementation plan as a recommendation for all new projects.
