UK BIM policy was hatched in 2010-11 by the incoming chief construction advisor, Paul Morrell. He was appointed by the Labour government of Gordon Brown and was faced with a study commissioned by Peter Mandelson into whether the construction industry was fit to deliver a low carbon future. Morrell took over the completion of the study and his report included the idea that while low carbon design might be costlier to deliver, there was a technology with the potential to reduce costs – building information modelling (BIM).
In 2011, the government construction strategy that emerged included the policy of mandating BIM for central government building projects in five years’ time. The government client was seen as having a poor record for project delivery, with most projects going over time and budget for a variety of reasons connected with leadership and processes. BIM, together with disciplines such as lean construction, benchmarking and stable supply frameworks, looked like a way to drive out risk, time and waste, and therefore cost. The target emerged of cutting 20% from the costs of government projects within the
life of the coalition parliament (2010-15).
Paul Morrell knew that BIM was underdeveloped in 2011. The Americans had the most evolved approach, but much more was needed to suit the UK way of working and ensuring standard outcomes. A task group was formed to develop UK BIM, chaired by Mark Bew, a polymath engineer. The group included many pioneers of BIM from across the disciplines. I was fortunate enough to be on the steering group that oversaw the task group between 2012 and 2013, while preparing a report for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) entitled Growth through BIM1.
Groundwork support
A number of tools and related guidance were developed by the task group, including the core series of Publicly Available Specifications (PAS) numbered 1192-2, 3, 4 and 5, which define how
BIM should work on projects, for asset management, for transfer between the two, and for security. The task group worked with the Construction Industry Council to develop the BIM protocol needed to
add instructions to the appointments of consultants and the contracts of constructors.
The legal and insurance industries were consulted to find their zone of comfort with BIM and the concept of Level 2 emerged, designed to work within the established commercial conventions requiring each player’s contribution to remain identifiable and auditable. Each was to produce separate models of its elements and they would then be ‘federated’ for coordination.
In 2004, Cambridge University developed the Soft Landings concept to ensure that buildings performed as designed – this was adopted and extended as Government Soft Landings (GSL). It required not only that the operation of the building should be considered from the start, but also that after occupation how well the original business case for the project was met should be judgeable. Whole-life outcomes become the goal, not just square metre outputs.
Most of the tools were available in 2013 with three years to go, and trainers were provided to government departments to coach clients in BIM use. Frameworks of designers and constructors were also formed, incentivised to learn BIM by the prospect of work. Some departments forged ahead, such as the Ministry
of Justice, Environment Agency and Highways Agency, which set up pilot projects monitored by academics and industry bodies. But the final bricks in the wall could not be developed by volunteer committees; they needed money.
Innovate UK agreed in 2014 to pay for the development of the so-called Digital Plan of Work for team members and for a unified classification system to allow machines to read model data. These were initially completed in summer 2015 by a team led by the NBS, RIBA Enterprise’s technical arm, under the title of the
BIM Toolkit.
How did it go?
The 2015 targets for savings were met on the government’s pilot projects, as verified by outside agencies. The savings came from a combination of reasons, with BIM amongst them. But it was early days, with costly learning curves to climb. By BIM day – 4 April 2016 – the government could point to 100% readiness to use BIM across departments, with a slightly later date of October 2016 to be ready to receive data from their projects and to process it. It is so rare for a government policy to be delivered on time and complete that scepticism of its achievement is quite reasonable. But in fact, the 2011 policy has been delivered as planned.
Not every member of the industry sees that – only 10% of them work on central government projects. The rest of the public sector was expected to follow central government, as it saw the benefits. Many local authorities, universities, hospital clients and utilities have done so already. Private companies and commercial developers are picking up the idea. The result is that most major architects and engineers are established BIM users and so are most major contractors, some having made it their standard operating process. They all want to qualify for government work and the mandate has thus proved its worth.
Surveys of maturity have shown that high levels of BIM capability exist, but these should be judged on the basis that they are voluntary and self-serving: everyone who fills one in overclaims, some even suggesting that they are already on to BIM Level 3 working. As Level 3 is not yet defined or technically possible, this indicates a major naivety. It may be another five years before the majority of smaller firms use Level 2 BIM properly.
Government support has now shifted to developing Level 3 and a new UK BIM Alliance has been formed to enable industry to help itself progress with Level 2. Launching this October, the Alliance will aim to link all the BIM4 Communities groups and the BIM Regions self-help hubs.
One way in which immaturity shows itself is that many consultants and contractors are using parts of BIM to improve their own performance, but are not sharing with colleagues or fully engaging with their clients, who remain passive users. BIM’s set of advantages are client-oriented, with active clients able to access better support in making project decisions and receive asset data to help operate and maintain the building. I wrote my recent book, BIM for Construction Clients2, to help bridge this gap between clients and industry. Clients need advice and support that is not always forthcoming from consultants or constructors. Full six-dimension BIM needs everyone to be in the team working to make buildings better, faster and cheaper.
Other industry specialists who are slow to engage are quantity surveyors (QSs), project managers (PMs), specialist contractors and product makers. QS and PM disciplines are more data driven than designers’, but were late to receive the tools and concepts they needed, as BIM was initially seen as relating to design. Many specialist contractors are small firms with cost pressures. Product makers are usually well funded, but are reluctant to provide digital content for every platform out there. We are not yet at fully interoperable BIM, where users can choose their software for its advantages to them and are able to talk to every other platform. Many still use pre-BIM programmes for their work. A product data template concept is in circulation, to help product makers provide standard format content for machines to search and for specifiers to import into their models.
Digital Built Britain
Since the policy was set in 2011, the technological world has moved on. It envisaged that Level 2 would be followed in a few years by Level 3 – a concept of shared models held in the cloud with constant updating and accessibility. Some aspects of this concept of Level 3 are already visible, but the major change has been in the arrival alongside BIM of the internet of things (IoT). Low cost sensors and actuators are opening up the potential for feedback on how buildings are actually working and for automated control. This further pushes away the boundary between capital projects and their operating life cycles: from now on, the issue is to design for whole life performance and for total expenditure (Totex).
Asset performance will be supported by BIM, but also by IoT and all the other data that streams through occupier organisations doing their business. Common Data Environments, developed for project integration, promises to allow clients to see all their assets, human, built and technological, performing together. The government brands all this as Digital Built Britain, a programme of evolving potential and one in which the UK leads the world. £15 million will be invested by 2020 in making this potential available to use. One of the targets for 2025 is 30% savings in Totex.
Fire prevention will not be left out of this progress. BIM for Regulations is a programme in development with BSI to allow design models to be checked automatically for compliance with regulations. They have long done this in Singapore. Digital simulation of fire behaviour is well advanced already. As-built checks to ensure that fire stopping is as required can be part of the scanning done
to record what exists at handover or after remodelling. The asset information model, coupled with IoT sensors, will be a powerful tool to raise safety and performance.
BIM policy has been a major UK success story, recognised worldwide. It provides an internationally tradeable asset to our consultants and constructors, and
a huge boost to the performance and sustainability of our built environment over the long term.
Richard Saxon is a BIM consultant, chair of JCT and a non-executive director of BLP Insurance