Schools : eighth report from the Select Committee on Estimates together with the Minutes of Evidence taken before Sub-Committee E and Appendices, Session 1952-1953.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Select Committee on Estimates
Date:
1953
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Schools : eighth report from the Select Committee on Estimates together with the Minutes of Evidence taken before Sub-Committee E and Appendices, Session 1952-1953. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    62/256 (page 42)
    ll..February, 1953.) [Coniinued. If that is so, then surely there must be economy in price?—You would think so, but so far there is no evidence to that effect. I think there is one additional point which in fairness should be made here. if a school built by the orthodox methods of construction takes, say two and a half years, to build, if you are in a situation of rising prices and if a prefabricated school can be built in, say, fifteen months, half the time, then I should have assumed that you must save money on a prefabricated construction because your increase in prices during the time of building must be less than during the two and a half years. In other words, if your initial prices were the same, with the provision which always has to be carried for wage additions and so on, then you would get out in fifteen months with a total price cheaper than getting out in two and a half years. That seems inevitable, and therefore I think—here I am expressing a purely personal opinion—evidence will be forthcoming in the course of a few years that there probably is an economy in price in prefabricated construction as against orthodox construction. As you know, final costs of school building are established some time after the event, and therefore as regards the major part of the work of prefabrication all the facts’ are~ not~ yet available. We have only a limited amount of evidence at the moment. On that quite limited amount of evidence there does not appear to be any significant difference in price, but there is a significant difference in time. I should say the speed of building would be little more than half, say something over two years reduced to four- teen or fifteen months. The average time to build a schoo] today is about eighteen months; it was of the order of two and a half years. They are being built more quickly. The advantage of that is very real. In fairness again part of the justification for the changes which have been made in the building programme is this: it has enabled the amount of work in progress to be re- duced. The situation which was developing in the building programme was a very sharp increase in the amount of work in progress but not finished. That was going up very rapidly while the amount of work com- pleted was not going up rapidly. That is a situation which must be corrected, otherwise you get to the stage where you have so much work in progress that you cannot handle the situation. By stepping up the tempo in which a school is built you reduce the amount of work in progress quite substantially, and therefore you are in a better position to deal with new work, if new work is to make steady progress. Mr. James Johnson. 454. Is it not a fact that the school we saw in Coventry was cheaper, and even cheaper in the final analysis than the tender which had been given in the first instance? The one we have seen has encouraged us to think they will be cheaper, as you say. I think the important thing is the tempo, is it not? You get more schools built in a shorter time. That is the point you make in this memorandum, is it not?— There again, that only is true up to a point. The actual length of time it takes to build a school, if it is properly scheduled, merely affects your initial two years; that is all. Once you have established your first two and a half years, then the work comes off at the same rate. Whether it takes two and a half years or eighteen months it is only your initial schedule which is affected. 455. It depends whether you build a more or less percentage of aluminium schools, If you build fifty-fifty that would be so, but if you build more or less it is simply a matter of arithmetic?—The point is not affected by that. Let us assume that you were building all your schools in fifteen months at a time. The other assumption is that all your schools take two and a half years to build. Those are the two programmes. Let us assume that you have in fact allowed, as you have here, for a period in which you have established the rate, the first two and a half years, then the tempo at which the schools are com- pleted is the same. The only difference is that you get a quicker start with pre- fabrication, but you do not keep up quicker output. The output comes off in fifteen months, and in the other case the output comes off in two and a half years. The proof of this is that the North Riding has completed by orthodox construction more school places within a stated period of time than the people on prefabrication because of the time lag in getting prefabricated building organised. (Mr. Hirst.) In com- paring prices of prefabrication with per- manent construction it is very important to compare them with the latest methods of design, because undoubtedly the revised methods of construction in our experience are no dearer than prefabrication although they used to be. - Chairman. 456. Would you say that the school which is being built at Wokingham, of which I have no doubt you have full par- ticulars because it is issued in the bulletin, could be built as economically on tradi- tional lines?—(Dr. Alexander.) To-day, yes, I would. The best example I can give you is again to quote the North Riding and compare it with Hertfordshire. It is a rather good example because the North Riding has used orthodox construc- tion all the time; it has not used pre- fabrication at all. Hertfordshire has prob- ably used prefabrication more exclusively than any authority. It had a very heavy building programme with the overspill from London. The present chief architect