Building to start in bid to cut tendering costs

Work is due to get under way this month rebuilding Lasswade High School in Midlothian, which was bundled together with Eastwood High School in East Renfrewshire under a pilot scheme to test out the new arrangements.

The SFT, which was formed by the SNP government in 2008 to save money on public sector projects, brought the two councils together to issue a single tender for the work.

Although the schools look different from the outside, they share about 70 per cent of the same design inside.

Grant Robertson, associate director at the SFT, thought the £63 million cost of the project was about 15 per cent lower than if separate tenders had been issued for the jobs.

“It’s difficult to put your finger on how much of that is down to the economic climate and how much is due to the combined tender, but we’re saving money,” he said.

Colin Allan, director of BDP, the architecture firm that designed the schools, said: “There are only so many ways you can design a fire escape, so if you can use a standard design for that then it saves you time and frees you up to concentrate on the parts of the school that give it a sense of identity, such as the entrance and communal areas.”

David Mackenzie, business development manager at BAM Construction, which is building the schools, added: “We’ve saved money by ordering in bulk for both sites. We’ve also worked with other companies in our supply chain to look at other ways of cutting costs but improving the final schools.”

But Michael Levack, chief executive of the Scottish Building Federation, warned: “We welcome all efforts to streamline public procurement. However, we remain concerned the current system does not offer fair access to the tendering process for many building firms – not least because the cost of participating in public tenders remains prohibitively high.”