ABSTRACT
Infrastructure is a large and expensive part of national investment, so its procurement matters a lot to policy makers and to tax payers. The new criteria for selecting designers and constructors are selected on a quality/cost balance basis. At the start of the decade being considered, the general situation in the UK construction industry was one of poor but improving performance. In the University of Cambridge fundamental change in procurement was clearly necessary since neither the draft legislation affecting building procurement nor the Latham report recommendations are known. Another aspect of building procurement is community relations, the importance of which related not only to the general relationship between the university and local people and their elected Councils, clearly an aim in itself, but also to how easily building projects could proceed. The procurement management systems adopted reduced waste; the programme during the decade was achieved within a fraction of 1 per cent of the total of set budgets.
