ABSTRACT
Everyone involved in the construction industry should be concerned with value for money. One of the principal objectives of any design solution for a proposed building or civil engineering project is to provide value for money for the client or owners of the project. This is of course only one of the criteria by which the project will be evaluated but it does encompass many of the project’s required attributes. The search for value for money is nothing new. During the 1960s one of the aims in the development of the techniques associated with cost planning (see Chapter 15) was to help to secure value for money. It can be reasonably argued that the introduction of cost planning was partially successful in this respect. Project designs were more carefully examined and alternative design solutions were developed to meet the client’s objective of value for money. The introduction of cost limits for public sector projects also helped to eliminate wastage in design and construction and to some extent to reduce construction costs. It was able to do this, while still maintaining standards of quality, through more carefully considered design solutions that fully met client objectives. Cost planning as originally envisaged and cost limits paid only scant regard to long-term, whole-life costs. However, while the use of
they only partially succeeded in improving value for money. The importing of value (engineering and analysis) techniques from the USA in the 1980s would bring further developments aimed at improving value for money.
