Developing a strategy for the built environment professions – next steps

Last month, we invited members and affiliates to contribute to CIAT’s response the UK government’s call for evidence for a strategy for built environment professions, trades and occupations.

Over 200 of you did so, responding to our survey, participating in one of our workshops, or in many cases, doing both. We would like to thank all of you for giving up your time and energy to help with this work. Your engagement and insights have provided us with a solid evidence base to develop CIAT’s central response to the call for evidence. We have also been able to share a summary of key points with several external partners across the sector, amplifying the voice of architectural technology in these discussions.

You can read the top line findings here:

Next steps

The Government’s call for evidence is open until 12 August.

Between now and the closing date, CIAT will refine what we heard from you into a single response, highlighting the areas where there is the greatest need for more support from government, such as:

• Understanding of building regulations duties, particularly among clients & contractors,
• Consideration of technical constraints in early-stage design and planning approvals.
• Change management and value engineering.
• Site supervision and quality assurance.
• Communication between different professionals, and management of information and responsibilities.
• Continuous learning and quality improvement.

The government has also emphasised that they are keen to receive induvial responses from professionals, so we encourage those of you who have the time and inclination to share your own perspectives, either via the online form, or by emailing [email protected].

As the call for evidence itself is very long, we do not recommend that members and affiliates seek to respond to the whole. Instead, we encourage you to focus on responding to the following questions sets (or individual questions within those sets; there is no requirement to respond to every substantive question).

• Design Phase, paragraphs 5.11 – 5.18, questions 18 – 34
• Cross-cutting issues, themes and challenges, paragraphs 5.38 – 5.48, questions 71-79

Other questions sets are as follows:

• Pre-design, paragraphs 5.3 – 5.10, questions 1 – 17
• Construction, paragraphs 5.19 – 5.28, questions 35 – 52
• Occupation & Maintenance, paragraphs 5.29 – 5.37, questions 53 – 70

All respondents must also answer the “about you” questions, i – x.

Whichever questions you respond to, we encourage you to draw on both the CIAT top lines and examples from your own practice. We also encourage you to share your responses with [email protected], so we can draw on them in our central response.

Thank you again for your support.