Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
Builders should learn from British
OPINION: It’s great having a residential construction site next door on your shared drive.
You get nails and screws dropped for your car or bike tyres to roll over. Broken glass on the driveway you have to ask to get swept up because nobody is bothering. The ill-secured security fences blow down in the wind.
The place is a mess. You are constantly picking packaging, lining paper, and polystyrene (this is a reclad and the walls being removed are largely composed of the stuff) from the driveway, and your own garden into which it has blown.
You get to recycle the builders’ empty drinks bottles, cans and takeaway containers chucked onto the side of the driveway where it was being heaped for (you assume) collection later.
You head out to find a truck blocking the exit, which nobody bothered to tell you would be there. One day there’s a digger at work. The kids are due home from school, and the area its working in isn’t cordoned off with traffic cones.
You try to have a chat with the operator about safety, and reversing without checking there’s a child behind him. He can’t speak English. Trucks run over the gravel on the side of the driveway spilling it onto the drive. You get to
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sweep it back into place. Nobody else will. And there’s the radio, the blaring radio, as if EarPods had never been invented.
Speaking with colleagues, builders’ lack of consideration can actually be worse than this.
One female colleague told me builders at her place actually put up a topless calendar in their temporary site office, a shipping container outside.
Really? When half your clients are women? In this century?
Builders and subcontractors on building sites who behave inconsiderately put neighbours in an awkward position. Nobody likes to complain.
Having a building site next door is something many homeowners experience. It’s life. It’s inconvenient.
But how hard would it be for builders – an industry that’s got a pretty tarnished reputation – to behave considerately to the neighbours of the people who hired them? Well, actually, the answer is not very hard at all.
Several years ago I was visiting
Edinburgh, Scotland, and walked past a building site that proclaimed itself covered by the Considerate Construction Scheme.
Being from Auckland, the idea seemed novel to me.
The Considerate Construction Scheme was developed by the building industry in the United Kingdom as part of a concerted effort to rebrand itself in the 1990s and 2000s because it was held in such low esteem by the British public.
More than 100,000 British construction sites have now operated under its considerate building code guidelines.
These can basically be translated as: If there are two ways of doing a thing, and one of them is likely to upset or inconvenience the neighbours, choose the other one. The code requires builders to care about the appearance of their sites (organised, clean, and tidy), and their appearance and behaviour of their people.
It requires ‘‘utmost consideration’’ of their impact on the community around the site, minimising impacts (including noise), and working to create a positive impression.
Safety risks should be minimised for neighbours (yes, that includes sweeping up glass, nails and securing fences so they can’t blow down).
Darrell Trigg, managing director of construction company Trigg, and president of the Master Builders Association, says public relations was a big part of building the brand of a company like his.
Sites Trigg operates are its chance to showcase how professional it is.
‘‘Your site is the public face of your company,’’ he told me.
Many smaller operators may be good builders, but they are poor business people, and may not understand that.
‘‘I think it’s sometimes the case that they don’t know what they don’t know,’’ he says.
Was there an argument that a British-style Considerate Constructors Scheme could benefit the industry here?
Very possibly, Trigg says, but the industry in New Zealand is quite fragmented with many associations and professional groups, so perhaps the chances are quite low.
After decades of shonky building, the industry is in need of a public relations facelift, but I’m not holding my breath.