Tight partnership saves millions

A tight partnership agreement between May Gurney and Norfolk County Council (NCC) has already saved the council many months of planning and millions of pounds on a scheme to develop a new northern distributor route around Norwich.

The two parties have come together to form a new site investigation facility, known as Norfolk Partnership Laboratories (see pic below), which has a turnover of about £1.8m with over 60 UKAS accredited tests and 33 staff. "We have had a partnership agreement with May Gurney for two years, and we now have a joint lab with their staff working here and some of our staff working at their offices," says NCC Group Manager, Bob Noakes. NCC's design manager, Charles Auger says: "The council decided to look at the Norwich area transport strategy in 2003 and had a public consultation in what it should involve. One of the things that came out as essential was the northern distributor route."

Following the consultations for the route the team set about planning the process of design and environmental assessment. Auger says that normally on a scheme of this type a team would look at desktop study information to identify likely problems for site conditions. But with this three-member partnership arrangement that also includes Mott MacDonald, the council provides the core design team with input from the specialists from the contractor and the consultant.

"It's a bit like an early contractor involvement scheme with the input from May Gurney at this stage," says Noakes.

NCC's Head of Norwich Area Transportation Strategy, David Pearson gives an example of real financial savings made through this collaboration. "The SI has been a success by looking at issues at a very early stage that would not have been possible otherwise.

"At Rackheath we had to decide whether to take the road over a railway, or under it to hide it from villages 400m away. Without May Gurney's input we would probably have underestimated the cost of putting the route under the railway. The proposal is now to put the route over, as the alternative would have cost about £12m and our estimate was £2m to £3m."

Pearson continues: "It's a huge scheme for a local authority of about £100m. We would normally do a lot of design work and decide where to do a ground investigation then put it out to tender for a huge SI. But the partnership has allowed us to tailor the SI, which has become much more of a value engineering design process than normal - rather than doing a one hit SI on the data from a desktop study. It gives us a huge degree of flexibility."