Lessons from the award-winning MMC alliance at HMP Wellingborough

The alliance team delivering HMP Wellingborough have been recognised at the 2020 British Construction Industry Awards. By combining MMC with a cutting-edge digital approach, this resettlement mega-prison project led to Kier receiving the ‘Productivity in Construction Initiative of the Year Award’ for what the judges described as ‘a superb demonstration of productivity in construction that should be adopted as the blueprint for delivery across the industry, particularly for social infrastructure projects’. Kier were also highly commended for this project in the ‘Digital Initiative of the Year Award’.

The Ministry of Justice developed the designs, costs and programming of this £253 million project using the two stage, multi-party PPC2000 Project Partnering Contract. They brought together team members procured under their bespoke overarching strategic alliance which enabled them to apply systems of continuous improvement and lessons learned on other prison projects. The success of the Ministry of Justice strategic alliance contract provided the basis for the published FAC-1 Framework Alliance Contract.

At a research workshop hosted by the King’s College London Centre of Construction Law, Rebecca Wade of Kier reviewed challenges faced during the pre-construction phase of HMP Wellingborough where collaborative working, product innovation and a pioneering approach to offsite manufacture and digital technologies informed on-site delivery and provided a blueprint for the Ministry of Justice’s future 10,000 prison places programme. Some key features of this alliance project included:

·      Strategic procurement by the Ministry of Justice using a PPC2000 contract that encourages collaborative behaviours, improved performance, improved value, joint risk management and dispute avoidance

·      Early Supply Chain Involvement under an integrated preconstruction phase and construction phase, using the Government’s recommended procurement model of Two Stage Open Book

·      Effective offsite manufacture facilitating a national ‘levelling up’ agenda, with the predominance of manufacturing facilities in former industrial hinterlands and more deprived areas of England

·      Effective use of BIM digital integration for virtual planning and real-time data management, so as to integrate the work of Kier, HLM Architects, MZA Consulting Engineers, Pick Everard and Arup, plus over 70 other contributors to the Project Information Model

·     Productivity benefits such as 80% design standardisation, 22% faster on-site delivery and digital tools preventing approximately £7 million of remedial works

·      Client benefits from the integrated alliance approach such as 70% increased energy efficiency compared to a Victorian prison, 95% of waste diverted from landfill, increased accessibility, smaller and smarter prison communities, improved cell doors and product innovations such as barless windows.

·      Social value including 100 new jobs (25% of them for ex-offenders), 50 apprenticeships, 25% local employment, 30% SME spend and 20% local spend.

The analysis of HMP Wellingborough by King's College London forms part of our research for CDBB and Innovate UK, working with the Cambridge University Laing O'Rourke Centre to examine how high-performing collaborative teams are using new contractual models and new approaches to digital technology. An emerging output from this research is a 'Collaborative BIM Protocol' based on a populated version of FAC-1, which is due to be trialled by the Ministry of Justice on the procurement of their 10,000 prison places programme. If you are interested in learning more about this research, please contact david.mosey@kcl.ac.uk.