It is wonderful to hear others echoing my own thoughts and many of my colleagues’ on this matter. As I work for a construction company that owes its success to repeat custom, I can only sympathise with the vulnerable bidders that have fallen prey to these schemes.

Like Neil I cannot stress the importance of collaborative working during long-term projects enough.

Best Regards,
Stephanie

Interesting article.

I think in some areas ethical considerations are present for some at least in our industry at two levels - personal and organisational.

Although in hard times I wonder how much of this is so rigourously adhered to generally. It must be easier to be ethical when there is no shortage of work and times are good.

Personally I had opportunities to go to Dubai, but one reason for not going was due to ethical issues of what was being built and how it gets built over there. It is likely these projects will still happen whether I am there or not, but personally I’ve made a choice not to, which included the ethics of actually being there and doing it

At an organisational level many years ago the company I work for chopped down a forest to build a fag factory. I doubt we’d do it again though, and we now have ethical considerations in the bid process (ie should we be involved in this project at all), whether the organisation acts as a developer or builder or both.

This considers issues such as reputational damage and whether a project (client, type of building etc) is aligned with our core principles, one of which is along the lines of: would you be happy seeing what you’ve done in the newspapers or on TV?

I’m not necessarily aware of where we have turned a job down on purely ethical grounds, partly because you don’t usually get to hear of projects that we decide not to work on, and probably because the decisions are more complex than solely one issue.

Sometimes ethical issues are not clear cut though. Many years ago, I remember the former owners of our business recounting when they carried out an inspection of a warehouse they had built and were renting in the far east. They found a whole load of small children stitching footballs. The question then arose - shouldn’t these children be in school and should we be building and renting units for these things to go on? They felt very uncomfortable. It transpired the children were all from poor families and none could afford to go to school, it being common practice to go out to work at an early age in that community. The choices generally being stitching footballs or being prostitutes. So which would we prefer?? At least in the football factory there was a chance their situation could be improved by providing some education.

So in summary i’d say ethics are considered (by some at least) as an up front issue. It’s just probably you don’t get to hear about it, and the projects that do go ahead which are ethically questionable are arranged, designed and built by those with less scruples, or less consideration for the ethical issues.

I agree with you, I have always advocated to my clients the need to embrace partnership/collaborative working as a means to reducing fraud risks in long-term contracts. The key as you say is to think about this early in the process and to structure the contract and discussions with contractors around effective risk management (of which fraud is just one risk).

Regards
Neil