15/01/14

Infrastructure Delivery: New RICS professional standards ensure projects are delivered on time and on budget

With infrastructure delivery at the heart of wider national economic growth LEPs are currently rising to the challenge of identifying and prioritising the infrastructure investments needed to enable jobs and growth in their local area.

As they get to grips with Strategic Economic Plans and oversight of Local Major Transport Schemes, RICS has responded by developing two new tools to ensure value for money and additionality, as part of a consolidated offer for the infrastructure industry.

RICS’ New Rules of Measurement (NRM) provides LEPs with a value for money framework - a standard set of measurement rules that are understandable to all those involved in a construction project.  Using a cradle-to-grave approach to procurement and including cost estimating, works procurement and post-construction procurement NRM ensures better, accurate cost estimation giving reassurance to investors.

Alongside NRM, the RICS Infrastructure Information Service for launch in early 2014 will provide for the first time, a single source of costs, trends and benchmark data in a coherent service offering for the sector.  The service will contain:

  • Price and cost index series for the infrastructure sector and sub-sectors
  • Forecasts of demand, prices and cost trends
  • Analysis of benchmarking studies by sector
  • Civil engineering estimating database
  • Cost analyses for infrastructure related buildings
  • Average prices for infrastructure related buildings.

The service will give subscribers a single source of publicly available benchmark data for use in comparative studies for clients, order of cost estimates and business case reviews.

The service is developing regional location factors based on road projects as well as providing access to the Building Cost Information Service (BCIS) building location factors used by regulators in the infrastructure sector.

The RICS consolidated infrastructure offer also includes a new RICS infrastructure qualification and the UK’s first Building Information Modelling (BIM) manager certification. 

For more information, please contact Emma Fitzgibbon, RICS Policy Manager: [email protected]

Please also see: http://www.rics.org/uk/tag/infrastructure/

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