After the previous hiccup, I started again with Henry Boot on 2nd May 1977. If I remember rightly, when I had my interview at The Royal Chase Hotel in Barnet at the end of March, I was only being considered for a Senior Surveyor's position for the Harlow contract. I think that the original offer was then updated when Henry Boot gained the Cheshunt contract in April and I was made Area Surveyor once again.
It was the Midland Region in Birmingham that was responsible for these new contracts in the south. (Remember where I noted in Part 10 about the region taking on a number of large housing contracts on the back of the success in Peterborough? Well Harlow and Cheshunt were two such contracts, destined to be disasters along with Tamworth, Coventry etc). When I joined, the housing contract in Harlow was already half way through and becoming difficult financially. We just had to get finished and get out. This included getting rid of the bricklaying sub-contractor who was going far too slowly. When management wanted to hold onto a cheque, the bricklayer's boss (as wide as he was tall, and an ex-boxer) sought me out on site and pulled me back to the office with various threats if he did not get his cheque. Fortunately my boss came over, gave the agreement to make the payment but that violence to staff could not be tolerated and the brickwork company had to go. So success of a kind in that we could employ new bricklayers and get the job on the move.
Cheshunt was different. This was 352 dwellings for the notorious GLC. Being there at the start was a big benefit. But we still struggled with the rates that Birmingham had given us. They had no appreciation of how much more labour cost in the south. We also struggled with our first bricklaying sub-contractor. He couldn't make the job pay, had too few men and came back for an increase on his rates. A huge decision was made that we would terminate his contract and take on the bricklayers as directly employed men. I worked out a payment regime that included bonus payments for various targets. These became a very popular incentive scheme and we had all the bricklayers we needed. They even worked some weekends just to get the bonus. There was an even more interesting story later when we did the same with the painting sub-contractor and we became, for a time, one of the biggest employers of individual painters in the south-east. We had to buy all the paint and the site manager used to dish out brushes personally.
It was in the June of 1977 that I started keeping action lists with various notes about my work. For a few years these were on sheets of bill paper that I kept in cardboard files until I progressed to A4 size notebooks. I have then all to this day along with an assortment of diaries. Looking at the first of these files I thought they would be a wealth of information. However they are filled with the day to day actions of a Quantity Surveyor and there is absolutely nothing of any real interest. The very first page is the list of things to do from a site meeting on Harlow. The first note is about some drainage drawings, and so it goes on.
What I did find in my notes was that we had a change of management in October 1977. Our two contracts in the south were taken off the badly performing Midland Region and given to the Yorkshire Region. I know! Remember Part 1 of this series and my seven managers in seven years? This was the first of those changes. Peter Horth was the Regional Manager and Ken Ottley the Regional Surveyor. They were first class. They were hugely supportive given both contracts turned out to have large losses.
No comments:
Post a Comment