British Tunnelling Society

at

The Institution of Civil Engineers

THE
2002 HARDING LECTURE
Reflections on 40 years in Tunnel Contracting
Colin Mackenzie BSc(CE)
atThe Institution of Civil Engineers
20 June 2002. 5.30pm

THE 2002 HARDING LECTURE

Editorial
Anthony Umney,BSc CEng FICE,
Chairman, British Tunnelling Society

here has been an increasing demand for the use of underground space in urban areas around the world as our
cities have become more and more congested. Tunnelling technology has equally taken enormous strides forward over the last 30 years. This has enabled tunnellers to meet these new demands whilst the improved performances of the Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) have held the costs of tunnelling against the generally increasing
costs of construction.
Inevitably these advances with tunnel technology have been matched by ever increasing demands and the challenges faced by todays tunnellers have led to difficulties in two areas. The first has been the difficulties experienced
with the insurance of tunnel works, and a second the recent collapse of gardens at Lavender Street on a Channel Tunnel
Rail Link TBM Contract. For the former the BTS has been working with the Association of British Insurers (ABI) to
develop a Joint Code of Practice for the Procurement, Design and Construction of Tunnels and Associated
Underground Structures in the United Kingdom. The objective of this Code of Practice is to promote and secure best
practice for the minimisation and management of risks associated with the design and construction of tunnels.
Contract insurers will require compliance with the Code of Practice, and although the Code has not yet been published
the industry is already effectively using the current draft of the Code. For the latter, the BTS is proposing the re-establishment of the Closed Face Working Group (CFWG), originally established to report on serious failures on two recent
UK tunnelling projects at Portsmouth and Hull. Union Railways have agreed to this tunnel review as being a constructive move to reassure not only the HSE but also the ABI. It is intended that the CFWG will be chaired by an independent person and its brief will be to include the assembly of data from incidents that have occurred in other parts of the
world.
The BTS have also recently established an All Party Group for Underground Space (APGUS). This has provided an
important opportunity to lobby Government on the benefits of the use of underground space and the capabilities of
our tunnelling industry. The BTS has experienced a welcome increase of membership and the number of entries
received this year from the Second Tunnel Industry Awards reflects an increased focus on the important part tunnelling
is taking in UK construction today.
The Fourth Harding Memorial Lecture was delivered by Colin MacKenzie. Colin has spent some 40 years in tunnel
construction and in his lecture he has been able to pass on to the younger engineers in particular the benefits of his
experience. Colin is probably the longest serving graduate of the Institution of Civil Engineers! This he relates was due
to all his documents, prepared for his professional interview, being destroyed in a site office fire and with his busy workload and without modern means of reproducing his documents he never managed to sit the interview. Colins career
has covered a very full range of tunnel construction in the UK and more importantly his contribution to it. His lecture
demonstrates the importance he has placed on safety from an early age and some lessons that can be learnt.
This Fourth Harding Memorial Lecture should be essential reading for todays aspiring tunnel engineers.

THE 2002 HARDING LECTURE

Colin Mackenzie

BSc(CE)

Colin Mackenzie retired in May 2001 after a 40 year career in Civil Engineering, much of which was on Tunnelling projects.
In 1961 he graduated with a degree in civil engineering from the University of Aberdeen, and immediately went to work for Mitchell
Construction on the Awe Hydro-Electric project in Argyll in Scotland.
After three years of rock tunnelling and dam construction, he left wonderful Loch Awe to join Mowlem on the Victoria Line Project in
London and there got his introduction to soft ground tunnelling.
He remained with Mowlem for 24 years, with that time split about 50/50 between tunnelling and other branches of Civil Engineering.
The projects with which he was involved include the Victoria Line (Victoria to Oxford Circus), the New London Bridge (where he was
Construction Manager for four years), the first Piccadilly Line extension into Heathrow, the East West Tyne & Wear Metro Tunnels, the
Lewes Road Tunnel, the Carsington Aqueduct Tunnels, the Don Valley Sewer Tunnels, the two Dorchester Bypasses, the Okehampton
Bypass, the QE2 Conference Centre Substructure in Westminster and the Molesworth Cruise Missile Shelters.
From 1982 to 1988 he was a Director of Mowlem Civil Engineering Ltd.
In 1988 he transferred his allegiance to AMEC, initially as Director for Tunnelling, and subsequently in a wider role encompassing other
Civil and Airport works.
The AMEC tunnelling works included two major sections of the London Ring main, the Fylde Coast Tunnels in Blackpool, tunnels for
Anglian Water at Clacton and at Ipswich, together with numerous other projects scattered across the UK.
He completed his career with a three year stint as the Resident Project Director on Contract 102 of the Jubilee Line Extension Project (the
section which included Westminster and Waterloo).
Colin served on the BTS committee for nine years, including two years as Chairman in the early 90s.
Colin is a recipient of the Telford Gold Medal of the Institution of Civil Engineers and of the James Clark Memorial Medal of the British
Tunnelling Society.

The author (left), at the Clacton Clearwater Project of Anglian Water,

with his daughter Karen, AMEC Project Manager Alan Barker, and
AMECs much-travelled and very capable 2.5m od Lovat TBM
named Karen Fiona Mackenzie after his daughter.

THE 2002 HARDING LECTURE

Harding Memorial Lecture

Reflections on 40 yearsin Tunnel Contracting
The fourth Sir Harold Harding Memorial Lecture was delivered by Colin Mackenzie BSc(CE)at the meeting of
the British Tunnelling Society held at the Institution of Civil Enigineers on Thursday,20th June 2002, 5.30pm
I never knew Sir Harold at a personal level, but
I did have contact with him when I worked for
Mowlem, and I frequently saw him in action as
the first Chairman of this Society. At the time that the
BTS came into being, in 1972, I was working on the
first Piccadilly Line Extension into Heathrow and I
lived in Pimlico, just round the corner from the ICE. It
was easy, therefore, for me to attend every meeting,
and that is just what I did, without fail.

1.

Harding was a formidable Chairman, often

calling directly on individuals to make a contribution when proceedings were a little sluggish. I recall one occasion, when the merits of rock
TBMs were being discussed, the Managing Director
of Nuttalls, Richard Triggs, sitting near the front,
minding his own business, when out of the blue he
was assailed by Harding with the following question tell us Mr Triggs, do you feel that these new-fangled
machines have a future, or would we be better
advised to continue to drill and blast, as God intended ?. To his great credit, Triggs rose and gave a very
interesting dissertation on the current state of development of rock TBMs. I dont know whether Harding
had a prior agreement with Triggs to call upon him,
but he made it appear to be spontaneous, and Triggs
didnt appear to know that it was coming. Together
they made it memorable, the proof of which is that
here I am telling you about it thirty years later.

2.

Some years afterwards, when I was the

Mowlem director responsible for tunnelling,
London Transport commissioned Mott
MacDonald to make a report on the condition of all
the cast iron linings of all the LUL tunnels. Among
other things, the report was required to identify the
manufacturers of the cast iron segments. Eventually,
Motts managed to do that, with the exception of one
type of segment which had a manufacturers casting
mark which nobody could identify. It existed in a
length of tunnel built by Mowlem some time before
the First World War. Motts contacted me in Mowlem.
I couldnt help. I contacted John King. He couldnt
help either, but he suggested that I might try Sir
Harold. I telephoned Sir Harold, who by that time was
well into his eighties and in retirement in the West
Country. He said that he was not familiar with that
particular casting mark, but he undertook to look for
it in some old papers which he had retained when
leaving Mowlem.

3.

4.

A week later he came up with the goods, in a

letter which started off -Dear Mackenzie.
That showed that Sir Harold hadnt lost any of
his old Mowlem style. In old Mowlem you didnt have
a first name. To Sir Harold I was therefore just
Mackenzie, to be addressed in correspondence as
Dear Mackenzie.
I telephoned him to thank him for his efforts.
He was delighted to have solved a puzzle that
had beaten everybody else, so delighted that
he regaled me with tales of how, in those far off days,
cast iron segments were manufactured in the North
and transported by ship to Hays Wharf in the Pool of
London, from where they were delivered to tunnel
sites by horse and cart, with each segment swathed in
straw to prevent it suffering damage as the carts clattered their way through the cobbled streets. I was
really sorry when he eventually hung up. I could have
listened to him for hours. As I reflect on that conversation now, I think of how appropriate it is that the
Society honours his memory each year. Long may it
continue to do so.

5.

INTRODUCTION TO LECTURE
I turn now to the lecture itself. When Peter
South, on behalf of the BTS Committee, invited me to give the lecture, I asked him if he had
any particular theme in mind. He replied that, while I
had a relatively free hand, he thought that reflections
on what I had learned during my forty years in the
industry would be suitable. So that is what I have
done. I propose to talk about some things that I have
learned which are relevant to the management of
tunnel contracts, and which I would like to pass on,
mainly to the younger members of our profession.
But you are not going to hear about Lovats and World
Records and so on. I, and many others, have spoken
enough about them in the past and theyve been
reported in great detail in the technical press. Im
going to talk about such things as Safety, Assessment
of Ground Conditions, Partnering, Costing,
Productivity, Payment of Labour, and about some
issues concerning Engineers for tunnelling.

6.

THE 2002 HARDING LECTURE

force. Yet, despite all those advantages, safety performance, as measured by Accident Frequency Rate,
was not as good as on some of our other contracts.

I think that I should make you all aware that I

have only ever been a contractor. In a career
spanning almost exactly forty years I have
worked for only three companies - all contractors.
Firstly, for Mitchell Construction, for three years on a
Scottish Hydro-Electric Scheme Secondly, for
Mowlem for twenty four years on a wide variety of
Civil Engineering projects and, lastly, with AMEC
for the final thirteen years of my career. I have never
worked for a consulting engineer, nor for a client.
Even my formal design experience was gained in a
contractors design office. Accordingly, I speak as a
contractor. So, if in giving my views from such a narrow base, I stray from the paths of reasonableness, I
have no doubt that I shall be held to account for it,
preferably in the bar afterwards.

7.

Accident Frequency Rate is the number of

Reportable Accidents per one hundred
thousand working hours. It is a long established measure recognised in many parts of the
world. The 100,000 hours was, originally, an approximation to a full industrial working life in the middle
of the twentieth century. That is, approximately 50
years by 2000 hours per year. A modern working life
will rarely have so many working hours, but the
100,000 is still a valid reference period.

10.

By late 1997, on Contract 102, despite our

best efforts, the rolling twelve month
Accident Frequency Rate was close to 1.0.
With a workforce of about 1250, and a staff of about
250, we seemed to be reporting a three day accident
every week. Some of them were trivial, but each one
was some form of personal injury, with all the unhappiness that that brings. We were simply not able to
drive down the frequency to our target level of 0.6. We
made all sorts of detailed examinations and analyses
of the accidents. These showed that the majority of
the accidents were attributable to such things as deficiencies in access arrangements, edge protection,
manual handling arrangements, and conflict
between plant and personnel in restricted working
space. Particularly worrying were the number of accidents arising from improvised expedient actions
taken by foremen and engineers to cover gaps in
detailed planning and method statements.

11.

SAFETY
The first subject which I am going to discuss is
safety. That will come as no surprise to anybody who has worked for me. Safety was
always the first item on my agenda. It is an issue close
to my heart, possibly because I was introduced to
industrial safety when I was very young. My father
was a Marine Mechanical Engineer with a business in
the port of Stornoway in the Western Isles of
Scotland, mainly supporting visiting cargo vessels,
the local fishing fleet and distant-waters trawlers
operating out of Hull, Grimsby and Fleetwood. I,
therefore, grew up in a state of constant awareness of
the hazards which exist in an engineering environment, because of the amount of time which I spent in
the workshops or on ships and boats with my father.
A concern for safety which developed in me at that
time has remained with me ever since. That background is also what stimulated my interest in mechanised tunnelling.

12.

Safety is a huge subject. I shall therefore

confine myself to some personal observations concerning safety in tunnelling. Good
safety management requires leadership from the
most senior levels of any company. If there is any
doubt of the sincerity of the commitment of the
directors and managers to safety, that doubt will
become a reality down the management line of a
contract and it will make it impossible to achieve
the best safety results. However, on some projects,
providing the right sort of leadership is not enough.
Sometimes individual projects present challenges
which have to be resolved at ground level. I shall
give you an example from Jubilee Line Extension
Project Contract 102 where we came up with an idea
which turned out to have impressive results.
Contract 102 was the section which included
Westminster and Waterloo. It was a 50/50 Balfour
Beatty-AMEC Joint Venture, (BBA). It had the full
safety support of both companies. It had excellent
staff on site, excellent safety professionals, an excellent safety management plan and a variety of safety
incentive schemes. It also had a very capable work-

I had my own reasons for concern. I had a

lot of contact with the workforce through
my frequent personal safety inspections. I
found most of the members of the workforce to be
intelligent and conscious of the potential safety hazards to which they could be exposed. Much of my
contact came through my making of on the spot
awards for useful contributions to site safety and tidiness. The awards were made to individuals and were
in the form of tax-free Marks & Spencer vouchers for

8.

By early 1998 we came to the conclusion

that none of our accepted safety management techniques could produce the
results we wished to achieve. We therefore decided to
have discussions with two HSE specialists who took a
regular interest in the contract, independently of the
HSE Inspectors and at a different intellectual level.
Their names were Jim Nielsen and Steve Peckitt. We
gave them free rein to examine all our arrangements
and to talk to anybody in BBA. Their key finding was
that the undoubted determination of my senior colleagues, and of myself, to make the contract a safe
place to work, was being diluted on its way down
through the layers of site management to the workplace. I had suspected this myself but I was surprised
by how widespread the HSE specialists had found it
to be.

9.

13.

THE 2002 HARDING LECTURE

10, 20 and 50. (BBA paid the tax). Sometimes,
when I queried why an individual was not dealing
with an obvious defect, such as faulty edge protection
at a high level within the Westminster box, I would
find that he was unwilling to stop doing the work
allocated to him by his foreman, in order to deal with
the defect, because he was fearful of the reaction of
the foreman to him taking such action on his own initiative. It seemed to me that the attitude of some of
the foremen was that the workers were there to do
what they were told to do, and that anarchy would
reign if workers were given the freedom to do things
on their own initiative. I believe that this attitude is
prevalent throughout the construction industry, and
that it is a key factor in our safety problems.
We concluded that we would have to find a
means of delegating real authority to a level
close to the actual execution of work. Of
course, such delegation would not relieve myself and
my senior colleagues of responsibility for safety on
the site. We decided to place our trust in the hands of
our Section Engineers and in senior members of the
workforce.

14.

After much deliberation, we decided to create, on each of the sites, groups which we
named Safety Task Teams. Each Task Team,
usually of eight persons, included trades chargehands and was led by a Senior Section Engineer.
Initially, no foremen were included in the Task Teams.
The Task Teams were supported by Safety
Professionals.

15.
16.

In common with many other sites the most

important categories of accidents were as
shown below.

a. Falls and trips at same level

(Gravity) (Clear walkways)
Falls of objects from above
(Gravity) (Edge protection)
Falls of persons to a lower level
(Gravity) (Handrails, stairs)
b. Manual handling
c. Contact with machinery
d. All other groups

50%

20%
20%
10%

My references to gravity are to draw attention to the

fact that the force which drives all falls is the force
of gravity. It is powerful and it is ever-present. We
must guard against exposing ourselves to its effects at
all times. The reference to stairs is intended to draw
attention to my practice of insisting on the use of proprietary staircases rather than ladders. I generally
permitted ladders to be used only where it was virtually impossible to install staircases.

17.

We asked the Task Teams to give priority to

categories a, b and c, putting the
falls category as top priority. It was

explained that, while the Task Team would receive

corporate policy on safety management from
above, its decisions on safety actions would NOT
have to be sanctioned from above these were to be
implemented, forthwith, at section level by the
Section Project Manager, with copies of the Task
Team notes being passed to Project Director level in
order to keep senior management fully informed of
developments.
At two week intervals, each Safety Task
Team made a formal inspection of its section of the works, and then held a meeting
to discuss the findings, to decide how to deal with the
safety deficiencies found on site, and how to prevent
such deficiencies occurring in the future. The inspection and the discussion usually occupied about four
hours. Following the site inspection the Team marked
a standard inspection scorecard whose format had
been agreed with myself and my fellow directors. A
sample scorecard from Westminster is shown in
Appendix 1. The Section Engineer then completed a
succinct record of the teams discussion and decisions, and prepared a coloured graph of the scorecard
results for that day, with comparisons with the scores
of previous inspections to illustrate trends in the
scores. A sample report chart is shown in Appendix 2.
The decisions and recommendations of the Task
Team were usually implemented without delay
through the Chargehands and the Section Project
Manager, the latter ensuring the full cooperation of
the Foremen.

18.

The improvements in safety performance

were surprising and rapid, and applied
across all types of work. Within a few weeks
of the introduction of the new arrangements the accident frequency dropped markedly and set out on a
trend which culminated in over 1.6 million manhours
being worked without a single reportable accident, ie
a frequency rate of 0.06 approximately ten times
better than our supposedly ambitious accident frequency target at the time when the Safety Task Team
concept was introduced. Thereafter, the improvement was sustained to the completion of the contract, albeit at a figure slightly above 0.06.

19.

Some people have tried to pooh-pooh

the importance which we have attributed
to the Safety Task Team concept, but
nobody has put forward a sustainable alternative
explanation of the dramatic improvement which we
experienced. I believe that the implementation of the
concept achieved the observed results through the
following factors.
a. It mobilised the latent capabilities of a large
intelligent workforce.
b. It immobilised the antiquated attitudes of
some of the Foremen.
c. It proved to everybody that a ZERO accident
frequency over an extended period is a realistic
objective.

20.

THE 2002 HARDING LECTURE

information provided with the tender documents,
placing particular emphasis on the borehole information. That approach seemed to me to be rather
simplistic, as the geology I had studied in university
made me aware of just how non-uniform soils and
rocks can be. However, it appeared to be the accepted practice, and we often got paid for what appeared
to me to be rather fine differences. The argument
often used by the contractor, and accepted by the
Engineer, was that the typical tender period of a few
weeks did not really give the bidders time to carry out
extensive research. Almost needless to say, I was
taught to only ever mention worse conditions,
never conditions better than those in the tender.

I am convinced that a dramatic improvement in the safety performance of the

industry could be achieved if formal
basic safety education were to be given to every
member of the workforce and if companies had the
confidence to trust them to apply it, as we did on
Contract 102.

21.

There is one other aspect of safety

which I wish to mention. It is that I
noted, over the years, that certain engineer managers had fewer accidents on their sites
than others who, superficially, appeared to be just as
well qualified and just as interested in safety. These
were the engineers who had done a lot of temporary
works drawings and programming. It seemed to me
that in the planning of temporary works these engineers had developed enhanced visualisation skills.
They therefore spotted safety hazards well in advance
of actual construction and either designed out these
hazards or drew attention to the need to manage
them. This could have important implications for
safety as more and more drawing is done, as a specialist activity, by CAD technicians rather than, as
part of their regular duties, by site engineers.

22.

These arrangements may have provided

a more or less equitable means of dealing with so-called unforeseen conditions when tunnelling was being carried out by
handwork or by open faced Greathead shields. But
they do not provide for adequate assessment and
management of ground risks when closed face tunnelling machines are being used. In an open-faced
shield it is usually possible to see the problem and get
access to it to deal with it. With a TBM, especially an
EPBM, it is rarely possible to see the problem or to get
access to it to do something about it. A relatively
minor unforeseen condition can therefore have a disproportionate impact on a TBM drive. So disproportionate, in some cases, as to completely nullify the
benefits which are supposed to flow from the use of a
TBM.

26.

The ability to visualise, especially from

drawings, is a vital facet of good safety
management. This has important implications in tunnelling as, in my experience, very few
tunnel foremen are good at reading engineering
drawings. Somebody who hasnt got good visualisation skills isnt likely to spot hazards until it is too late
to manage them properly. Such a person may therefore take dangerous expedient actions when the hazards are unexpectedly encountered, especially if he is
in a position of authority to instruct the workforce to
take such actions.

23.

I feel that a very rigorous approach needs

to be to taken to the matter of ground risk
when TBMs are to be used, and that there
should be a requirement on the bidder to make clear
exactly what he has allowed for in his bid, in a manner similar to that in which these things are dealt with
in a Partnering contract.

27.

However, the latest 3D CAD software

offers us the opportunity to use Virtual
Reality techniques to take everybody,
stage by stage, through graphical displays of the proposed construction procedures. When I say everybody, I especially include the relevant trades of the
workforce. 3D graphics proved useful on Contract 102
for giving everybody an appreciation of what we were
constructing, a much better appreciation than was
possible from conventional drawings which very few
site personnel could fully interpret.

24.

If the client proposes to award the contract to the lowest bidder, he would be
well advised to make sure that the bid is
genuinely the lowest by requiring each bidder to provide a fully evaluated risk schedule detailing what he
has allowed in his bid for those risks which he may
expect to share with the client.

28.

It almost goes without saying that all this

will be pointless if the client doesnt
already have an Engineer properly experienced in tunnelling works. Contractors are expert at
finding ways of portraying tender information in the
most favourable light so as to get the cost allowances
in the submitted bid as low as possible, and yet provide a believable basis for subsequently claiming
additional reimbursement. There is no doubt that
these practices have too often made a farce of bidding under traditional forms of contract.

29.

GROUND CONDITIONS ASSESSMENT

I turn now to the matter of assessment
of ground conditions. As an engineer
working for a contractor, generally
under conditions of contract in which ground risk
was shared with the client, I was taught that I must be
alert to changes in ground conditions and to the possibility that these might provide a basis for claiming
additional payment. I was taught to base my assessment of what was reasonably foreseeable on the

25.

THE 2002 HARDING LECTURE

Therefore, I was delighted when, around
the end of the eighties, more collaborative forms of contract came into use. It
then became possible for all the contracting parties
to pool their knowledge, together with the knowledge
of any geo-technical experts engaged by them, to
make a genuine, in-depth assessment of the ground
in which the tunnel is to be placed, and of the risks
associated with all the potentially difficult variations
which might be found in that ground.

30.

But how should the assessment of the

ground conditions be made ?. In recent
years, I have usually adopted the following
policy for TBM drives. Having put together a bid
team, we start by asking the best Engineering
Geologist available to us to discuss with us the general geology of the region in which the tunnel is to be
located. We consult BGS Geology Maps, BGS Regional
Geology handbooks and any other information available to us. We then ask the geologist to put the SI
information into the context of the overview which
we have just discussed. We then usually ask the
Engineering Geologist to describe to us how the
ground came to be where it is now, and to describe
the processes which, in the passage of geological
time, have led to it having its present physical properties. That request usually results in the geologist
giving us a lecture about desert conditions, or about
deposition in shallow marine water, or about glacial
rivers, or about Tundra phenomena, etc., as appropriate.

31.

In almost every case it is possible to identify a region on the Earth where, at the
present time, one can find conditions
similar to those which gave rise to the soils or rocks in
which it is proposed to drive the tunnel.
If one then consults photographs or diagrams of
that region in geology text-books, such as Holmes
Principles of Physical Geology, (1), it is usually possible to get a good appreciation of the variations
which occur in the general conditions, variations
which one may have to deal with, but which have not
been exposed by the boreholes. The TBM will have to
be made capable of penetrating these variations. In
some cases this will lead to the TBM having features
added to it, at substantial cost, to cope with something whose probability of occurrence might be
rather remote, but whose potential costs would be
many times greater than the costs of equipping the
TBM to cope with that particular condition.

32.

These deliberations usually require input

from every discipline in the team. I made
it obligatory that the decision on which
type of TBM to select, and how to tool it, be made by
a multi-disciplinary team, and be ratified by the
Tunnelling Divisions Board. In my view, no individual should be empowered to make that decision on
his own. Anybody who takes it upon himself to do so
is, in my opinion, asking for trouble.

33.

In passing, I should mention that I have

seen companies attempt to place all the
commercial risk inherent in these decisions on the TBM supplier. My experience leads me
to conclude that that is not appropriate. My view is
that the risk should lie somewhere with the contracting parties. If the contracting parties cannot handle
it, they shouldnt be tackling a tunnelling job.

34.

Going back to geological issues, the diagram in Appendix 3, taken from Professor
Peter Fookes 1997 Glossop Lecture, (2), is
helpful to the gaining of an understanding of the relevant geological processes which have created the
rocks and soils of the UK. This diagram provides a
wonderful insight into our geological history, and an
understanding of how, for example, we come to have
coal, Bunter Sandstone and so on. These tectonic
movements are still taking place, at velocities similar
to those at which our fingernails grow, according to
an expert on a recent Radio 4 broadcast !.

35.

PARTNERING
Turning now to Partnering. Earlier in this
lecture I have used the expression collaborative contracts, because that is a
generic expression which I have seen used by others.
In most cases what I really mean is Partnering.
Almost all the contracts for which I was responsible
in the final ten years of my career were formal
Partnering contracts, both in tunnelling and in general civil engineering. I have been amazed by what we
achieved on some of these contracts.

36.

I should mention at this point that I am

not a Johnny-come-lately to Partnering.
My first experience of what could be
regarded as a formal Partnering contract was in 1968,
with Mowlem. It was the contract for the construction of the East Greenwich Relief Sewer for the GLC. It
was a rush job because a large, and politically
important, contract for the southern approaches to
the Blackwall Tunnel had been let before it was
realised that, as a consequence of its design, a new
sewer tunnel would have to be built some distance
away from the approach works. This new sewer was
not small. It was seven feet in diameter, in Thames
Gravel, close to the river, and with its invert three
metres below the water table. In addition, for a substantial part of its length, the only alignment available for the new sewer was alongside, and within a
few metres of, the Southern Outfall Sewer which carried, I was told, something like a quarter of Londons
sewage. I used to worry that, if we got it wrong, about
a quarter of the population of London wouldnt be
able to go to the toilet !. Now, that really is something
to get worried about !. The potential for embarrassment was acute.

37.

THE 2002 HARDING LECTURE

tendering because everything is out in the open from
the start. It eliminates virtually all the ingenious contractual manipulation which has characterised competitive tendering, and which has run so many contracts into trouble. It mobilises the talents of the
whole team and makes everybody concentrate on the
out-turn result from the very outset of the project. It
is the out-turn that the client wants to know, not the
starting price. Clients do not like uncertainties.

I dont know the details of how Mowlem

came to have the contract, but I understand that it was the result of very rapid
and close negotiation between Vincent Collingridge,
the Mowlem Tunnelling Director, and senior GLC
Engineers. The result was a form of contract based on
the ICE conditions, but with open books accounting, with limits on profit and loss, and with facilities
for close cooperation between the GLC and Mowlem
in regard to the management of the project.

38.

I anticipate that Partnering, in the course

of time, will sort the more capable tunnellers from the less capable. Partnering,
because of the openness of partner selection, gives a
client an opportunity to run the rule over potential
contractors, and designers, to an extent not open to
him in other forms of contract. Clients have choices.
Basic logic suggests that a client will choose to partner only with the best available to him.

43.

It worked very well. The works were completed inside the very tight programme
necessary to avoid disruption of the other
contract, and within budget. Despite the tunnel
being relatively short in length, it was advanced on
four faces simultaneously from two working shafts,
with all tunnelling being carried out in compressed
air. All faces were advanced using clay pocketing
methods with Greathead shields and full horizontal
face planking.

39.

Long term Framework Partnering

enables clients to get even greater benefits, benefits which arise from continuous performance improvement. On the now-famous
BAA Paving Team infra-structure works on UK airports, the clients objective was to reduce his costs by
30%, in real terms, over a period of five years. That
was one hell of an ask, but it was achieved. It would,
almost certainly, not have been achieved if the work
had been packaged as a series of individual repetitive
Partnering contracts, even though these would, individually, have produced better results than other
forms of contract.

44.

But the success achieved in Greenwich

wasnt just due to the form of contract,
nor to good Mowlem or GLC engineering. We were blessed with two wonderful things. The
first blessing was a complete set of first class drawings which were not varied as the work progressed.
We completed the works using the same bound set of
drawings as we had been issued with at the start of
the contract. The second blessing was a GLC Resident
Engineer named Harold Bubbers, a brother, I believe,
of the famous Bernard Bubbers of Motts. Harold was
a superb engineer with a wonderfully calm diplomatic style which worked wonders with the many neighbours and authorities affected by our works.

40.

Although the client is the real winner

from Partnering, the other parties also
win. For example, Framework Partnering, and Partnering on large projects, enable contractors to invest in highly productive, but expensive,
equipment and enables designers to develop the
most cost effective designs and permanent works
components. These developments make contractors
and designers more competitive when pursuing later
opportunities.

45.

The list below shows that Greenwich had

most of the factors which my subsequent
experience has shown to be vital to the
successful and harmonious execution of tunnelling
works.
a.
People who knew what they were doing, ie
appropriate specialists
b.
Clear and unchanging construction
requirements
c.
A comprehensive assessment of
construction risks
d.
Contingency arrangements for dealing with
these risks
e.
A realistic budget
f.
Open Books Accounting
g.
Collaborative management of the project
h.
An excellent engineering representative of
the client who put a lot of effort into
ensuring that construction never met third
party Red Lights.

41.

But not everybody can partner successfully. It calls for styles of personal conduct to which some people can not conform. The traditional, fiercely competitive, and sometimes secretive, nature of the tunnelling industry has
nurtured quite a lot of people who endeavour to maximise their results through less than honourable
commercial behaviour. There are also those who relish absolute power and to whom collaborative decision-making is anathema. These are to be found
among all of the contracting parties, not just among
the contractors.

46.

I sincerely believe that there is no better

way than Partnering for a client to get
the required quality, the lowest costs for
that quality, and the best programme. Partnering is
superior to traditional forms of so-called competitive

These factors have been recognised by

several clients, as a result of which we
have found ourselves on a number of
occasions being assessed by Behavioural
Psychologists engaged by the client to assist him in

42.

47.
8

THE 2002 HARDING LECTURE

contractor selection.
Even people with good
Partnering characteristics take time to make the
adjustment from traditional forms of contract to
Partnering. I said earlier that my first experience of
Partnering was at Greenwich in the late sixties. My
next experience of it was at Tooting Bec, with Thames
Water and AMEC, at the end of the eighties.
A major problem had arisen on Ring
Main Contract 1A at the time when
Thames Water was being privatised.
There was a significant difference between AMEC
and Thames Water over extra payment for dealing
with the problem. This was a most unwelcome complication of the privatisation arrangements. It was
imperative that it be resolved in a manner which
would enable Thames Water to have an immaculate
privatisation prospectus. Thames Water therefore
decided to switch from the traditional form of contract, on which the contract had been let, to an open
books form of contract embodying Partnering. All
historic differences were settled quickly, in order to
create the right climate for the remainder of the
works. The job went well thereafter, but some staff on
both sides found the transition difficult. On the contractors side, some found it difficult to be open about
such things as internal plant hire rates, and about
how to calculate workforce bonus payments. On the
clients side, some found it difficult to treat the contractors staff as equals and to face up to sharing
responsibility for decision-making in regard to programme. But, in both cases, good cooperative behaviour became established after about two months.
That cooperation became closer and closer as ideas
emerged to overcome, completely, a potential programme delay of about eighteen months, and as
more and more difficult work was successfully completed.

48.

It has never been clear to me whether

Partnering was introduced at Tooting Bec
as an expedient solution to a pressing
privatisation problem, or whether it was meant to be
the first step in a long term policy for the execution of
capital works. As time passed, it turned out to be the
latter, and provided both the technical and contractual foundations for all subsequent Ring Main contracts, with their remarkable successes and achievements. The industry owes a lot to Roger Remington of
Thames Water, whose introduction of the I Chem E
form of contract to tunnelling was such a courageous
and far-sighted decision.

49.

Roger subsequently drew my attention to

a specific, and important, benefit which
Partnering gives to clients. It concerns
the effective use of capital. There was a stage in
Thames Waters capital works programme when
Roger had responsibility for capital works worth
about 200 Million, all of which were on an open
books Partnering basis. He was called to the
Highways Agency to discuss Thames experiences of
Partnering. The person he met in the Highways

50.

Agency was also responsible for capital works worth

about 200 million, but all of these were on the traditional non-partnering basis. They compared the
amounts of capital immobilised by each of them as
provisions for legitimate contractual claims. In
Rogers case, the amount was 0.5 Million. In the
Highways Agencys case, the amount was 40 Million.
I acknowledge that that is a simplistic comparison,
but it serves to illustrate a fundamental point Partnering gives clients greater certainty in regard to
out-turn costs, and thereby enables capital to be used
more confidently and efficiently.
After the Ring Main, we used our newfound skills to win and execute further
Partnering projects with Thames Water in
the South, with United Utilities in the North West,
and with Anglian Water in the East. These jobs were
not without their setbacks, but in only one case did
we and our client fail to deliver the goods. The one
exception was a Thames Water contract in East Ham,
where the contractor/client relationship at site just
did not gel, and AMEC lost a lot of money because we
had to meet the costs of overshooting the Final Target
Cost. So the contractor doesnt always make money
on Partnering contracts. That example proved to me
the crucial importance of the leaders at site being
fully committed to Partnering, and of not reverting to
traditional attitudes when the going gets tough. That
was the third contract in a series of twelve partnering
projects executed by AMEC Tunnelling up to the time
of my retirement. It was never allowed to happen
again.

51.

In the course of these contracts we had

some wonderful partners. In this context
I feel that it is appropriate to comment
on the contributions to success made by three of the
best partners with whom it has been my pleasure to
work. They are Andy Miller of Thames, Steve Smith of
United Utilities, and Adrian Henderson of Anglian. All
of them are knowledgeable, unusually competent,
and so self-effacing that I feel compelled to mention
them for fear of them otherwise not being given the
credit they deserve. In addition, each of them displayed remarkable forbearance in putting the common objective above any personal ambition or goal.
And, none of them ever tried to be the contractors
Agent, a common failing of some client representatives in the early days of a Partnering contract.
Engineers like these are worth their weight in gold.

52.

Although I have said that East Ham was

our only Partnering failure, that is true of
my AMEC experience. However, as a Joint
Venture partner of Balfour Beatty, we had a notable
failure on Contract 102 on the Jubilee Line, where
Partnering initiated by BBA was not reciprocated by
the JLE. It was their loss. In my opinion, it cost them
millions.

53.

THE 2002 HARDING LECTURE

feel you need onto a single A4 sheet of paper, then
youre trying to collect too much data, and it will progressively bury you. You will end up trying to figure
out whats wrong with the data rather than trying to
figure out what the data is telling you. So keep it as
simple as you can. Pay particular attention to trends.
I emphasise that point. Its the cumulative result that
matters, not flash in the pan fluctuations which
may be due to clerical indiscretions or to unusually
favourable transient circumstances. Appendix 5 illustrates my single sheet approach. It shows a sample
single sheet of the direct costs of a typical medium
diameter EPBM tunnel, unidentified for reasons of
confidentiality.

So, Partnering has been a wonderful

development for tunnelling, and we
should do everything possible to foster
its adoption by all clients, but, in exchange, we shall
have to continue to get better and better at what we
do, to win and retain the confidence of clients in the
Partnering concept.

54.

COSTING
I now turn, but only briefly, to the subject
of costs. I have been surprised by how
many engineers have shown little knowledge of costs. To some extent this has been due to
contractors being very secretive about costs, and permitting only the most senior staff to be privy to them.
Such a policy is a serious impediment to the proper
professional development of engineers. I dont see
how an engineer can do justice to his responsibilities
without a reasonable working knowledge of what
things cost. Youve got to be on top of your costs to be
on top of your job.

55.

PRODUCTIVITY
I shall now talk briefly on the subject of
productivity. Something that is much
more highly developed in tunnelling
than in most branches of civil engineering. There is
much published material on the subject, so I shall
confine myself to some of the aspects which I found
to be of particular relevance to soft ground tunnelling.

60.

It has been my practice to get my staff on

each job to compile for me a single sheet
listing the current local costs of relevant
materials and resources. I started doing so in
Mowlem and I kept doing so until retirement. These
exercises were intended to be as much for their benefit as mine.. Appendix 4 shows an example of one of
my standard lists of local basic costs. I had a similar
sheet for plant costs.

56.

Productivity is not production. It is a

measure of the efficiency of production. In
soft ground tunnelling it is usually about
finding the most cost effective balance between input
of resources and rings in the ground.

61.

Tunnelling equipment is in a continuous state of development. It has always

been so, and it will continue to ever be
so. As a result, contractors, when planning or bidding
for new work, regularly have to make assessments of
the productivity which will be achieved by new
equipment. They are able to do this by fragmenting
the main production activity into a number of subactivities, for most of which they will have existing
productivity information. For example, a new type of
tunnelling machine may be capable of excavating
much more quickly in a certain type of ground than
was previously possible. In estimating the time for
one complete ring cycle the contractor will be able to
rely on existing data for many components of that
cycle.

62.

Engineers should always have access to at

least this level of basic costs. They cant do
local budgeting without them. Basic costs
dont vary a lot from contractor to contractor. So there
is no great risk inherent in a breach of confidentiality.
What does vary is the productivity which each contractor achieves with these resources. The out-turn
cost per unit of work can therefore vary substantially
between contractors.

57.

Again, Partnering has been very good

for the advancement of engineers
familiarity with costs and productivity.
The open books nature of these contracts has compelled the contractors to develop costing systems
which make information available much more rapidly than before, and more widely. The formality of
open books accounting enforces a strict discipline
on forecasting and costing, and on comparisons
between the two a better discipline than ever existed previously in most contractor organisations.

58.

But where does all this existing data

come from ?. Well, it usually comes from
hours and hours of activity observation
and activity analysis by young engineers. Most of us
have done it. In my case it started with recording data
when rock tunnelling on the Awe Hydro-Electric
Project in Argyll. Mitchell Construction recorded
comprehensive details of every round fired in every
face on the project. That data was distilled and
analysed at the end of each month. It resulted in very
high outputs with modest resources. Discipline was
tight, and downtime was virtually non-existent. I suppose it is no surprise that the company held the world

63.

Engineers have to be careful not to try to

become amateur accountants. Reams of
figures, giving every detail of every aspect
of everything, are not what engineers need.
Engineers need succinct, reliable information, rapidly. I believe in the single sheet approach. If, at each
level of the project, you cant get the information you

59.

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THE 2002 HARDING LECTURE

high speed record for rock tunnelling at that time.
From there, I went to Mowlem on the
Victoria Line in London, and got introduced to a more sophisticated level of
work study and activity analysis on the LUL Running
Tunnel drum diggers. That set the pattern for my subsequent twenty four years with Mowlem, both in tunnelling and in general civil engineering.

64.

So, my advice to all younger engineers,

and to some more senior ones, is to collect and analyse productivity data at
every relevant opportunity and apply the conclusions
of these analyses to continuously improve productivity either by refining existing methods of production
or by inventing new ones. You may find tedious the
many hours you have to spend collecting and
analysing data in the early parts of your careers but
your efforts will be rewarded handsomely later in
your lives.

65.

There is one aspect of tunnel drive production which I wish to touch upon
before leaving this subject. It concerns
the early parts of tunnel drives, the so-called
Learning Curve Period. I mention it because it is
rarely shown on Gantt Chart programmes and has
been a regular source of differences, between the
contracting parties, in the reporting of progress. Its
something that I have been asked about many times.

66.

Over the years, I have analysed the records

of many mechanised tunnel drives, and I
have reached some conclusions as to how
to assess the so-called Learning Curve Effect on the
early part of tunnel drive programmes. At this point it
is necessary to refer to Appendices 6, 7, 8 and 9.

67.

Appendix 6 shows a typical tunnel drive

programme, in Time/Chainage format, for a medium diameter EPBM-type
drive launched through a pre-formed eye in the side
of a shaft. It shows the TBM advancing a short distance, using only the very short equipment train
which it was possible to accommodate in the shaft,
and then stopping to install more parts of the equipment train. Advance then resumes until sufficient
tunnel has been driven to accommodate the full
equipment train and pit bottom facilities. Following
that final equipment installation phase, the drive
resumes and continues to completion. Note that I
have not shown a reduction of output when completion is approaching. The final curve of the so-called
S-Curve, so beloved of work study experts, is hardly
ever noted in UK soft ground tunnelling, in my experience.

68.

Appendix 7 shows the same programme

with the equipment installation periods
removed. Having reduced many TBM
drive records to this format I found that the tangent
point between the learning curve and the straight

69.

11

line of the sustained output after the tangent point

tended to be found at approximately 300 metres from
the start of the drive. Analyses which I made in the
1970s, mainly concerning drives in clay, showed the
tangent point to be found at a distance from the start
approximately equal to three times the length of the
equipment train being towed behind the TBM. With
EPBMs the distance to the tangent point tends to be
a little greater, ie the 300 metres referred to above.
The difference may be due to the extra distance needed for the EPBM drivers to find the operational
parameters for optimum machine performance in
the more arduous ground conditions in which
EPBMs are used. My conclusion is that a distance of
300 metres, from start to tangent point, is a good figure to use in programming all advanced TBM/EPBM
drives. However, that conclusion only fixes the distance. It is still necessary to find a means of establishing the time to reach the tangent point.
Appendix 8 shows the same programme
line as in Appendix 7 but with two additional lines.
a. The first additional line is a line joining the origin to the tangent point. I found that the slope of that
line was approximately 50% of the slope of the
straight line of the sustained output after the tangent
point. There was a range of values for the slope of the
line but, as 50% was approximately a mean value, I
feel that the 50% figure is a reasonable figure to use
for general programming purposes, especially as,
when the programme is being developed, the
straight line after the tangent point is still an estimate. Most engineers and estimators seem to able to
assess the sustained output after the tangent point
with a reasonable degree of accuracy, but many have
difficulty assessing learning curves. So, it seems reasonable to link the slope of the line between the origin and the tangent point to the slope of the straight
line after the tangent point. That being the case, I recommend that the 50% figure be used, ie the average
output over the learning curve period be taken to be
50% of the planned sustained output after the learning curve period. The position of the tangent point at
the end of the learning curve can thereby now be
fixed in terms of both distance and time, for the purposes of both estimating and programming.
b. The second additional line is a dotted line
extrapolating, downwards, the straight line of the
sustained output after the learning curve to intersect the horizontal axis, ie the time axis. The intercept, The Learning Curve Effect, between the origin
and the intersection of the dotted line with the axis,
can be calculated using the recommendations made
above. However, the magnitude of that intercept will
be between 2 weeks and 3 weeks for most practical
TBM outputs. I recommend that the intercept be
taken, for preliminary programming purposes, to be
2 weeks for TBMs less than 4 metres in diameter, and
3 weeks for TBMs above that diameter. That takes us
to Appendix 9.

70.

THE 2002 HARDING LECTURE

other workmen. They told me that the best of them
had lung capacities close to double the norm, at
rest heart rates in the forties per minute, and superb
bone structure and muscle development. In addition,
most of them had been introduced to physical work
at an early age and had developed mind-sets which
could cope with unbroken hours of arduous toil.
Interestingly, these are the same characteristics
which distinguish the crack Tour de France cycle riders from general sportsmen.

Appendix 9 is intended to show a simplistic

programme for preliminary programming
purposes. This simplistic Time/Chainage
programme is constructed by marking off, on the
horizontal axis, an intercept equal in length to the
sum of, (i) the time allowed for equipment installation after the TBM has been launched, and, (ii) either
2 weeks or 3 weeks, as appropriate, for the Learning
Curve Effect. A straight line can then be drawn from
the end of that intercept to the end of the drive. The
slope of the straight line is the same slope as for the
straight line sustained output after the learning
curve.

71.

The point which I am trying to make is

that the high wages paid to handwork
miners were EARNED by extraordinary
individuals from incentive payment schemes from
which typical construction workers would have
earned only typical construction wages. There is no
fundamental reason why the high payments made to
these supermen should be made to normal individuals just because they are working in tunnels.

76.

PAYMENT OF THE WORKFORCE

Im now on to my second last section. Its
about the payment of the workforce. A
sensitive subject, but, now that Im
retired, I suppose that I can speak more freely than I
could as a tunnelling director.

72.

Machines have removed most of the need

for supermen. It makes no sense to invest
in machines AND pay handwork wages
for using them. However, it is a fact of life that, in the
UK, levels of pay for mechanised tunnelling have
been allowed to drift upwards to levels previously
associated with handwork. This is not the case outside the UK. It is not my intention to discuss the reasons for the UK anomaly. I shall say simply that I have
never been happy about it.

77.

It seems that a lot of people think that the

high levels of payment made, historically,
to face workers on handwork drives were
due to the conditions in tunnel faces, to the arduous
nature of the work, to having to work shifts, and so
on. That is a misconception. These payments were
EARNED under piecework arrangements in which
the targets for the various elements of work were
broadly in line with the targets for other types of civil
engineering works. What was different was the men.
They were the physical crme de la crme of the
human race. They could have earned the level of
money they got in tunnelling on other types of construction work. I have seen handwork miners EARN
tunnelling money on deep cut and cover pipe
installation and on major concrete pours.

73.

When I came to London in 1964 to work

for Mowlem on the Victoria Line, all
underground work was carried out on
the basis of piecework, with all piecework Tasks
being expressed in Hours rather than in money.
One Hour was worth the Working Rule Agreement
rate for one hour for the grade of employee for which
the task was set. That meant that there was a lot of
stability in these Tasks because general inflation
had no effect on them. Some Tasks on the Victoria
Line had been in existence for many years,
unchanged, from earlier LUL projects. However, in
1972, following industrial unrest across the whole of
the construction industry, there was a 25% increase
in the base rate in the Working Rule Agreement.
Tunnelling contractors decided, as a group, to stop
setting prices in Hours and to switch to setting
them in monetary terms. It was an effort to mitigate
the effects of such a substantial increase, but it meant
that thereafter all pricing was exposed to the effects
of general inflation. The stability of pricing was lost
forever. Estimators and managers were then presented with serious difficulties in setting prices and
Tasks. The entry of Trades Unions into tunnelling,
and the end of Hire and Fire, both in the mid seventies, generated even more uncertainty.

78.

For example, Mowlem had a pipeline

contract in Edinburgh at a time when
tunnelling work was in very short supply
North of the border. A group of Donegal tunnel miners asked to be considered for employment on the
pipeline. They were told that they would have to
accept the bonus task already set out for a civil engineering workforce. They did so, and proceeded to
produce outputs which earned them as much money
as they would have earned in tunnelling. The same
bonus task had been used with a civils workforce
before the Edinburgh contract, and was used again
afterwards, without outputs and payment levels
being achieved comparable with those achieved by
the miners.

74.

It wasnt until I was at Greenwich, and we

had to send miners for compressed air
medicals, and the doctors started asking
questions about where we got these men from, that I
came to realise that handwork miners were not normal human beings like the rest of the population. The
doctors could always pick out the miners from the

75.

As an Agent, and as a Contracts Manager,

I had a difficult time after 1972 endeavouring to assess movements in the labour
market and trends in the pricing of Tasks and bonus

79.
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THE 2002 HARDING LECTURE

schemes. But, I kept good records, with the result that
by 1980 I had sufficient data to allow me to draw up a
set of tentative guidelines for my own use. I found
them to be effective and I have updated them privately ever since. They have their roots in the old
Hours system, in an attempt to eliminate the effects
of general inflation.
Appendix 10 is a graph of how I link payment to output for a TBM Ringbuilder
the grade of employee which I have
selected for use as a benchmark. Ringbuilders are
important. They install the permanent works which,
after all, is the object of the whole tunnelling operation. Appendix 11 shows my guidelines for linking the
payment of the Ringbuilder to the payment of the
various other grades of employee on a typical TBM
tunnelling contract.. Appendix 12 shows how to calculate the costs of employing these grades at these
levels of payment. (Note that the example given in
this appendix is for output matching programme
requirement.) Appendix 13 shows my guidelines for
the payment of a top class handwork Miner
engaged on works requiring excavation to be carried
out using hand-held pneumatic clay spades, and
spoil to be loaded by shovel. A handwork Miner is
usually a member of a tightly knit gang whose numbers are dependent on the diameter of the works
being undertaken. As an approximate general guide,
the Leading Miner of the gang is paid 7.5% more than
the Miner, and the Miners Labourers 7.5% less than
the Miner. The determination of the level of payment
to be made to handwork miners should only be in
the hands of engineers/managers who are very experienced in this type of work. Top class handwork
miners should be treated with the utmost respect.
The enormous effort which they put into their work is
a much more personal thing than the effort put in by
workers engaged on machine tunnelling, where the
main brunt of the work is borne by the machine. Men
are not machines, and should never be treated as
such.

80.

I hope that you will find the information

to be useful. I emphasise that it is for
guideline purposes only. The figures
should be reviewed in the light of all the circumstances of any specific contract and may have to be
tuned to suit. I would be interested in hearing from
others who have done similar exercises.

81.

Tunnelling is no place for suck it and

see engineering. Everything needs to
be fully engineered, and planned in
detail, before any construction work is put in hand.
Some decisions in tunnelling are virtually irreversible. For example, it is not possible to switch
TBMs in the manner in which it is possible to switch
even the biggest machines on surface works.
Tunnelling simply has to have top notch engineers.
All the easy tunnels have already been driven. The
future will almost certainly consist of hi-tech railway
and road tunnels, and difficult water industry tunnels. We shall need very good engineers for these
works.

83.

To get them, we need to persuade

some of the best products of our
schools to become tunnelling engineers because it is a stimulating and rewarding
career, and one which is worth pursuing through university education and subsequent professional qualification. But, we have to compete for the talents of
these young people against the many excellent
opportunities open to them in other professions. We
shall only do so successfully if the financial rewards
of following a tunnelling career are comparable with
those available from following other professional
careers. I am being deadly serious when I say that I
think that we need to approximately double the
salaries we pay currently in tunnelling to our best
professional engineers. I have done as much as I have
been able to do, to achieve that objective, within the
constraints of the human resources policies in the
large public companies in which I have held director
responsibilities. I have been fortunate to have had
some excellent engineers work for me. Not just civil
engineers, but mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, electronics engineers and mining engineers
all essential to successful tunnelling. I used to derive
a modest satisfaction from seeing the salaries paid to
them sitting at the top, or near to the top, of the company salary lists. But these salaries were still not high
enough to really catch the attention of top notch
school leavers.

84.

ENGINEERS

Likewise, I feel that we need to

improve the working conditions for
engineers. For example, I feel that they
should not be obliged to work twelve hour shifts as a
matter of course. In fact, I feel that we should drop
twelve hour shifts altogether, for everyone. I shall
come to that later.

Finally, I wish to say a few words

about engineers. Tunnelling is as
technically challenging as any branch
of civil engineering, with the possible exception of
bridge engineering. Consider the challenges of the
Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) and the Jubilee Line
Extension Project (JLEP), and then consider if there
are other civil engineering projects comparable with
them.

Some of you will, no doubt, tell me

that we cant afford to increase engineers salaries by as much as I have
suggested, because of the cost increases which will
flow from doing so. I shall try to demonstrate that the
effects will not be dramatic, and that they are well
within the improvements in costs which flow from
Partnering and from general improvements in efficiency of working. I show, in Appendix 14, a table

82.

13

85.

86.

THE 2002 HARDING LECTURE

which shows a typical pattern of costs for soft ground
tunnelling using a medium sized EPBM in a
Partnering environment. These costs are expressed as
percentages of Total Direct Costs, ie the total of
Temporary Works and Materials, Permanent
Materials, Subcontractors, Labour and Plant. That is
the form of presentation which I, at a personal level,
have found to be the most meaningful for examining
tender summaries. Dealing with the cost of engineers, you can see that the typical cost of all staff is
12% of Total Direct Costs and, therefore, 8.7% of the
Total Selling Price. Less than half of that figure is the
cost of engineers, the remainder being the cost of
other staff. Doubling the salaries paid to engineers
would therefore, superficially, add around 4% to the
Tender Total. But I dont believe that the figure would
actually be as high as that. The higher salaries would
attract the very best engineers, whose abilities would
go some way, if not all the way, to offset the superficial increase in costs arising from the increased
salaries. So, it might actually turn out to be a no cost
proposition.

Having already mentioned my distaste for twelve hour shifts, I would

like to finish by putting forward an
immaculate economic argument for putting an end
to them, but I find that I am not able to do so. I find
myself facing the same difficulty as must have faced
reformers who argued for an end to slavery a couple
of centuries ago. The argument is essentially a
humanitarian one, but with an underlying conviction
that economic benefits will flow from a decision to
stop employing a working practice which has outlived its time.

90.

Nevertheless, I do have some evidence

to support that conviction. I have had
many contracts which operated a twelve
hour double shift work pattern, a number which have
operated an eight hour treble shift pattern, and a
number which have operated a ten hour double shift
pattern with a two hour gap between shifts. The pattern of ten hour shifts with two hour gaps produced
the most satisfactory overall results. Production tended to be very good, and downtime tended to be very
low. And, perhaps most importantly, staff and workforce were happier than under the other arrangements.

91.

I recognise that there is an argument

that an increase in engineer salaries
would create pressures to increase the
salaries of other staff. While I wont try to deny that
argument, I dont feel that that is a particularly strong
one, because the salaries of some other grades are
already high enough to meet market demands, for
example foremen, and no other grade of employee
is as fundamentally vital to the industry as engineers.

87.

The twelve hour shift pattern is simply

too brutal. The eight hour pattern is
fine for the workforce, and for some of
the staff, but its intensity puts too much pressure on
the senior managers and supervisors who cannot be
on an eight hour pattern. My experience is that these
senior managers and supervisors get completely
worn out on contracts with eight hour shift working.
On balance, therefore, I strongly favour ten hour
shifts Monday to Thursday, and eight hours on
Fridays (to conform to European Working Hours regulations).

92.

If you reject completely the idea that a

reduction of the increased costs would
be achieved through having the best
engineers, you could simply regard the 4% to 5% as
being the cost of attracting top quality school leavers
into civil engineering tunnelling something that
appears to be necessary in any case from inspection
of recent trends in numbers of entrants to UK universities to study engineering.

88.

I recognise that some clients may not

be over the moon with this proposal,
but, over recent years, we have given
them enormous advances in predictability, quality
and speed of construction, together with substantial
cost savings through Partnering. I would like to think
that most of our client partners would agree that we
have earned the right to a more civilised existence.

93.

The increase which I have advocated

above would have to be made incrementally over, say, a five year period,
but there would have to be some form of unequivocal
public commitment to it, to make potential students
aware that it was being made. In my judgement that
commitment will have to be made soon, or we shall
not have the engineers to meet the needs of the country.

89.

References
(1) Holmes, Professor Arthur & Dr Doris, 1978, Principles of Physical Geology, Third Edition, published by Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd,
Sunbury on Thames.
(2) Fookes, Professor Peter G., 1997, The First Glossop Lecture, The Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology, published by the
Geological Society, Volume 30, Part 4, Nov 1997.

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Appendix 1

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Appendix 2

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Appendix 3

Source: Fookes, Professor Peter G., 1997, The First Glossop Lecture

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Appendix 4

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Appendix 5

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Appendix 6

Appendix 7

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Appendix 8

Appendix 9

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Appendix 10

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Appendix 11

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Appendix 12

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Appendix 13

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Appendix 14

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