Integrated Project Insurance

Dudley College Advance II, Dudley

The Integrated Project Insurance Model was first used on a new build further educational facility for Dudley College. The alliance achieved close integration between structure and services, by the creation of a thermal adaptive building structure: this included a high-performance thermal envelope, engineered natural ventilation, and active thermal mass using TABS heating. Such an innovative solution for a building with low energy requirements would have been unlikely if the various specialists in the Integrated Project Team (IPT) had been working in silos. As a result, energy costs are 50% less than of the sister building delivered under Design & Build. The IPI Alliance Contract and IPI Policy facilitated collaboration between every member of the alliance supporting the process. It ensures a no blame/no claim culture and the limitation of losses due to the indemnity provided by insurers.

The IPT on Advance II went further than most other construction projects in applying BIM Level 2, so that it is beneficial to Dudley College now and for the foreseeable future. The updated Integrated Collaborative Working Toolkit is publicly available for use by those who wish to practice collaborative working in whatever form.

Further information about the evolution of IBA and how Advance II was delivered, with monitoring and support from Innovate UK, can be found in the Prospectus on IBA.

Dudley College Institute of Transformational Technologies (“IoTT”)

The most recently completed application of the IPI model was on the Dudley College Institute of Transformational Technologies. The College had to bid to the Department for Education (DfE) who acted as gatekeepers for a competition for funds to build new institutes of technology. Based on the favourable outcome on Advance II, Dudley College made it a condition of its bid that the IoTT should be delivered under the IPI model.

The intention of the IoTT to continue the theme of delivering advanced engineering, including advance medical engineering, meant that it would be a higher cost than the education benchmarks for schools and colleges. However, with IoTT being the first of the new Institutes to be funded, DfE felt there was no precedent for additional funding although they acknowledged this may be the case for future projects. The alliance was confident that it could achieve this reduced benchmark and agreed to proceed despite it being some £72/m2 less than the comparative benchmark established by the team based on the special facilities of the Dudley IoTT.

In December 2019 the team were all struggling to determine how to build a high-tech facility for a simple college budget. The forecast cost at that time was standing at £1.8m over the target cost with pain-share, and even having to call on the cost overrun insurance was looking like a real possibility. However, the incentive scheme which distributes overspend as well as savings to all alliance partners, facilitated the necessary response. The project outcomes were transformed by adjustment to ground remediation measures, revisions to acoustic and thermal treatment, adjustments to site compounds resulting in reduced project overheads and a comprehensive transition to the collaborative challenge utilising the skills of all alliance partners and suppliers.

When IoTT was completed in August 2021 it finished a month earlier than the insured completion time and £275k below the target cost of £17.69m including review events, becoming the first IPI project to do so. With a £275k shared saving (client element £61k) the outcome was £58/m2 less than the target cost and £130/m2 in total below the IoTT benchmark.

IoTT is already operating with an additional 24% less energy usage than Advance II, further enhancing the commercial benefit year on year. In terms of climate change targets, IoTT has delivered operational energy of 76 kWh/m²/y and embodied carbon of 738 kg CO₂e/m², both close to the RIBA Climate Challenge Targets for 2025.

A crucial aspect of ESG was the genuinely collaborative culture throughout the alliance, protected by a “no blame/no claim” undertaking and limitation of potential losses to pre-agreed collective pain-share. The result has been that, without exception, all the partners and alliancing suppliers fed back that they had enjoyed the IBA process and experience – which of course was win/win in that they contributed more creativity and initiative for the benefit of the project.

Further information about IoTT is in the alliance’s Second Prospectus, “Turning the Construction Playbook into ‘oven-ready’ reality using Insurance Backed Alliancing” is available here.

The Future

Having observed the outcomes delivered from IPI at Dudley College, Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council appointed IPInitiatives to be its provider for IBA, and the alliance for the Health Innovation Dudley project has now been appointed.

The end of 2022 saw the publication of the Public Sector Playbook (Guidance) and the Private Sector Playbook (Trust and Productivity), with their policies and drivers respectively and outcomes to drive “better, faster greener delivery”. IPInitiatives maintains that IBA is in a unique position to turn these aspirations into reality.