every public building must be great

So a publicly-built school has as many problems with it and will cost as much to fix as some PFI debacle. Does this somehow disprove Common Weal's policy of public infrastructure owned and designed in public hands, for public good? We would argue strongly that rather it reinforces it.

A Falkirk primary school, designed and built by the local authority, requires millions in remedial action as a string of problems with the build are identified (balconies not properly secured, flammable products used where they shouldn't have been...). What is important to understand are the different points of failure in a project of this size – and what that tells us about their procurement process.

First of all, all big projects of this size have snagging issues. The number of individual decisions that have to be made on a build of this scale are enormous and few projects don't require some of these decisions to be revisited once they have been implemented and it is clear they are not working quite right.

We need to separate the snagging process (which will occur in the best-built buildings) from failures in design. The fact that this school has remedial action running to millions of pounds strongly suggests the problems are not simply snagging.

The second reason there are often issues in large public buildings is the incentive to reduce costs. Public budgets are tight and the way we have financed infrastructure loads the cost over shorter periods than the lifecycle of the building. This creates incentives to reduce costs, and that creates issues.

But we need to differentiate between the inevitable process of specifying works according to budget (rather than necessarily according to need) from the in-built cost premium of PFI. Because PFI is a profit-extraction model, whatever the budget for the build is, a not inconsequential extra top slice must be extracted to meet the profit requirements of investors.

With PFI, the pressure to reduce the overall cost of the project (which will always exist) has an additional profit surcharge added. But that does not mean there won't have been pressure to reduce the cost of this primary school project and cut some corners.

That may not be the whole story, however. The press reporting suggests that it was designed by in-house architects. That may be fine, but since so much work has been outsourced to the private sector for so long and since a local authority the size of Falkirk will have a limited number of projects of this scale, is in-house expertise gaining enough experience of projects of this size to manage them internally?

It is perfectly possible that they can be, but there is clearly a possibility that this was simply of a larger scale than in-house teams had become used to. And this is exacerbated by another factor; public infrastructure like this is not like other building projects because the requirements on the building are very specific.

Other buildings to not need to support the kinds of activities that take place in a hospital or school. A basic office layout will not meet either educational or medical needs. There is a lot of specific knowledge required to create best-practice environments for young learners or people recovering from surgery – or sports centres or community halls...

This is all precisely why Common Weal's solution is to create a National Infrastructure Agency which supports public bodies to develop new infrastructure in public ownership but with the support of a specialised design team which becomes expert in best practice in design for user needs, a project management advisory team to ensure the project is delivered as smoothly as possible and a finance team to ensure that the public authority gets maximum value for money.

That model ensures the best realistic chance of getting excellent buildings consistently, without profit being extracted, with first rate project management support and financing models appropriate to infrastructure which should be designed for 50 year lifecycles and longer – consistently for all citizens in all local authorities. We have to get this right; retail parks or office spaces come and go, but we will always need our school and our hospital to be excellent.

A few weeks ago our briefing was about a local authority which had got all of this right and produced an excellent school for its community. It is perfectly possible to achieve that standard for everyone – but not with our hollowed-out, fragmented model of public infrastructure.