خرید اموال بخش دولتی انگلستان و خدمات حرفه ای ساخت و ساز: کیفیت رقابت وی

The procurement of UK public services has seen considerable changes during the final 20 years of the millennium. Successive governments have legislated to impose firstly compulsion to compete on price, followed by a duty to achieve best value. Property and construction professional consultants were under an obligation to their professional bodies not to compete on price less than 20 years ago. The first part of this paper chronicles the main stages in this period of great change. Many commentators in the public and private sectors have predicted a decline in service quality as firms have been forced to cut costs in order to survive in highly competitive markets. The second part of the paper reports an empirical study that has investigated whether there is any substance to these predictions. One hundred and eighty nine public sector clients have assessed private sector consultants with a view to establishing whether those consultants appointed by competitive fee tendering perform less well than those appointed by other methods. The development of SURVEYQUAL, a 25 item service quality assessment scale is described briefly. Service quality is not significantly lower for those consultants appointed by competition. However the data suggest that public service clients can positively influence service quality by taking great care with the pre-selection of tenderers.

When Leonidas’ 300 Spartans died defying the vast numerical superiority of the Persian Empire, it was a defeat of quality by quantity, of expensive military experts by comparative, if anachronistic cannon fodder. Most marketplaces from time to time must suffer from the Thermopylae factor and that appears to be increasingly the case in the competitively tendered world of real estate. Those genuinely able to provide a service lose out on a value for money calculation to somebody who does not really understand what that service is. This rather jaundiced view of competitive fee tendering is provided by a UK property professional (Whitehead, 1999), who appears to have been on the wrong end of the value for money calculation recently! Yet the majority of property and construction professional services carried out by the private sector for the UK public sector are now let on a fee tendered basis. Following the abolition of professional institution mandatory fee scales for such work less than 20 years ago, there has been unrelenting pressure from successive UK governments for competition to prevail. This paper charts this development and then attempts to answer the question implied by the final sentence of Whitehead's statement — has fee tendering led to lower standards of service quality in the provision of public sector professional services in the property and construction field?

Fee levels have fallen to a significant extent since the abolition of mandatory fee scales some 17 years ago. The data collected as part of this study suggest that fee tendering is now the principal route for the appointment of construction professionals for public sector work in the UK. However the main result of this study is that fee tendering has not led to a decline in clients’ perceptions of service quality. Another finding is that public sector clients can positively influence the likely level of service received from their consultant by taking care with the pre-selection of tenderers. Thus the public sector clients surveyed as part of this study do not share Whitehead's (1999) view that those consultants successful in the value for money calculation do not understand the service they are providing.