Prices Guides and Quotes

[drpeterwardle]

A debate/discussion has started on the "High profile public campaign" thread about if there should be guide prices for archaeology work. I think this is worth continuing:

The relevant contribution are:

Badger wrote:
It also can be looked at from a developers point of view where it forms an important part of the business process... if you like... why pay twice for geotechnical work, land surveys, architectural surveys, even site contamination (ie archaeology) - recently archaeolgoists located several unknown pit shafts, which would have cost the developer dear...! The construction industry must be made aware of the value (in real cash) and I agree with the concept of creating national guide prices for work... ie An Evaluation in North England, on a site plot that is 100m by 100m and needs 10% trenching will be 1m deep and has a grade of 5 in likelyhood of archaeology being present... will = £ xxxxx

Developers don't like surprises... and archaeologists have to start acting like professionals if they want to be treated as such.


Dr Peter Wardle wrote
I have to say that I think that Badger is talking naive xxxxxxxs and
misses the point. Archaeologists are not qualified to be surveyors or comment on contamination. The waste comes from not ensuring that the different studies are not co-ordinated.

As for guide prices who will set them? Curators? The IFA? BAJR? Consultants? A totally pointless exercise that any consultant worth his salt can do this in his head.

See you in the Conference.

Dr Peter

Stripey Kelly wrote 2 months later

Dr Wardle, why are you so resistant to guide prices? You ask who will set them, why not all of the below? Why can there not be a proper discussion with all elements of field archaeology, from those at the coal face to those in the offices? Where people can sit down and thrash out decent price guidelines. As Badger points out, they do not have to be set in stone, but with a very basic guideline clients and ourselves would be starting, at least, from the same place.

Peter Wardle wrote
As I said seeting guide prices is both naive and pointless.

By now every consultantcy will have rule of thumb costs which is all guide prices ever can be. Some curators say a 5% spend on archaeology is not unreasonable and others say the cost goes up an order of magnitude from assessment to evaluation to excavation.

For geophysics there is an almost uniform cost across the country.

Guide prices for urban sites can never work ie X acres will have an archaeology bill of Y because there are so many variables:

thickness of deposits
date of deposits
type of deposits
the extent they will be disturbed ie what the foundation scheme will be or not
location
logistical difficulties

for example.

Guide prices exist for post X - as a percentage of the field work costs which I find unhelpful.

In the example David quotes he quotes for an evaluation the following variables

Location
Size
Sampling strategy
Depth of deposits
Likelyhood of archaeology being present.

which will costs £XXXXX ie £10000+

Of these 3 of the variables will be unknown when the developer does their costs calculation or even if an evaluation is neccessary. My estimate for a rural site would be under 10k not over it with the standard probability of archaeology being found.

There is also the question of who is taking the risk. So I would suggest that a guide price is more of a guide formula to be applied with specialist knowledge of the likely values of the variables and how much they can vary.

This is called consultancy. So yes I am against the notion that a committee of digger project officer and others should sit down to attempt to generalise what cant be generalised when many of them will have little experience of costing projects.

Peter Wardle

Historic Building wrote

cannot, in any way, see how guide prices are useful. What would be more helpful would be for units to try and be explicit in their quotations for work. A few years ago I was consulting on an evaluation near to an important site in London. The level of trenching was very limited simply open the area of the trench and drop in 50cm or to the top of any archaeology and the construction impact was very limited and could be jacked up above anything. I had in my mind about 7 grand; the majority of the quote settled around that level. At the extremes were 1.5 grand and 30 grand. The 30 grand quote was not even fixed. One quote even included shoring.

What I would suggest would be a standardised format for presenting quotes. This would enable non-archaeologists to establish exactly what they are paying for and would help prevent some of the sharper practices we are all aware of such as obtaining jobs by not mentioning post-excavation works and then claiming 'the county archaeologist is making me do it'. A practice I have encountered far too frequently.

I did hear this morning on the radio through the stella haze that the Today programme is looking for members of the public as guest editors. Possibly it could be worth exploring

[beamo]

Having spent the last twenty years variously as contractor and/or consultant, I would have to throw my hat in with Dr Peter on this one - I don't really feel that it would be feasible to produce any sort of reliable set of guide prices dur to the sheer number of variables that are involved.

We might all have a few rules of thumb that we use to come up with our own ideas of a potential price for a piece of work, and these estimates can sometimes be passed on to clients (heavily caveated of course) but the range of prices returned by contractors never fails to surprise me, even when the scope of works is clearly defined and the variables are limited.

If we did collectively produce a set of guide prices a la Spon, I suspect that I would have to spend a lot of time explaining to clients why the price for any particular job was so far removed from the guide price.


Beamo

[1man1desk]

I'm with Dr Pete and Beamo on this one - guide prices would be nice, and I can see why people would support them, but I don't think that they are feasible (except in certain specific areas of work, like geophysics).

There are just too many variables that affect the cost, so the variability above and below the guide price would be too large for the guide price to be useful. All that would happen is that the guide price would be a charter for disputes between contractor and client.

1man1desk

to let, fully furnished

[gumbo]

In that case can we have decent briefs please. Some of the s*** ive had to tender against its like you have to imagine what the job might be and then budget against that Grrrrrrrr.

[voice of reason]

and while we're at it, can we put an end to consultants issuing tenders which ask for a price based on a trench plan (if you are lucky), with no detailed specification, or even just a letter just saying please quote for 30 trenches each 2m wide without even a location map, and say 'and the winning tenderer will be supplied with the DBA, geophysics and site investigation data'. How are people supposed to assess the correct professional price without even the basic background data. Lazy, lazy, lazy, and signals contempt for contractors. And they wonder why we don't like consultants.

Rant over, for the time being.

[troll]

Old chesnut I know but, what about insurance against those "variables"? A fully informed contractor can make a reasonable guesstimate but no more. There are also very few tenders that quote from and to in the final price.Developer insurance to cover lifes little "variables" like the Iron age burial ground that came up on the last day or, the other end of the Mary Rose sticking up out of the natural.Developers/clients pay a premium based on their past record and the location of their developments. A developer working in the City of York, Canterbury or Edinburgh is likely to pay a higher premium than one for example working in Loughborough, Skegness or Redcar(completely random choices). Premiums can be reduced the more a developer/client reduces impact upon the archaeology over time.Alternatively, premiums will raise should a developer/client neglect the conditions set by curators. I don`t think that a price guide would work in the current environment, I do think that project managers should give wider cost margins to account for the unexpected and wonder if an insurance system would`nt work all round?

..knowledge without action is insanity and action without knowledge is vanity..(imam ghazali,ayyuhal-walad)

[1man1desk]

From Gumbo:

quote:In that case can we have decent briefs please. Some of the s*** ive had to tender against its like you have to imagine what the job might be and then budget against that Grrrrrrrr.

From Voice of Reason:

quote:and while we're at it, can we put an end to consultants issuing tenders which ask for a price based on a trench plan (if you are lucky), with no detailed specification, or even just a letter just saying please quote for 30 trenches each 2m wide without even a location map, and say 'and the winning tenderer will be supplied with the DBA, geophysics and site investigation data'. How are people supposed to assess the correct professional price without even the basic background data. Lazy, lazy, lazy, and signals contempt for contractors. And they wonder why we don't like consultants.

Lots of tenders that don't involve a consultant at all are sent out on the basis of a curator's brief alone, and that usually gives even less information than is listed above.
Personally, I am all for detailed Specifications, and that is what we generally do. In fact, the preparation of detailed Specs (and tying them in to a proper contract) is, in my view, one of the key purposes of having a Consultant in the first place.

From Troll:

quote:Old chesnut I know but, what about insurance against those "variables"? A fully informed contractor can make a reasonable guesstimate but no more.

That is a good argument against guide prices, to be sure.
I don't like the insurance idea, but there is another approach, which we always adopt. Our tenders are always issued with a Bill of Quantities. The Tenderer has to price items that can reasonably be priced, and is tied to the rates/figures in their Tender. However, items where a quantity cannot reasonably be identified are given as 'provisional' items, where either a sum of money is specified or a provisional quantity is specified, and the Tenderer is asked to provide a rate.
Under this approach, a cost is included in the price for all of the 'guestimate' items, so the client never gets asked to pay for something they had not expected to. However, the successful tenderer ends up getting paid for what they actually do, not for a guess. Equally importantly, all tenderers are placed on an equal footing - prices no longer vary according to the differences in people's guesswork, but instead according to how much they would charge for the same piece of work.
A smart consultant will usually ensure that the total amount of money in the provisional items is towards the top end of the likely out-turn cost. That way, the overall out-turn price for the job is likely to be less than the total budget, rather than more, and that is usually popular with clients.



1man1desk

to let, fully furnished

[voice of reason]

One man says: Lots of tenders that don't involve a consultant at all are sent out on the basis of a curator's brief alone, and that usually gives even less information than is listed above.

But the difference is that we can ask for the necessary information from the direct client and they will generally try and provide as much as they can. The attitude I have encountered from the consultants is that there is no way they can frankly be a**ed and you are just seen as being awkward by asking for it. I cannot see how the consultant can justify not sending out all relevant information in the first place, as they (allegedly) know what is needed. To do otherwise seems to me to be acting against the client's interests in not getting 'informed' quotes from potential contractors. Though some of the twelve-year olds, who have never seen mud let alone know to spell it, and who seem to be tasked by consultancy firms with obtaining quotes probably can't see why knowing anything practical about the site is at all relevant.

[gumbo]

LOL...

I wasnt talking just about consultants 1man, some of the worst briefs ive seen are DC ones. I also knew that you would have an exemplary track record on this matter!

Voice of Reason: (This isnt aimed at anyone inparticular) I actually think this is a deliberate tactic with some consultants: prepare a flimsy brief/specification and then get the contractor to work up the whole thing on spec. How many hours have people spent talking to pointless consultants about pointless basic points of strategy or getting them to send the most basic of information (e.g. a map) where if the job was done properly you wouldnt have to waste the person hours.

I fully expect an 'Oh its the contractors who take the p***' tirade but I dont care.

Bye. G

[drpeterwardle]

And here I was having a quiet afternoon.

Insurance.

To insure against archaeological discovery as Troll suggest was perfectly possible - I set up said scheme in 1994. It is however very difficult and by defintion is expensive. Most very large developers will self insure in any event.

To answer Trolls points.

"Developers/clients pay a premium based on their past record" No the nature of this kindo of insurance is that no claims bonuses cannot be used.

"and the location of their developments." is a factor but a relatively unimportant one.

A developer working in the City of York, Canterbury or Edinburgh is likely to pay a higher premium than one for example working in Loughborough, Skegness or Redcar(completely random choices).

"Premiums can be reduced the more a developer/client reduces impact upon the archaeology over time."

Not sure what Troll means by this.

"Alternatively, premiums will raise should a developer/client neglect the conditions set by curators."

By defintion this would render the insurance invalid.

Asking for quotes - I always reckon contractors make a meal out of tendering especially for small jobs. They need to know:

What they are being asked to do - X trenches x wide etc
Where
When
Whats the archaeological interest
What H&S issues there are
What the practical difficuties are.
What risks they are being expected to cover.

Several years ago I posted my method statement for tender competitions on Britarch. I got loads of flack about it for being unneccessary including providing the infomation that people are asking for here.

Peter