NCE interview: Mace chief of staff takes on Net Zero reality
Archive | 28 March 2022 | This article originally appeared in New Civil Engineer.
Hannah Vickers was interviewed by New Civil Engineer on 28 March 2022 on the industry’s move to Net Zero.
It is easy for challenges such as materials costs and labour shortages to preoccupy civil engineering firms. But Mace chief of staff Hannah Vickers says tackling these must not be at the expense of future targets.
She is promoting this view to her colleagues, having joined Mace last year to take up her newly created role. Vickers’ main focus as chief of staff is to support the efforts of chief executive Mark Reynolds and the firm’s executive board to embed the group’s 2026 business strategy.
As part of the strategy, the group is investing in three areas: net zero carbon; construction to production; and data and digital capabilities. “My role focuses on how to get all three of those working together and how to make the right investments in all three,” says Vickers.
Innovation investment
She is chairing Mace’s transformation steering group, an investment committee which selects innovations that can drive change within the business. It also allocates funding from its research and development budget which was £48m in 2020.
Another part of her role is to drive operational efficiency across the company, by establishing a key performance indicator framework, running the business planning function and setting budgets for the following year.
Vickers’ responsibilities also include deepening the group’s relationships with target clients, senior industry figures and government stakeholders. She has a wealth of experience in external affairs from her previous roles.
Before joining Mace, Vickers was chief executive officer at the Association for Consultancy & Engineering and before that she was the ICE’s head of policy and external affairs for a year.
“Both roles were about working between government and the industry, so it was quite a lot of translation, negotiation and mediation between those two,” she says. Vickers highlights her work on Project 13 and the Construction Playbook which she says have provided “a solid foundation for the industry transformation going forward and for what clients need to do to enable that”.
She says that her drive to join a business from a trade association was to prove that the theoretical concepts she previously worked on can be done in practice.
“Her drive to join a business from a trade association was to prove that the theoretical concepts she previously worked on can be done in practice.”
Public versus private clients
The Construction Playbook points out the benefits of offsite manufacturing and its ability to deliver efficiencies while cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Vickers says that Mace Tech – the division leading Mace’s construction to production approach – has demonstrated through its work that a significant reduction in waste can be achieved through offsite manufacturing. This in turn has a massive impact on embodied carbon.
Vickers is looking into low carbon solutions used within the business and tries to incorporate them in as many bids as possible so it can help clients reduce their carbon footprints.
Mace has pledged to reduce client carbon emissions by 1M.t by 2026. As a group it achieved net zero corporate emissions last year through offsetting, but states in its 2026 business strategy that the target is to achieve a further 10% cut year on year to reduce its reliance on offsetting.
Mace claims that wider adoption of modern methods of construction could lead to a £2.8bn a year cost saving on national infrastructure projects.
The innovations Mace is working on are not just focused on carbon reduction. Vickers gives the example of a project control room system with live data feeds that aims to improve the management and delivery of complex projects and programmes.
Vickers finds that private sector clients are more receptive to innovation than their public sector equivalents.
“The private sector clients have a very different risk appetite… So a lot of our really interesting innovations start life in the private sector,” she says.
“Those clients are far more open to some of our innovations because they have a different stakeholder group to manage.
“They’re not spending public money. If they get excited about something that Mace or any other contractor is doing and it doesn’t work out, it’s their money, their risk.”
Vickers says once the company knows that an innovation works and has accreditation certifications, it can bring it as a “finished package” into public sector projects.
Collaborations
Innovations and dedicated business strategies can help individual companies tackle some of the issues they face, but Vickers says that some challenges must be addressed by industry-wide collaboration.
She gives the example of the challenge to achieve net zero carbon emissions. This is a topic of which she has extensive knowledge as she is currently the Construction Leadership Council’s lead for the CO2nstructZero industry change programme.
But achieving net zero comes with its own complexities. It is far from straightforward for all tier one contractors to have zero diesel construction sites, for example.
Vickers says that if all of them switch over to hydrotreated vegetable oil fuels tomorrow “we’d have a huge problem with the sustainability of supply of these fuels”.
“It might be the right thing to do but we can’t all do it, because then what we’ll end up doing is fighting with each other and pushing out cost increases onto the clients,” she says.
“Ultimately we’d be driving the wrong behaviours in that supply chain. So there are things like that where we have to collaborate.”
She adds that construction companies must act collectively to shift commercial models for zero diesel plant to get better deals. Currently the cost of battery powered alternatives is prohibitive.
Vickers also stresses the importance of data sharing within the industry. She says: “Data is only valuable when you assimilate it and draw some insights out of it. I feel like as an industry we’re at the start of the learning curve on that.”
She explains that the industry has yet to share data openly in a way that useful insights can come out of it. But she is optimistic that data sharing will happen in the next three to five years.
Although the industry stereotype is that “contractors just want kill each other and not collaborate”, her experience until now has shown that it is not the reality.
“I have found that both our supply chain and our competitors are very open to that [collaboration],” she says.
This article appeared in New Civil Engineer. It was originally published on 22 March 2022.
Hannah Vickers is Managing Director at Built Confidence and was previously Chief of Staff and Global Head of Advisory at Mace.
