Money has been in the news since well before the election, but now that there are more new policies than resources to fund them, the focus is sharpening. As Carl Vann reminded us in the first of a three of events around understanding the economics of construction and practice, founding director Bill Thomas coined the maxim ‘money is the only building material’. As engineer, architect and property developer, Bill understood architecture to be a broad as well as a focused activity, and his legacy includes a determination to ensure that all of us understand the financing of building and of practice, as well as honing our listening and collaboration skills – other essential implements in the design toolkit.

Carl’s promise to make sure everyone at PTE is ‘fluent in finance’ was backed up with a quiz about build costs provided by Craig Williams from Gardiner Theobald (even higher than we thought) and a lively discussion of GIA vs GEA (not for the last time, in a fact-packed day). Understanding what buildings cost is crucial to architects who like to deliver their designs. Understanding what it costs us to design them is no less key, and colleagues were engrossed by a forensic dissection of company structures and what determines how much we can do, for the fees that we charge, by FD Mary McDonnell. Double entry bookkeeping may have been at the esoteric end of the discussion, but Work-in-Progress calculations are now an open book to all.

Once we knew what buildings cost, and understood PTE’s finances, the fine art of fee calculation was final link in the chain. We counted five ways of benchmarking, from percentage of construction cost to cost per home, but in the end we agreed that it’s all about relationships - no two clients want quite the same thing.

Time then to lift our eyes to the horizon, back to the world of real construction costs and how the new government could deliver 300,000 homes a year for the next five years. Anna Clarke from The Housing Forum has been working on the cost of building ‘the most straightforward house’. “This hypothetical house doesn’t exist”, she said piquing our curiosity as she shared her working methods for a report due out in the autumn. It does serve as a baseline for a raft of abnormals, from sloping sites to Future Homes Options, as yet undecided, that make the UK’s ‘high’ construction costs more understandable.

Steve Beard from Beacon Partnership then took us through a live viability spreadsheet demonstration that showed one bedroom social rent flats to be viable, with a 45 year payback. Unfortunately, anything larger is not, the gap increasing with size, and so Steve has been looking at one bedroom houses. The lesson? Time for a radical rethink about how we fund affordable homes. Just as well we have a new government and the potential for fresh ideas.