Drive around your town or village and chances are you will see some fairly unattractive houses and extensions. Ask an architect and they will probably blame the design on the builders. Builders meanwhile complain of architects over-specifying and designing structures which are difficult or expensive to build. The obvious answer is to get them working together from the beginning, a concept that is becoming established in major infrastructure projects.

Early Contractor Involvement derives from Sir John Egan’s 1998 UK Construction Task Force report ‘Rethinking Construction’ and began a fundamental change in the procurement process. Instead of consultant engineers designing a scheme and their client then putting it out to tender, ECI brings the skills together at the beginning, with the aim of reducing costs and timescales.

The concept has been embraced by Highways England (formerly the Highways Agency) and is now being used for HS2 and by many other infrastructure providers. But where do the land valuers fit into this?

Given the compulsory powers used for most of these schemes it would be easy to leave land issues until the end, as a supposedly simple matter of compensation. But that would miss valuable opportunities for cost reductions and improvements in stakeholder relations, and to avoid some nasty surprises.

Compensation for land taken and other claims can be a complicated matter, not always helped by landowners being unhappy about their land being taken at all.

It is accepted practice that if any land is taken, the full effects of the whole scheme are taken into account in calculating the owner’s and occupier’s compensation – valuing the land taken is just the start. Claims can include loss in value to the retained areas, even the loss of a view, and sometimes substantial business disturbance during the construction period. Businesses may close altogether and compensation paid accordingly. The compensation available to those who lose no land but who may still be affected by the scheme is far more limited, so a minor tweak in the design may significantly reduce their compensation or remove it altogether.

Compensation advice can feed into route selection and scheme design – different designs may have similar construction costs but very different compensation costs. A recent newspaper article described a scheme which was claimed to have knocked millions of the value of a small estate. 

The claim may be exaggerated but the scenario raises the question of whether a different route could have been taken and the overall costs reduced. There is also the possibility that the need for permanent land acquisition or rights may simply have been overlooked – finding you need just a tiny part someone’s land at a late stage can be very expensive.

The possibility of claims under Pt.1 of the Land Compensation Act 1973 or S10 of the Compulsory Purchase Act 1965 may also be missed if no land is being taken. Identifying the issues and finding solutions can also help remove objections at the planning stage.

Valuers need to be part of the team from the very beginning, building relationships, providing realistic compensation budgets, identifying risks and finding solutions.