Injecting certainty into fees

Any discussion about how architects charge fees brings into sharp focus the perspectives of supplier and customer. For while architecture, as a profession, is about serving the interests of society in general and clients in particular, that does not mean it is a charitable activity. George Bernard Shaw’s cynical description of any profession as being a ‘conspiracy against the public’ is nevertheless the basis for the consumerist attack on fee scales which began in the mid-1970s, and has never ceased.

Architects, like contractors before them, now frequently have to bid via competitive tender, to the intense annoyance of the better designers who resent being lumped in with the less talented and treated as though all architects are equal at what they do, implying that the best way to choose one is thus by commercial competition.

There is rich irony here, since the formation of the profession and the RIBA 175 years ago was based on a similar idea: that all architects were equal, and therefore they should all be paid the same fee, whatever the quality of their work. Having eliminated fee/price competition from the outset (while continuing to impose it on contractors and suppliers) and having banned associated ungentlemanly activities such as touting and advertising, the profession was left high and dry when one important plank of its structure, the fee system, had to be disbanded.

It is not even as though the RIBA can produce a recommended scale without upsetting competition authorities, who have very little sense of irony as to the worth of their own activities. (They never have to examine, for instance, whether their policies have had any beneficial public effect, or indeed whether the inevitable consequence of fee competition results in better or worse buildings and environments. There is just a crude assumption that the public would prefer to sit in competitive darkness rather than in the light of a known charging system.)

It is probably unsurprising that the RIBA has now entirely abandoned the notion of fee scales as part of its guidance on using architectural services, but as with the passing of any whole system, it is far from clear as to what will replace it. The suggestion that there must be something wrong with (now superseded) graph-based fee advice, because this implied that percentages would be lower than they were in 1971, is odd. Why would fees rates necessarily be the same (or more), for the same sort of work? Surely a fee system should be able to change the numbers without changing the entire structure.

Anyway, why should consumers take comfort from the idea that hourly rates are a better answer? Better for whom? And what would those rates be? Does a skilled technician get charged out at the same rate as an inexperience architect who just got Part III? And what are partners being paid for, sitting at a screen ‘designing’ by the hour, or contributing expertise which has little relationship to the idea of time charges?
The truth is that no single charging system can properly deal with the very different types of activity that architects undertake. Some of this works on an hourly basis (detailed design, for example); some of it needs a broad-brush sum (feasibility and concept, usually woefully undercharged by the profession), and something in between related to the value and complexity of the project.

Fee scales based on percentages were an attempt to elide the conditions described above into a coherent and predictable single system. And let’s face it, even if you submit a complex set of fee proposals, most clients will still put them into context by working out what the percentage fee is in relation to construction cost, because it gives them a simple comparator.

At a time when certain large architectural organisations are trying to survive by putting in insanely low bids for projects (to the disadvantage of responsible professionals opposed to loss leader business), it would certainly be helpful to have advice on appropriate ranges of fee levels, so clients could understand whether the practice advising them is going to make a loss on their job. In which case caveat emptor.

The problem for the RIBA is publishing such advice without falling foul of competition law. Perhaps someone else could help.