Are competitive fee tendering and construction professional service quality mutually exclusive?
Author InfoMichael Hoxley Abstract It is a little more than 15 years since the associations representing construction professionals in the UK surrendered to government pressure and abolished mandatory fee scales, predicting as they did so that inevitably abolition would lead to a decline in the standard of service provided to clients. Initially the abolition of fee scales had little impact on fee levels in the UK economic and property boom of the late 1980s demand from clients in all sectors was high and fee levels remained at, or close to, pre-abolition levels. However, in the recession that followed, fee levels fell to unprecedentedly low levels, causing many commentators to be concerned that the quality of service provided to clients would fall. The main aim of this research is to establish whether clients perceptions of service quality have declined as a result of lower fee scales. Following a literature search five hypotheses are presented namely, that clients perceptions of servi
