Edward Skoyles

Edward Skoyles (14 March 1923 – 30 July 2008) was the first quantity surveyor employed in the UK to research costs and practices in the construction industry. He did his research from 1960 until 1984 at the Building Research Establishment. Among his research projects was developing a new type of tending for construction projects called operational bills. He also started the study of the actual amount of waste in the construction industry, and investigated the varying methods of cost estimation practices used in different countries. His contributions are still widely discussed in the academic literature particularly upon operational bills, and building waste

The tendering in the UK construction industry is traditionally based upon Bills of quantities in which the estimation of costs is based on the materials in the completed works. This fails to separate out the costs of labour and building plant. Edward Skoyles proposed a new form of tendering, operational bills in which such tendering was based around building tasks. This allowed for the separate costing of labour and plant. This offered several advantages including a more accurate ability to cost a proposed project, better communication between design and production and ease in creating critical-path analysis for the contractor. A refinement of this was “bills of quantities (operations)” in which the operations are described in terms of the rules of the standard method of measurement rather than labour and materials. Priced-activity schedules of the NEC Engineering and Construction Contract are a modern descendent of operational bills.

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