Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism to promote the renewal of national unified indicators for public procurement based on actual results of two-day work week
December 24, 2024
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism has indicated its intention to revise the "National Unified Indicator," which visualizes the efforts of public contractors in line with the guidelines for the Public Works Quality Assurance Promotion Act (Public Works Quality Assurance Act). The indicator for the leveling of construction periods will be considered to grasp not only the off-season from April to June, but also "peak cuts" to eliminate busy periods. The indicator for setting appropriate construction periods, which is determined based on the implementation status of construction that is subject to two-day weekends, will also be reviewed. The current indicator is an "announcement-based" indicator of whether orders were placed on the premise of two-day weekends, but the new indicator will set a "performance-based" target of whether two-day weekends were ultimately achieved. A
new "Third National Unified Indicator" will be set as a target to be addressed from FY2025 onwards. The review will take into account the guidelines for the revised Quality Assurance Act, which will be revised soon, and the progress of the current "New National Unified Indicator." The current indicator has a final goal of FY24, and the results of efforts in FY23 have recently been summarized and published.
As the construction industry is calling for the elimination of busy periods, a new indicator for peak cuts will be created and public purchasers will be informed of the plan. The current indicator is calculated by dividing the average number of operations from April to June by the average number of operations for the fiscal year, based on data registered in Collins (a database of construction results information). The national average for fiscal 2023 for construction work ordered by the national government, prefectures, and municipalities was 0.72, the same level as fiscal 2022.
The current indicator shows the implementation status of construction work subject to the two-day weekend, and is calculated as the percentage of cases in which the construction period and cost adjustments were announced on the assumption of two days off per week, excluding disaster recovery work and maintenance work. The goal is to achieve full implementation in all regions by fiscal 2024, and looking at the actual figures for fiscal 2023 for construction work ordered by prefectures and designated cities by prefecture, 37 prefectures have already achieved full implementation. In
light of this situation, the new indicator will switch to a target of capturing the number of construction works that have actually been achieved. Even if the client sets the initial construction period on the premise of two days off per week, proper schedule management is required to ensure that two days off per week can actually be secured. On that basis, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism will consider implementing two days off per week on a monthly basis or a complete two-day weekend with weekends off for construction projects
directly managed by the Ministry. The current indicators grasp anti-dumping measures for both construction and business from the low bid price investigation criteria and the setting of minimum limit prices. For construction projects, the figure obtained by dividing the number of contracts in a fiscal year by the number of measures implemented was 0.93 in FY2023, a slight increase from FY2022.
