Remediation contract a missed opportunity

Making developers and their suppliers pay for their role in creating buildings of such a dangerous quality that inhabitants die when fire spreads too easily within them, which is what happened at Grenfell Tower, is proving to be a difficult job. And it looks unlikely to get any easier.

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Removing ‘dead hand’ of the Treasury could spur growth

To even the most casual observer of the UK’s public sector procurement performance it must be obvious that something, or more probably things, is seriously wrong. The stop-start approach to bringing HS2 into Central London at Euston station on cost grounds, even though government ministers admit that this will lead to greater long run costs, is not untypical.

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Advanced Procurement Agency at heart of call for reform

Science, technology and innovation are at the heart of the UK’s future and procurement and infrastructure policies have key roles to play in producing the necessary conditions for fostering them, say former Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Conservative Party leader William Hague in a joint report.

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Virtue signallers beware

The next thing you might be contacting your lawyer about could be your potentially over-inflated sustainability claims. Virtue signalling by ‘greenwashing’ could end up being more expensive than taking the measures you have wrongly claimed to.

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Planning reform should be a new Government priority

Not much remains of short lived Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini budget, and as we went to press it was unclear what exactly new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Cabinet will do with the little left, but the otherwise hapless Chancellor might have left behind what could be a useful legacy in the shape of a new approach to planning.

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Report reveals industry unprepared for growing pressures

Some interesting insights on the state of the industry and its contractual relationships emerge from the RIBA Construction Contracts and Law report (see News), the first since 2018. The value of the RIBA survey might be thought to be reduced by the fact that only 5% of the respondents are classified as being Tier 1 contractors; but they are a small part of the construction universe in terms of how many of them there are.

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Financial regulator on trail of Carillion

Headlines about fines levied on the accountants that were supposed to be auditing the accounts of Carillion before its spectacular collapse in 2018 are far from the end of that affair. We await the details that will be revealed by a Financial Reporting Council (FRC) investigation into what happened to allow Carillion’s Board to escape a proper scrutiny that could have saved the public purse many millions of pounds and a lot of honest Carillion employees their jobs. But that is coming, if slowly.

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