Rarely has the need for speed in increasing investment in the UK’s infrastructure been more evident, but prevarication and delay seems to be the order of the day.
Blog and Comment
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.
Developers told to step up to Grenfell related repair costs
The government’s response to the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in which 72 people died has at last been announced, and there has clearly been a considerable shift in approach to how to prevent another disaster and in who should pay.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bid rigging a thing of the past?
Construction is under the microscope again for anti-competitive practices, this time for cover pricing in the demolition sector.
Social value a procurement challenge
Little attention has been given to the proposed legislative shake up of the UK’s public sector procurement that went before the House of Lords for second reading in late May. This is surprising because public sector procurement accounts for over £350Bn a year, at least some of which is regularly accompanied by inefficiencies of legendary proportions.
Modern slavery reporting lacks conviction
Modern slavery is a hidden problem but one that the construction industry is known to be particularly exposed to. The sector’s demand for lower paid manual labour and its global, complex and often opaque supply chains make it an attractive target for human traffickers looking to exploit migrant workers.