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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more