Out with the old normal – in with the new?

Commercial excellence is to be the ‘new normal’ in public sector procurement, Sir Jeremy Heywood, Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, has said in a blog on the civil service website.   

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Matron could cure schools of scandal

Private finance type contracts came under harsh scrutiny by the inquiry into the buildings defects that led to the collapse of a school wall in Edinburgh in April 2016.  

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Procurement focused strategy published

A Green Paper for the first UK government industrial strategy for many years has been released for consultation, but receiving a lukewarm response from industry generally.

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Arbitration market share under threat

Arbitration is the least heard of dispute resolution method, although it is the preferred method when many large scale projects go wrong, either technically or commercially. Confidentiality goes hand in hand with arbitrations of course, so little is heard of their outcomes.

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Shining light on arbitration

Arbitration rarely makes headlines, which is part of the reason for using it as a dispute resolution method. Things haven’t been as quiet as normal in recent months though.

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Restoring arbitration for the 21st Century

Guest editor Martin Burns, Head of ADR Research and Development at RICS, sees a renewed appetite for arbitration, as a middle ground between long drawn out litigation and high speed adjudication. An improved version of what went before won’t be enough to cope with modern demands so new ground must be broken, he argues.

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Survey reveals procurement gulf

Possibly to the surprise of some, procurement professionals in the UK appear to see Brexit as an opportunity not to scrap the EU procurement directives but to reform them.

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Brexit posts major challenges

The fallout from the referendum decision to leave the European Union is still falling heavily and the construction industry like most others is wondering what will happen next.

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Professional negligence adjudication pilot

Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) seems to be growing in popularity and is now available in several forms, most of which the construction sector has benefitted from, particularly adjudication. The industry remains the only sector to have had adjudication thrust upon it by legislation, but its success in construction has been noted elsewhere in the legal and business world.

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Comment: All aboard for open contracting

The Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) might not have been heard about much in construction up until now, but it is shaping up to be a significant driver of contractual relationships between central government spending departments and their suppliers, not only in the UK but across much of the world. It is to be trialled in the UK on HS2, it was announced at the recent London anti-corruption summit.

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