Author Archives: Ian Weinfass

The client behind a planned £3.8bn gigafactory in Northumberland has gone into administration. Britishvolt, the start-up driving the vehicle-battery gigafactory that was set to be built by ISG under a £300m contract, failed to secure enough equity investment to continue as a going concern. Administrators at EY-Parthenon said the majority…

A new planning application for the £3.5bn Royal Docks development has been submitted. The Silvertown site in Newham, which has been derelict for decades, is set for development by the Silvertown Partnership. The plans include 6,500 new homes, 50 per cent of which are classed as affordable, and a new…

A former council highways worker has been jailed for stealing £1m meant for contractors. Tyler Evans, 42, was handed a sentence of four years and eight months after carrying out a fraud while working for Birmingham City Council from 2010-14. His role was to control the refund of payment bonds…

Contractors working on National Highways projects will now be automatically enrolled into its project bank accounts. The initiative aims to ensure monies are held in trust in case a lead contractor becomes insolvent during a project, protecting cash for smaller firms. It is also an alternative to retentions, whereby a…

The senior commercial director of the government’s new hospitals programme has left her role. Emma-Jane Houghton, who joined the Cabinet Office for the job in December 2020, has taken up a position at government-owned defence company AWE. Responsibilities in her hospital-programme role included briefing construction representatives on procurement plans for…

Funding for the UK’s first set of small nuclear reactors will not be in place for at least a year, it has been reported. According to The Times, Whitehall’s planned investment in the new technology remains uncertain, despite it having been discussed for years. The newspaper said that Rolls-Royce SMR…

Collapsed contractor Jehu Group received £7.5m in taxpayer-funded grants and loans while it was struggling, it has emerged. A report by the Bridgend-headquartered company’s administrators revealed that the circa £70m-turnover firm received £5.1m in loans from the Welsh Government-owned Development Bank of Wales in the year before it went under.…

Kier Construction has named Anna Baker as its new head of sustainability. Baker moves from Careys, where she held the equivalent role for two years. Previously, she spent more than 12 years at Sir Robert McAlpine, where her last job was as director for safety, sustainability, health, environment and quality.…

Steel production has been forced to halt temporarily this week due to the spiralling cost of energy. UK Steel, the trade body for the sector, warned that production could decline further next year if the government does not extend and improve its support for businesses’ energy costs. The current Energy…

Former Mabey group chief executive Juliette Stacey is set to join Willmott Dixon’s board in the New Year. Stacey, who left Mabey in 2019 after it downsized following the sale of a number of subsidiaries, was named as a new non-executive director on the contractor’s board. She is set to…