Author Archives: Will Ing

Tolent has lost a tribunal case after it failed to consult Unite before making hundreds of redundancies when it entered administration last year. Unite was a recognised trade union for skilled, unskilled and craft employees of Tolent, the £200m-turnover contractor based in Gateshead that collapsed in February 2023 following difficulties…

The Construction Leadership Council (CLC) has asked the government to “implement the Construction Playbook consistently”, accusing it of “frequently” ignoring its own guidance on best-practice procurement. The request was one of 10 made by CLC co-chair Mark Reynolds in a letter to chancellor Jeremy Hunt ahead of the Spring Budget…

Tributes have been paid to the drill worker who died on an HS2 site last year. Charlie Harper died on 28 April 2023, aged 71, a day after being hit by the end of an unsecured pipe. Harper had been undertaking horizontal directional drilling at a Solihull site operated by…

A coroner has issued a safety warning about drilling and pipe dispensing after a 71-year-old man died at an HS2 site in Birmingham last year. Charlie Harper suffered serious abdominal and chest injuries after being struck by the end of a polyethylene coiled pipe on 27 April 2023. The tail…

Former Carillion chief executive Richard Howson has become president of a Florida-based energy tech company, months after being banned from directing UK companies. Howson was the chief executive of Carillion from December 2011 to July 2017 – six months before the UK’s second-largest construction company entered liquidation with £7bn of…

The director of a scaffolding company has received a suspended prison sentence after one of his employees was electrocuted. Ian Pepper, director of Kent-based Canterbury City Scaffolding, has been sentenced to 18 weeks in prison, suspended for 12 months, and ordered to undertake 200 hours of unpaid work and 20…

A Conservative MP has said that Laing O’Rourke did a “shocking job” on the construction of a housing block in Ipswich, adding that the contractor “seemed to have got away with it”. Laing O’Rourke was the design-and-build contractor for The Mill, a 327-home development in central Ipswich that features blocks…

Kier and Galliford Try have reported positive financial updates, defying gloomy reports of industry stagnation. Kier told investors that the second half of 2023 saw it “continue to trade above the prior period” and experience “strong volume growth, particularly in construction”. The company also drastically cut average month-end net debt,…

Bouygues and Laing O’Rourke have been served warning notices by the nuclear regulator over fire-safety failures at Hinkley Point C. The contractors have each received enforcement notices relating to failings by their joint venture BYLOR JV. The Office for Nuclear Regulation also served notices to NNB Generation Company, a subsidiary…

Construction innovators traded insights on the latest industry tech trends On a crisp November morning, a herd of geeks, innovators and experts descended on a London hotel for TechFest, an annual celebration and exploration of cutting-edge digital processes and automation, sponsored by Construction News and its sister title New Civil…