Author Archives: Contributor

Poor connectivity has remained a thorn in the side of the construction sector – it remains one of the major barriers to full ‘digital adoption’. Every site needs internet access these days, but getting a cabled connection can be fraught with difficulty and delay, and on some remote projects it…

Beth Fryer is legal counsel at engineering consultancy Atkins In December 2020, the government published its Construction Playbook, a policy document setting out how central government expects public bodies to procure, value and deliver public works projects. The playbook’s approach is mandatory for contracting authorities and arm’s length bodies (although…

Juliette Enser is the senior director of cartels at the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) Few industries are as crucial to a dynamic UK economy as construction, which is one of the reasons why the CMA has taken strong action to root out rogue cartels from the sector. With infrastructure…

Alan Kennedy is an associate at law firm Womble Bond Dickinson Issues with visas and increased red tape look set to price migrant workers out of the employment market, following the UK’s departure from the European Union. The fees linked to employing migrant workers from the European Economic Area (EEA)…

For an exceptionally long time, construction has been known for having issues it struggles to address. Shortages of skilled labour within the industry are so commonplace that at times in conversations it can feel less like a real topic than a chorus we all repeat endlessly. Many organisations will rush…

You know when you have had a good idea, because you keep coming back to it. A decade ago, the genesis of an idea took hold. As the new chief executive of the Electrical Contractors’ Association, and new to the world of trade associations, one of my initial aims was…

The information and support is out there to prevent deaths – now it’s time for the industry to commit to better practices, writes Peter Bennett

We draft standards to regulate it, produce guidance on correct procedures, and train people to do it safely, but working at height still results in falls.…

If humans can’t always be trusted to work safely at height, could a different kind of intelligence step in? Paul Thompson investigates

Almost half of the 40 workers killed on UK sites in 2019/20 resulted from falls from height. Despite the best efforts of the industry, the number of onsite deaths…

A new temporary-works access system offers a rapidly installed alternative to large-scale scaffolding. Paul Thompson reports

Even in a world where COVID-19 has made us all grimly accustomed to daily mortality figures, the statistics on deaths in the construction industry are still sobering. Despite making great strides to improve its safety…

Construction News readers might have heard of the Common Assessment Standard, first announced in April 2019 by Build UK and CECA, with the support of the Construction Leadership Council (CLC), ECA and many others in the industry. The Common Assessment Standard is essentially a general, industry-agreed set of questions that…