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As the UK’s vaccine programme reaches more and more people, we can see the end of the pandemic, and start to consider what its long-term effect on our economy and built environment will be. One of the most direct changes it could have is on how we design and build…

Over the past year, the issue of professional indemnity insurance (PII) premiums has quietly been moving up the agenda for construction companies. Across our industry, PII premiums have soared while coverage exclusions have also increased. This is driven by a number of factors including an increase in historic claims in…

A new suite of FM contracts aim to offer a more consistent procurement strategy

The facilities management market is worth around £120bn per year in the UK. Despite its size, it has lacked a dedicated contract form, until now. At the end of January 2021, NEC launched a new suite of…

Over the last year, I have seen UK contractors changing their operations at a scale and pace I never expected. When the 2016 Farmer Review urged rapid construction modernisation or risk extinction, this is what it meant. But we have such an exciting opportunity as an industry to go beyond…

With the collapse of international travel throughout the pandemic, combined with the Brexit rhetoric of ‘taking back control’, it might seem counter-intuitive to suggest that recent events have left workers more vulnerable to exploitative practices – but this is exactly what happened in 2020. The COVID-19 crisis has hit the…

I feel a mix of amusement and surprise hearing TV and radio debates about decarbonisation of heat, major infrastructure projects, electric vehicles, battery storage, public sector funding. Just a few years ago, who would have thought that on prime-time radio, we’d have 15 minutes of discussion about the detail of…

Today is International Day of Women and Girls in Science. With so much brilliant innovation going on in the scientific world at present, it feels like a great opportunity to encourage more organisations to consider the outstanding talent that is waiting to be discovered. Historically, construction and engineering have been…

The new year is barely under way, yet it has already brought with it momentous change – new vaccines for COVID, being delivered at phenomenal pace; a potentially balanced political backdrop with the USA electing a more stable President; and, most importantly for our market, some resolution on Brexit. While…

Payment has been creeping up the agenda recently in Construction News. In December, it published an Oracle-sponsored panel discussion and, last month, it published its latest CN Payment 100 list, analysing how promptly the UK’s largest contractors pay their suppliers. But looking at the landscape today, we can see that…

The arrival of the Construction Playbook is a milestone moment for the industry and its clients in the public sector. But its publication marks the beginning of the journey rather than the endpoint. The document is a roadmap that we must all now follow. The central messages in the playbook…