Opinion

Jonathan Parker is development director at national framework provider Pagabo This year has seen several big names in the construction industry hit financial difficulty, and prevailing wisdom suggests that the list is only going to grow longer. Indeed, data from the Insolvency Service shows a 19 per cent rise in…

Eric Johnstone is a senior associate and Amy Pairman is an associate at law firm Brodies The new provisions of the Building Safety Act 2022 governing works on higher-risk buildings (HRB) came into effect on 1 October 2023. These have fundamentally changed the building-control process and will have significant ramifications…

Michael Doolin is group managing director of consultancy Clover HR Addressing the UK’s ever-growing skills gap must be at the top of the next government’s priority list because a failure to do so would have a huge impact on the growth of the UK economy and the competitiveness of so…

Justin Phillips is a partner, London office director and transport sector lead for rail interchange projects worldwide at engineering consultancy Buro Happold So the northern leg of HS2 is dead, having been very publicly and – bar something radical happening – very permanently cancelled. There’s no doubting it’s a hammer…

Dan Whiteley is environmental sustainability director at Bam UK & Ireland In the lead-up to the COP28 climate-change conference, which starts at the end of November, its president-designate, Sultan Al-Jaber, issued a rallying call to the private sector, highlighting the role the summit must play in supporting the objectives of…

Kingsley Clarke is operations lead at Southern Construction Framework There are only a few months to go until the launch of phase three of the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme, providing £1.4bn of grant funding up until 2026 to support public sector organisations to meet net-zero targets. With the built-environment sector…

Paul Cannaby is director of civil engineering at construction consultancy Pick Everard Recent years have seen an increase in weather extremes, with severe droughts and major flooding in the UK and globally due to climate change. This necessitates strengthening flood resilience but it’s not all about large-scale infrastructure – there…

The Conservative Party’s conference slogan – “Long-term thinking for a brighter future” – might have lacked pizzazz, but it oozed seriousness. Sadly, it turned out that the phrase actually meant scrapping a rail megaproject on which groundworks were imminent and replacing it with a bunch of schemes that – where…

Chris Hallam is a partner at law firm CMS Following the dumpster fire that was the Conservative conference in Manchester, last week mercifully saw the final party conference of the season when Labour took its annual shindig 30 miles along the East Lancs Road to Liverpool. It seems both parties…

Clive Feeney is group managing director for LHC Procurement Group Prime minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to push back the deadlines for key energy-efficiency policies, including allowing existing fossil-fuel heating systems to be used in certain homes for almost an additional decade, has been roundly criticised as undermining the UK’s ability…