Blog Author: Richard Saxon CBE, JCT Chairman Construction is many industries within one classification. It stretches from the mammoth to the minute, from infrastructure work like HS2 to household repair tasks. Any critique of construction therefore needs to recognise the part of the industry to which it refers. The statistical classification of the industry also fails to include its clients and consultants, essential parts of the cultural and economic system of the built environment. All that having been said, new initiatives at one end of…

  Blog Author: Richard Saxon CBE, JCT Chairman The collapse of Carillion is probably another nail in the coffin of the current UK model of main  contracting where virtually all the trade work is subcontracted. Over fifty years in the industry, I have seen the change from traditional contractors with their main trades in-house to the current, insustainable pattern. The vertically integrated contractor was brought down by recurrent business cycles which punish employers. Once the idea spread that trade specialists could be hired in just…

Blog author: Richard Saxon CBE, JCT Chairman The Construction Leadership Council is an innovation set up by Government in 2016 to provide a successor to the concept of the Chief Construction Adviser and to provide an expert body to guide government in its approach to the industry. The concept was to select a group of chief executives or chairmen from leading firms across the supplier landscape, co-chaired by the construction minister and a major client, Andrew Wolstenholme of Crossrail. Government disdains the bodies set up…

Blog author: Richard Saxon CBE, JCT Chairman 2016 was another year in which insightful reports were published castigating the UK construction industry for its dysfunction and making recommendations that may or may not ever be acted upon. The recent much publicised Farmer Review: ‘Modernise or Die’, was preceded by ‘Collaborative Construction: More myth than reality?’, produced by Pinsent Masons. Mark Farmer joined the December meeting of JCT Council to discuss his report’s implications for contracts. The Collaborative Construction report is the result of a wide…

Blog author: Richard Saxon CBE, JCT Chairman Britain has a massive, long-term housing problem, with market-driven supply not nearly equalling demand and major skill shortages preventing any increase in that supply in the short term. The country also has a set of policies in place which hamper alternatives from making a contribution by seeing home-ownership as the people’s ideal. It may be the aspiration of the majority but it’s an impracticable one: home ownership rates are falling. But now we have another national crisis to…