Rudi Klein is a barrister and former chief executive of the Specialist Engineering Contractors Group
It is extremely gratifying that the government has accepted the recommendation for a construction regulator, albeit implantation is delayed until 2028.
More than 30 years ago, as chief executive of the Specialist Engineering Contractors Group, we recommended that an Office for Construction should be established.
This was submitted to the joint government/industry inquiry into procurement and contracts headed by the late Sir Michael Latham.
“Radically changing the course of construction is often compared to turning round a massive oil tanker”
Unfortunately, Sir Michael did not take up the idea. We resubmitted the proposal to the then Business and Enterprise Select Committee in 2008. The committee’s response was that there should be a chief construction advisor.
This was taken up by the previous government and then the post was abolished.
Given that this was a recommendation in the Grenfell Inquiry report, the government will be reintroducing this post.
Over the past 30 years since Latham’s 1994 report, we have had numerous reports cataloguing the industry’s faults.
The Egan Rethinking Construction report in 1998 recommended a more integrated delivery process with genuine collaboration underpinning that process, spawning a “Movement for Innovation” that eventually petered out.
It seemed that the industry would not be distracted from its chosen path of non-collaboration, lowest price, risk-transfer and payment abuse, which were all exposed in the aftermath of the Carillion collapse in 2018 and in the Grenfell Tower Inquiry.
In his report in 2016 (commissioned by the Construction Leadership Council), Mark Farmer observed: “The construction industry is in dire need of change. What is clear to me following the nine months spent on conducting this review is that carrying on as we are is simply not an option.”
Farmer was ignored.
Radically changing the course of construction is often compared to turning roun