Author Archives: Ian Weinfass

A Reading-based contractor has been fined £30,000 after the death of a delivery driver. Father of four Levi Alleyne, known as Chunky, was electrocuted while delivering crushed concrete to a construction site where BBM Contracts was principal contractor. He died after the crane arm of his lorry came into contact…

Ex-Osborne directors have blamed the 2022 Liz Truss mini-budget for problems with the firm’s build-to-rent development business, a new report reveals. Leaders at the company said in April when the company filed for administration that its problems were caused by high inflation, the lingering impacts of Covid and Brexit, and…

Balfour Beatty has hired Alstom Transportation’s UK and Ireland managing director to be its new head of construction. Nick Crossfield will become chief executive of Construction Services at the UK’s largest building firm, filling the role formerly carried out by Mark Bullock for three years before he retired. A statement…

The Scottish National Party (SNP) has called for cuts to VAT for retrofit work, an RAAC remediation fund and a ban on new nuclear power stations in its election manifesto. The pro-independence party is not standing in seats outside Scotland and so cannot win enough MPs to form the next…

Balfour Beatty has won a contract to build a trio of electrical substations in Argyll, western Scotland, worth £192m. The contractor has been selected by SSEN Transmission to build the three new 275kV substations in Craig Murrail, An Suidhe, and Crarae. The new substations form part of the client’s Argyll…

Construction was the worst hit industry for insolvencies in the year to April 2024, the Insolvency Service has revealed. Some 4,401 construction companies in England and Wales registered as insolvent in the period – 18 per cent of all businesses to do so. The figure is almost 500 more than…

The Building Safety Regulator (BSR) has said that work on more than 50 ‘higher risk’ projects will need to be paused until it can sign off their applications, Construction News can reveal. The move follows the compulsory liquidation of private registered building control approver AIS Surveyors, which was wound up…

The National Federation of Builders (NFB) and the Scottish Building Federation (SBF) have announced plans to merge. The England and Wales-based NFB, which can trace its origins to 1880, and the SBF, which was founded in 1895, agreed to become one organisation within the next two years. The name of…

Parliamentary authorities expect to spend nearly £2m on procuring a contractor to repair the Palace of Westminster’s tallest structure, the Victoria Tower, after botching the first tender. Construction News revealed in April that the tender for the £95m job had to be re-run after errors were made in documents used…

The chair of the Building Safety Regulator’s Industry Competence Committee has said the construction industry must ensure a tragedy like the Grenfell Tower blaze never happens again. On the seventh anniversary of the West London fire in which 72 people died, Jon Vanstone called for the industry to honour the…