Not a great month for contractors. We have all been branded crooks and villains by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) which made an announcement about its investigations into bid-rigging.

And even though no one has been proved guilty yet, they published the names of all those firms who have been involved. Which doesn’t seem very ‘fair’ at all.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with construction, the story appears to be that hundreds of dodgy contractors, including some of the biggest names in the land, have been doing over their poor clients by getting together to fix bid prices. But that isn’t the story at all.

Cover pricing is hardly a new or secretive practice. Nine out of 10 clients would surely know that they may get one or two cover prices among a group of tenders.

If all but one were a cover price, that would be different, but for the majority of contracts this won’t be the case.

The ‘poor clients’ are not the blameless innocents that some would have us believe. If they could get their act together and allow reasonable timescales to get tenders in that might help. And if they kept shortlists short – rather than long – there wouldn’t be so much time wasted on tenders that will never come to fruition.

Let’s wait and see what the outcome of the OFT investigation is. Although I can’t really see The Sun screaming ‘Most builders honest after all!’ across its front page, can you?

Source

Construction Manager