Just as we were ready to welcome and praise last year’s Industrial Strategy putting the construction industry’s modernisation high up on the agenda, the UK’s second-largest construction firm collapsed. Carillion’s demise means different things to different stakeholders, but has only one overarching implication: we must change our basic delivery model, prioritising new procurement models and more technology-enabled delivery methods fundamentally underpinned by future-proofed skills and accreditation programmes.

Any such reform is critical to addressing the damage done by the Carillion collapse – and indeed the fire at Grenfell Tower – to the attraction of young talent into our industry. It is also badly damaging public trust in our industry. Ongoing media exposes of poor-quality homebuilding also continue unabated. 

In order to avert this kind of crisis, we must move away from the image of construction that is depicted in Channel 4’s latest sitcom, Lee and Dean, which follows two builders’ daily lives and hits all the clichés associated with the image of the cowboy builder. Replicating and maintaining stereotypes will only exacerbate our growing recruitment problem, as new entrants into the industry sink to record lows and the current workforce continues to age, with 19% of construction workers set to retire within a decade. 

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