The perilous life of the regional contractor

By Dave Rogers2020-02-06T06:00:00

Construction companies are going bust at the rate of about one every 36 hours and regional contractors are under particular strain. Dave Rogers reports on the reasons for their demise – and what others are doing to buck the trend

David Chambers has a story for our times.

The 63-year-old chair of Lindum, the £164m turnover Lincoln contractor set up by his father John more than 60 years ago, is talking about the spate of high-profile collapses which have bedevilled the sector over the past year.

He stops and recalls his own firm’s apparent brush with the grim reaper. The manager in charge of its office in Peterborough had shut early one Friday afternoon last August. Suddenly, the firm’s head office was getting calls from panicked suppliers. “They thought we’d gone bust.”

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