Late Payments and Environmental Issues

The UK Government appears to be concerned about the rise in late payments within the industry. This comes amidst speculation that the situation is only going to get significantly worse, as Main Contractors start to feel the impact of increased costs – and there are more challenges still to come.

Late payments have been endemic within the industry for years, ever since construction companies decided that they were quite happy to provide the money as long as someone else had the responsibility for delivering the project, on time and on budget. Having previously employed direct labour and owned their own plant, they have shifted such liabilities off their balance sheet to the Main Contractor, together with the need to keep their equipment and labour force fully occupied. The consequences have been all too predictable throughout the extended and complex supply chain - from the use of retentions to withhold cash for work not completed satisfactorily, to cash flow issues colliding with resource and material shortages. The Access Group’s integration of Experian into their construction management software is designed to introduce a degree of late payment risk mitigation within the industry, and is featured in this issue of the newsletter.

Having been put on a back-burner (so to speak) since February, environmental issues are now back on the agenda too, and we have two articles this month that focus on construction and building performance. Vectorworks has introduced a spreadsheet, the Vectorworks Embodied Carbon Calculator (VECC) that calculates carbon emissions in architect’s designs, enabling them to optimise the carbon content of materials from manufacture and transportation to disposal or otherwise. Elsewhere IES has helped the Orkney Islands Council to turn one of their iconic granite buildings into a Digital Twin Command Centre, housing a Building Management System (BMS) to gather data from an initial 7 buiildings within their portfolio. These include heat meters, oil and electricity meters, plus indoor and outdoor temperature sensors. Gathering such data, along with wind directions and speeds, allows them to identify areas of overheating and to make savings across energy, cost and carbon emissions. It could prove a timely innovation for us all.

David Chadwick

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