A decade after her organisation was formed, Build UK boss Suzannah Nichol on the challenges and rewards of representing both main and sub-contractors
I meet Build UK chief executive Suzannah Nichol, along with her long-serving deputy Jo Fautley, over a cup of tea in a swish London hotel bar. Nichol is beaming. Less than 24 hours earlier, at Windsor Castle, Princess Anne presented her with an OBE for her services to the construction industry. She has brought the gleaming silver medal to our meeting, in its presentation box, and proudly shows me her photos of the day. “It’s been quite an exciting week,” she says.
Nichol has been the public face of her organisation since 2015, when it replaced the two bodies representing main contractors and subcontractors – the UK Contractors Group and the National Specialist Contractors’ Council. After a decade at the helm, her famed energy remains undimmed. Ten years on, she now feels secure enough to talk about the scepticism she faced from some quarters in the run-up to the body’s establishment. “The one [comment] that stuck with me was someone who said to me, ‘You’ll never do it’. I think they couldn’t see how it could work,” she says.
“Covid taught us how much you can achieve, if you understand the objective, have a really clear plan, and you identify what you need people to do”
Suzannah Nichol, Build UK
In 2015, with some issues still sharply dividing main contractors and their supply chains in 2025, this anonymous sceptic’s doubts were, perhaps, understandable. However, the organisation’s function is not necessarily to solve all disagreements, but to present a unified voice for construction to the outside world, Nichol says. “You have that debate – which sometimes can be quite feisty – behind closed doors,” Nichol says. “And then you agree something that moves everybody forward, rather than either end, and the minister or whoever, somebody else, makes the decision”.
Build UK has certainly established itself as not just a leading voice, but an influential policy and practice body in the UK construction landscape. But what exactly has it achieved?
“We pride ourselves on our delivery,” Nichol says. “We don’t have standing committees. We don’t write reports. We look at how we can shift the industry, and sometimes that’s on really small things.” As an example, she points to the safety helmet colour standard, one of Build UK’s first achievements. This simple initiative standardised the colour of helmets worn by different types of workers across building sites in an attempt to avoid confusion and improve safety. “Now people often talk about going to ‘black hat briefings’.” That makes my heart sing,” she says.
Some issues are, of course harder to solve. One of the main reasons for scepticism over whether main contractors could work with subcontractors was the issue of prompt payment and retentions. It’s six years since Build UK published its Roadmap to Zero Retentions document, which outlined a path to eliminating retention payments by 2025. The document was initially embraced by the government. However, a Conservative minister under the previous government killed off any hope of that deadline being met, ruling out legislation and passing the buck to the industry.
Nichol is clear that Build UK’s approach always relied on government legislation, supported by the industry developing and implementing a phased roadmap. “Unfortunately, the government has not progressed legislation to abolish retention,” she says. “However, that’s not within the gift of the industry.”
Payment pride
Nonetheless, Nichol is proud of her organisation’s achievements on payment times. She says that the benchmarking carried out by her body – using government data that firms are required to produce by law – has helped drive down the average payment times for her members from 45 to 29 days. “I think that data is really powerful,” Faultey adds. “One of my favourite moments was when one of the chief executives of one of the big contractors stood up in front of all our members and said, ‘I want to be top of that page’. They’re competitive, you know. They are competing with each other on everything.”
Until now, the data has measured only the volume, rather than value, of invoices. This has led some sceptics to suggest the figures are prone to some ‘creative accounting’. These voices say smaller value invoices can be (and are) rushed through, while larger bills are left unpaid. Nichol voices scepticism. “If a company’s financial director is signing a government submission, that financial director [had] better be pretty confident that whatever they’re submitting will stand up to scrutiny,” she says. Faultley agrees: “When [tier ones] are prioritising payment, they’re prioritising their highest-value suppliers, such as their steel suppliers, anyway.”
Whether this confidence is well-placed or not is likely to become clearer later this year. More comprehensive reporting requirements, which the last government opted for as an alternative to legislating on retentions and payments, will take effect from April. Build UK helped shape the new metrics, which now require firms to report values as well as numbers of invoices paid, along with details of retentions policy and practice.
The recent high-profile collapses of some tier one contractors have focused the minds at bigger firms, Faultley believes. “Over the past 12 to 18 months, they say their biggest worry is the resilience of the supply chain,” she says. “They are all focused on that. They don’t get it right every time [on payment]. There is still more work to be done. But they are much more conscious about the resilience of the supply chain.”
Nichol adds that without the conversations over payment enabled by Build UK, progress would have been much slower. “This isn’t an overnight win,” she says. “People talk a lot more about the challenges and what they need to do differently. When we started, that conversation was very adversarial and didn’t happen.”
One of the biggest areas where Build UK has unarguably made a big difference is in procurement. Almost immediately upon its creation, it set about hacking back the jungle of pre-qualification questionnaires ushered in by the 2015 Construction (Design and Management) Regulations. By 2019, Build UK, working with the Civil Engineering Contractors Association, produced the unified Common Assessment Standard (CAS), helping firms prove their capabilities just once via a standard form. Last year, the Cabinet Office told all public bodies they should use the standard in their procurement processes for works contracts. “That’s a game-changer,” Nichol says.
The CAS, Nichol says, has also helped construction firms cope with the requirements of the Building Safety Act (BSA). Revisions devised by Build UK, and adopted last year, brought the CAS into line with the enhanced safety standards and regulatory requirements introduced by the act. “It wasn’t that easy, but all we needed to do was slot the new requirements in. We were already on that train. We didn’t need to divert. We just needed to stop at another station and pick more people up,” she says.
Changes to Construction Skills Certification Scheme (CSCS) cards have been another outcome of the post-Grenfell regime. Nichol highlights the role her organisation played in the introduction of the Smart Check system, which allows employers to verify all 2.1 million cards displaying the CSCS logo via existing site access systems or on an app. “It’s a step forward for industry productivity,” Nichol she says. “For employers, the card will become part of demonstrating that you have ensured the person doing the work on site has got the right skills.”
At the start of this year, CSCS cards obtained through employer recommendation were phased out, replaced by qualification-based accreditation. This has led to some moans from older workers who need to have their skills reassessed. Nichol is puzzled by the objections. “I’ve got friends who are in the aviation world. They spend a huge amount of time being assessed on a simulator. You wouldn’t want a pilot to go, ‘I’ve been flying this plane for 40 years and never had a problem’.”
Crisis management
The BSA has influenced a large part of Build UK’s agenda in recent years. But it was the Covid pandemic that affected the way it now goes about its business. The organisation has a weekly meeting with the Building Safety Regulator to flag up industry issues, administered by the Construction Leadership Council (CLC). “Some [issues] we can solve on the call,” Nichol says. “[With] some of them it’s longer, and we have to go away. We flag up things that are coming down the track, things we are hearing. That was a Covid way of working.”
It is often said that Covid was the CLC’s finest hour, when it pulled the industry together in the face of adversity. Nichol reveals the leading role that Build UK played in those efforts. Early in the crisis, before lockdowns were even being considered, her organisation gathered emerging documents on site procedures that had been produced by its members. “I got six different documents, all slightly different, but the core of it was the same. So we said, ‘Right, we’re going to combine them’. We named them site operating procedures.”
On lockdown day, 23 March 2020, the government produced two lists: one containing industries that had to shut by law and another with those that were exempt. Construction did not appear on either. Nichol fielded worried calls from contractors, which were facing difficult questions from shareholders. The majority wanted to keep sites open, she says. “We turned to the prime minister’s advisor and said, ‘Construction is staying open. We’ve got some site operating procedures that meet all what you’re saying to do’. And they asked, ‘Will everybody comply with them?’. I crossed everything in hope and said, ‘Yes, they will’.” The rest is history. Throughout the crisis, construction carried on while Build UK took charge of the 16 updates to the site operating procedures made in response to constantly changing government guidance.
The experience provided a lasting legacy. Nichol cites the recent collapse of ISG, where Build UK immediately stepped in to find new employers for the 135 of the firm’s 141 apprentices who sought help. “We worked with the administrators, who kept on [ISG’s] head of emerging talent, so we didn’t have to get people to give lots of permissions to contact people. Covid taught us how much you can achieve, if you understand the objective, have a really clear plan, and you identify what you need people to do. We had amazing help immediately from our members and others.”
Looking at some of the long-standing issues still plaguing the sector, it would be easy to underestimate the difference that Build UK has made to the construction industry. But Nichol has no doubts that the organisation is on the right track. “A lot of what we do is trying to change stuff that’s been around for a really long time,” she says. “That takes time, and it can be quite painful. I don’t think we have any ambitions to do anything differently, apart from do more of what we do well and to make a difference.”
