Buildings

The Building Safety Regulator will turn its focus to driving down the number of live cases relating to remediating unsafe buildings in 2026, the body’s chief executive has told Construction News. Despite the strides made on clearing new-build applications, the volume of live cladding remediation cases has remained stubbornly at…

Seven new hospitals being built to replace reinforced aerated autoclaved concrete- (RAAC-) affected buildings will be delayed by three years and miss their 2030 deadline. An independent report commissioned by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) in 2022 recommended that hospitals in the government's New Hospital Programme with…

A £45m Kier job to combine four Scottish schools into a community campus has experienced another delay. The new Tain Community Campus, a project to relocate four schools onto one site, has been pushed back a further three months – and will now be completed 20 months later than first…

Total output in the UK construction sector fell 1.1 per cent in the three months to November last year, compared with the previous three-month period. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the decrease was the largest quarterly drop since March 2023, when it went down by 1.4 per…

Nearly 100 tower crane operators are to walk out over “unacceptable” pay-rise offers over the past two years. Tower crane operators employed in the UK by Wolffkran, a Swiss firm specialising in the design, manufacture and use of tower cranes, voted to hold fortnightly 24-hour strikes beginning later this month.…

Stewart Milne’s administration process could take up to three years following an extension. The housebuilder was set to exit administration this month, but administrators at Teneo in December extended the process by a further year, to 7 January 2027. The company went under in January 2024 after several failed attempts…

A year-long slump in construction activity has begun to slow as business confidence began to show small signs of recovery, latest figures show. The S&P Global purchasers’ managers index (PMI) registered 40.1 in for December, up from 39.4 in November, but still short of the 44.1 figure from October. A…

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has blamed a review on radon regulations for the delay in its multimillion-pound remediation of HMP Dartmoor. The prison has been closed since August 2024 after high levels of radon gas were detected. Despite the closure, the MoJ still signed a new lease up until…

Housebuilder Taylor Wimpey is suing Vinci Construction for more than £30m over alleged cladding and steelwork defects carried out by the contractor’s subsidiary Taylor Woodrow at a development in Cardiff. The case concerns the development of seven residential towers at Victoria Wharf in Cardiff Bay. Taylor Wimpey appointed Taylor Woodrow…

Landmark legislation around building safety will be reviewed in 2027 - five years after it was introduced, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) announced yesterday. The landmark Building Safety Act (BSA) was introduced in 2022 in response to the Grenfell Tower tragedy in 2017 when 72 people…