Freddie Mercury from Queen:

“And we have no such thing as a budget anymore. Our manager freaks when we show him the bill. We’re lavish to the bone.”

This month saw the government deliver its emergency budget. If only the country’s economics were as straightforward as being a rock star once was. (more…)

Edward Davies, Hill Dickinson LLP (currently seconded to the Panama Canal Expansion Project):

In September last year, under the heading unreasonable skill and care, I looked at the dilemma facing professional people who need to strike a balance between giving advice in the timescale required and taking long enough to be as confident as they can be that the advice is correct. (more…)

A recent Court of Appeal decision set many construction practitioners thinking about how the parties communicate and give notices to each other. In particular, when a statute or contract requires a company to give a notice or sign a document, do the execution rules of the Companies Acts always apply? (more…)

If a high net worth individual wants to carry out work to their house, or even intends to build a new house, what form of building contract might you recommend for their works? (more…)

We all know that we need to improve energy use in new houses and buildings, so why should we care about existing housing stock? On 10 June, the Construction Products Association (CPA) published An Introduction to Low Carbon Domestic Refurbishment, a guide that answers that question and might even provide some inspiration for the wider construction industry. (more…)

CABE (the Commission for Arcitecture and the Built Environment) has published Simpler and Better, a report which argues for the introduction of a minimum design standard for homes, combined with better, leaner regulation of new homes through (for example) the planning and building regulation systems. (more…)

James Levy, joint head of construction and engineering, Lewis Silkin LLP:

Of the various areas of law that make up what is known as “construction law”, I think it is fair to say that negligence and whether a certain loss is recoverable is perhaps the most complex and one which, still today, many years after a snail was found in a bottle of ginger beer, gives rise to the most uncertainty.

That uncertainty concerns, amongst other things, the question of whether the damage caused is to “other property” (when the loss is normally recoverable) or to “the thing itself” (when the loss is not normally recoverable, as it constitutes economic loss). (more…)