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This year marks the tenth anniversary of Build UK, the trade body created by what many considered an unlikely alliance between tier one contractors and the body representing their specialist subcontractors. Given the perennial friction created by contractors’ use of retentions and abusive payment practices, a conflict of interests seemed inevitable and many commentators assumed Build UK was doomed to failure.

But, 10 years on, the organisation has proved to be an effective and influential campaigner on behalf of contractors both large and small.

Suzannah Nichol, previously chief executive of the National Specialist Contractors’ Council (NSCC), has served as Build UK’s CEO from its inception. She joined David Taylor and Phil Bishop on the Re:Construction podcast to discuss how the organisation began and to reflect on the highs and lows of its first decade. Here’s an edited transcript of the conversation.

TCI: Build UK was a merger of the UK Contractors Group and the NSCC – two polar opposites. Your task must have been like the old riddle of how to take a fox, a chicken and a bag of corn across the river. What made you think it could ever work?

SN: At the time we’d had something like 26 different construction ministers in the previous 26 years – it was like a revolving door. We’d be sitting around government tables with a whole array of trade bodies and the minister would literally sit back with their hands behind their head, wait until the industry had done its stuff and then they would make the decision.

And I remember thinking: “This is so wrong. This industry is huge. It has so much to offer and it actually has a lot of the answers. We should be the ones driving what happens within the industry, not a government minister, particularly not one who has literally found themselves in the seat that day”. And the opportunity arose from the organisation that I [then] ran.

The NSCC had become larger and as a specialist sector we had a really strong voice. By the time I took it over we were very clear on our policies.

So I had a conversation with my chairman, Kevin Louch, a concrete flooring specialist, and UK Contractors Group chairman James Wates – now Sir James of course – about how we could be so much smarter and really should be sitting around the same table with the contracting supply chain, the core of it because, ultimately, whilst we have differences, we have much more in common.

Both Kevin and James looked at me and said, “do you think we can do this?” And I said, “well, we’re going to give it our best shot”.

And actually, things came together much quicker than I think anybody thought it would. Once we started to get people around the table the conversation just shifted up a gear and people really wanted to talk.

I was quite upfront: payment was an issue we were going to talk about, we weren’t going to hide from it. You know, there might be blood on the table but we were going to… push through it and we were going to do it with the industry in charge.

This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of The Construction Index Magazine. Sign up online.

TCI: What made you so confident that the small specialist contractors would be able to operate on equal terms with their employers under the same umbrella?

SN: Well I started my career as a site engineer. I qualified as a health and safety professional. I’d worked for a mid-range contractor. I’d worked for a major contractor. And then I spent a huge amount of time working for the specialist contractors.

So I’d seen it from lots of different angles, which is part of the strength of Build UK. We spend a lot of time doing that 360-degree “What will they think? What’s your view? How does it work for you?”

Don’t forget also the specialist contracting supply chain makes up the majority of a contractor’s business. A tier one contractor can do nothing without its specialist contractors.

Sir Michael Latham

So we had joint chairs to start with; we literally brought two boards together… and we made sure it was fair and equally split and they were all good people. They didn’t come with their arms folded, they came with their sleeves rolled up.

Once we brought everybody together, we had clients literally knocking on our door saying, “how do we get to be part of this?” Professional services then came. We’ve got consultants, we’ve got those that support and we’ve got institutions in the membership as well, because they recognise the value of the industry being more collaborative.

TCI: You mentioned Sir Michael Latham just now. Build UK now embodies a lot of what he recommended in Constructing the Team. But that was published about 20 years before Build UK came into being. What took you so long?

SN: We are a huge, huge industry. One in 10 of the working population works in construction. We’re between 7% and 10% of GDP, depending on what stats you’re looking at. And we are composed of about three million people, all with their own views, their own ways of looking at the world and how they want to do things.

So change isn’t easy for anybody. And when you have a lot of different industry bodies, clearly there’s also vested interests.

I can’t really answer why it took so long but once we saw the opportunity we took it and made it happen. But I’ve always been a bit of a super fan of Sir Michael Latham, and I’ll tell you why.

When I was a very young engineer, Sir Michael was the chair of CITB [Construction Industry Training Board] and I came across him at some kind of event and he was incredibly kind, he took an interest and he took me under his wing. I think I probably asked a really awkward question when everybody else just sat and listened.

He reached out and gave me that little bit of support and I have never ever forgotten that… It makes me incredibly proud that now, at this stage, you can actually see the link between all the things that he said and what we are doing as Build UK.

This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of The Construction Index Magazine. Sign up online.

TCI: You are clearly proud of what Build UK has achieved over the past decade. But when did you first realise that you could make a difference?

SN:  Well we had all sorts of issues kicking around in the industry but one day one of the contractors said “if only we could agree on the colour of safety helmets,” and I said “What? Out of everything, the colour of safety helmets?”

Then I thought, well actually that would be really easy. We don’t wear a uniform on site; you don’t really know who works for who. Also, I was a qualified health & safety professional for years and at every briefing it was “tell your supervisor” – and you’d look around and you wouldn’t be able to tell who your supervisor was.

So we pulled together the tier one contractors and it turned out they’d been trying to do this for three years. Then I mapped out what they all did and it was a kind of 80:20 thing – 80% were doing the same thing. So then we ended up with the safety helmet colour standard where you’ve got white helmets for competence, blue helmets if you’re a newbie or vulnerable – an apprentice or a visitor – and you’ve got black helmets for a supervisor and then orange hats if you’re a slinger-signaller.

A couple said, “well, we’re not going to do it” I said, “Fine. I’ll go with 80%. That sounds like a big step forward to me”. And slowly but surely, everybody began to understand: blue hats want to be a white hat. White hats want to be a black hat. One of my proudest moments was when National Highways, or whatever it was then, actually phoned me up and said “can we adopt your policy?”

TCI: That sounds like an easy win. But you must have had more challenging tasks. What are you most proud of having achieved with Build UK over the past 10 years?

SN: Well, that then segued into things like the Common Assessment Standard [the streamlined prequalification process pioneered by Build UK]. That was actually one of our first pieces of work…

And we navigated Covid – and if you ask what I’m proudest of, that’s probably it. That’s the bit that massively floats to the top: we did the site operating procedures – my little team – and we published them through the Construction Leadership Council because we knew this was not just about our members.

Apart from the blue lights and the food sector, we were the only industry that kept going through every single lockdown and I take my hat off to every single person who left their home when everybody was told to stay indoors and they went out to work and kept the industry moving.

Over one weekend we changed the opening hours of every single site in London; if we hadn’t,  the mayor was going to shut us down. So on a Friday we called everybody in and that weekend we sorted out where all the pinch points were and every single site changed their opening hours and every single person complied with what they were asked to do. That just blows me away.

There was no blueprint or toolkit for this; things were changing on a daily basis. So we had a conference call with tier one bosses and asked if they wanted to stay open or shut their sites.

I asked 10 contractors and eight voted to stay open so I stopped after 10 and said “Right, we’re going to keep you open but you’re going to have to do certain things and I don’t know what they are yet!”

TCI: The government must have been delighted that you took that decision away from them – or made that decision for them!

SN: I think you’re right, because when I went back to this senior government advisor and said “construction’s staying open, OK? We keep the lights on” he asked if everybody would do it and I just crossed everything and said “yes, they will”.

I’m not saying everybody did but we kind of led the way then, because government, if you remember, then started producing guidelines. But they were too slow for us. We were changing on a weekly basis: people were having to work out things like how to carry a sheet of plasterboard with two people, how to work in close environments.

Interestingly, the industry became much more productive and much more efficient during that time. We were also able to go back and inform government on what we needed to do but they pretty much left construction alone because we demonstrated collectively that we were going to work together, we had clear leadership.

The Construction Leadership Council met every day, we led on the site operating procedures, other people led on other bits, so we all played to our strengths and the whole industry stepped up and motored forward.

We were one of the first to roll out Covid testing because we’ve got big groups of people going to work and we were also one of the first sectors to roll out vaccinations.

This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of The Construction Index Magazine. Sign up online.

TCI: There must have been some issues that have proved frustrating over the years – and I hope you’re going to mention retentions at this point!

SN: Well, the industry is really good at saying what it wants to do and wants to change but actually shifting that dial…

You mention retentions and yes, payment is still a challenge. But I don’t think payment is just a construction issue. I think it’s a power imbalance through any supply chain. However 99% of companies in construction are SMEs and work tier two, tier three, tier four down the chain. So they have to wait for the cash.

But on payment performance, we’ve shifted the dial on that. We benchmark it on our website so you can go in and see the payment terms of all our contractor members that have a duty to report their payment terms. In the first five years of reporting, we’ve improved the payment terms amongst our members from 45 days down to 29 days just by benchmarking them.

We started benchmarking payment performance following the introduction of the statutory duty to report [introduced in April 2017]. So we don’t have to go and get the data ourselves which is great because, you know, businesses are rubbish at filling in surveys.

But companies over a certain size have to submit their payment data against certain metrics and that’s all on a website. So we said to our members in 2018, “Right, we’re going to put this in a table, a league table, OK?” And everyone’s like, “We love a league table!” Well, you do love a league table when you’re at the top of it. Nobody likes a league table when you’re at the bottom of it – I’ve noticed that.

We actually lost members over it. They asked: “Why are you doing this?” And my answer was, “Well, for one, it’s an issue; two, transparency works; and three, if we don’t do it, somebody else will do it, right?”

I said: “We will mock up the benchmarking table. We can then show you where you are. You won’t be able to change it because it’s on your last six months of performance, but you will know where you are. So if you are towards the bottom of that table, you will know in advance. Then you can talk to your board, you can talk to your clients, you can talk to your supply chain and you can decide what your position is and how you are going to respond.”

That’s a much better way than the first time you see it is on the front of the construction press and you’re bottom of the league table and they’re singling you out.

In terms of retentions, you’re absolutely right. It is a tricky issue but I think there is clear agreement now with our tier one contractors. They moved from not even talking about it to having grown up conversations about it and recognising that it isn’t the way to do business.

I remember a lunch we had with some of our tier one contractors and some specialists when one of our larger specialist contractors looked at Mark Reynolds, who was then chief executive at Mace, and said “I’ve worked for you for years, I’ve always delivered a cracking job and if there are any issues, I will come back and fix them for you, and I’ve proved that. It isn’t fair that you withhold a retention from me in the same way you withhold it from all your other suppliers who don’t have that same relationship.”

And Mark turned around and went, “Yeah, I get it. It’s not fair. Forget all the other reasons. It’s not fair”. And that was a bit of a turning point. That’s what you need sometimes: one of those conversations where somebody in a leadership role who can make things happen just kind of does the right thing in front of your eyes.

This is one of those things that the industry has to sort out for itself.

We’ve set out minimum standards for retentions. We’ve written the contractual clauses and I now have specialists who say, “By Jove, this works! I go in with these minimum standards and match them up against my contracts and most contractors I ask will now implement those standards.”

Now, from 1^st July I think it is, new laws require certain companies to report on the retentions they hold and on their retention practices.

TCI: So you’re going to put that up on your late payment table?

SN: Yes, we’ve just updated our table. The metrics won’t come from everybody just yet because you report six months after your financial year starts. But we’ll end up with a number that shows whether you’ve got more retention withheld from you than you are withholding and we’ll start to see where the money sticks. The clients will have to do this, the contractors will have to – anybody who reports will have to do that.

TCI: Back to the issue of industry representation, lobbying, interaction with government. Build UK is a democratic organisation representing its members; how do you work with the Construction Leadership Council, which is not representative? It’s hand-picked people appointed by government, administered by government, with no democracy, no mandate, no legitimacy!

SN: It’s a team game. So whatever you think of the Construction Leadership Council, it brings that top level of industry representation together and it makes a difference. And again, we learned that during Covid, by bringing together the tier one contractors (and the supply chain through our membership) with the construction products, with the consultants, with the Federation of Master Builders, with the merchants, we were like an industry superpower.

The CLC doesn’t have any resources as such. But the collective weight of all of us is much more powerful. And we’re also much smarter. I don’t need to go in and say, “oh, I’ve met the minister this week”. It’s quite nice to be able do that but I don’t need to. If it’s a products issue, if they invite me I can say “really, you need the Construction Products Association there, because they are the lead on products”. I can play to my skill set but there is often somebody better placed to do that.

And I think that’s the difference about Build UK. I don’t have to lead on everything. The Construction Leadership Council brings together the right organisations to play to our strengths. We do play a leading role because as part of the industry, we’re the largest in terms of membership, not necessarily the largest in terms of organisation, but in terms of membership.

We’re out of time and we haven’t even mentioned building safety! We’re in a really painful time right now but, again, only by working together can we come out the other side. I’d love to come back and talk about that – and competence, skill levels, apprenticeships, card schemes and how we bring on that next generation.

Construction’s been good for me. I’ve had the most amazing career and I hope it’s not over just yet!

This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of The Construction Index Magazine. Sign up online.

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