NEC contract benefits discussed at length in high-profile Emap podcast and webinar

Two of the UK’s leading industry news providers, Construction News (CN) and New Civil Engineer (NCE), recently featured NEC contracts in a webinar and podcast respectively. Both titles are published by Emap.

Sponsored by Oracle Construction and Engineering, the CN webinar on 14 October 2021 was entitled How can construction contracts be put to work to work to encourage innovation. It focused primarily on NEC4 contracts and how they drive innovation.

Chaired by CN editor Lem Bingley, the panel consisted of Arup legal group associate director Nora Fung, UK Parliament head of procurement Kuda Kadungure, Orcale director of industry strategy Werner Maritz, RPCuk business development executive Chris Woodbridge and GHM Planning director Glenn Hide. The 1 hour webinar can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnB27Kkz-3Q.

NCE podcast

NCE’s podcast on 27 October 2021 was part of its The Engineers Collective series sponsored by Bentley Systems. Entitled Contracting to collaborate and drive industry change, it focused on the impact NEC contracts have had on the global construction industry over the past 30 years.

Hosted by NCE editor Claire Smith, the guests were John Welch, chair of the NEC Users’ Group and deputy director for construction at Crown Commercial Service, and Andrew McNaughton, infrastructure lead at Aczel and formerly with Systra and Balfour Beatty.

Smith commented afterwards, ‘We so often only talk about forms of contract when projects end up in court so it was nice to step away from that and talk about how NEC has helped move the industry away from its adversarial past.’ The 1 hour podcast can be listened to at https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-6ge3c-1113fb4.