It’s that time of year, when Business Link Magazine invites the region’s business leaders to offer up their predictions for the year ahead.
It has become something of a tradition, given that we’ve been doing this now for over 30 years.
Here we speak to Ian Taylor, Managing Director of construction company Henry Brothers Midlands.
The construction sector will be extremely busy in 2022 with the roll out of a large number of frameworks and infrastructure projects worth billions of pounds nationally. There’s the £3.7bn New Hospital Programme, the £7bn Department for Education Construction Framework, schemes for the Ministry of Justice and the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, plus the Government’s levelling up agenda to name just a few of the opportunities that are in the pipeline. Although we will have to wait to see if the levelling up delivers for the East Midlands in the way we were all hoping!
This huge programme of work will bring greater strain on the demand for materials and labour, leading to a knock-on effect on pricing. Supply chain issues during 2021 led to volatility and this will continue in 2022 as demand increases for the delivery of construction projects and we see inflationary pressures. To avoid pricing volatility, I expect that many clients will procure their developments through frameworks, which have a reduced procurement time over the traditional tender route, and allow projects to get to site more quickly. I also expect that clients and contractors will start working together on schemes as early as possible in the process – working smarter to avoid some of the uncertainties that are likely to arise in 2022.
Finally, I predict that there will be an increasing requirement to provide carbon neutral projects. We saw this grow in 2021 and the direction of travel is only one way. In time, all projects will need to show a carbon neutral performance.
