Speaking at a Movement for Innovation conference, Crane said one of the biggest barriers to changing the way the industry operated was forms of contract that institutionalised an adversarial way of working.
Crane said: "If a main contractor has an adversarial contract with a client, he'll pass on that risk to his specialists and you end up with an entire chain of conflict." The problem, said Crane, stemmed from clients and main contractors employing lawyers to amend standard contracts or write unfair bespoke ones. He said: "Take the New Engineering Contract. That was a genuine attempt to establish a non-adversarial framework for clients and contractors. But what has happened? People – clients and main contractors – have started adding their own amendments.
"We need to sit down with contract-writing bodies like the JCT and establish a contract that underpins the principle of working together and discourage people amending the standard forms of contract that we develop from that."
