The Construction Leadership Council (CLC) has failed to deliver meaningful change, a decade on from its launch, according to a leading sector commentator.

The CLC was launched in 2013 by the then Department for Business, Innovation and Skills alongside the Construction 2025 report aimed at transforming the industry.

This week, in an opinion article for Construction News, barrister Rudi Klein, former chief executive of the Specialist Engineering Contractors’ Group, slammed the CLC’s track record over the following decade.

He said: “If we are to judge the CLC’s performance over the past 10 years, we only have the Construction 2025 targets as the key performance indicators. Set against these, the CLC’s performance has been woeful.”

Klein also criticised the CLC for failing to respond to recommendations made by Mark Farmer, founder of construction consultancy Cast, in his 2016 independent review, Modernise or Die. He further slammed the CLC for failing to deliver on its own targets for ensuring contractors’ prompt payment to suppliers.

He also questioned whether the CLC had a long-term future, suggesting that the next government might merge it with another regulatory construction body.

In September last year, in his first interview since being appointed as CLC co-chair, Mace chief executive Mark Reynolds told CN about his ambition to turn the sector body into a more forward-thinking group that looks to confront industry issues before they develop into larger problems.

But success within the sector also depends partly on the government pushing out policies and pipelines that spur it on, he added.

• Read Rudi Klein’s assessment of 10 years of the CLC