Balfour Beatty plc

I think I've been to court twice on dilapidations, with the first one being Elite Investments and TI Bainbridge, which was some case in the 80s.

But the one I remember most was what was called the Texas Home Care and Balfour Beatty, which is the way they named the cases.

And I was appearing in the High Court in London.

And so I'd given my evidence and I was there for two days so I had to go and buy a shirt because I thought I was going to be there for the first day and not the second.

I specifically remember a protest in 2011, which went to the city of London, Westminster, There had been lots of organising with construction workers.

There's a big construction company in this country called Balfour Beatty.

They were trying to reconfigure the contracts for electricians, plumbers, all sorts of things.

They'd been on strike.

So anyway, b-but as I say, hadn't been there for long, maybe he's not tainted by the previous regime.

He himself, safe pair of hands, used to be chief executive of Balfour Beatty, trained as an accountant.

He's one of those kind of classic boardroom figures you find in British business, who's on a board of a port-

[chuckles]

I think that's probably a smart move as

well the contractor market now but the kind of holiday letting market in the future because the ones I was looking at for essays more recently were the like the wind turbines so there were you know wind farms that you've got a five year contract with Balfour Beatty that are going to be there for thinking probably that's going to be a huge occupancy rate with contractors but what happens when the contractor work's done

but there's maintenance on them all the time as well like it's a good idea to kind of target the wind farms

yeah do you get any updates from Alex in terms of like you don't really want to know about like guests or like the condition and stuff like that see to

He's been around the block.

He was the boss of Balfour Beatty in the noughties and early 2010s.

And he's currently the chair of a construction company called Grafton.

And he's on the board of Anglo-Americans, a big, big mining company.

So good for them.

And like I said, there are loads of companies like this, right? So there's BAE Systems, Sodexo, Balfour Beatty, Atkins Realist, KBR, Soprasterra, Miti, Babcock International, Kia is another one.

And they're all multi-billion pound companies that work with the government and bid with the government for contracts to provide infrastructure and services for Britain and other countries because there's no reason they need to be locked into Britain.

So getting back to Anglo Futurists thing, are we giving away the Chagos Islands to take the contract? I mean, purportedly not, but we are giving away the Chagos Islands and they do have a substantial...

Yes, Ian Tyler, um, confirmed in the job.

He, in terms of his background, he's, he's been CEO of Balfour Beatty before.

He worked there for over a decade.

He's also currently chair of Grafton, the building supplier company, so he's gonna be their permanent chair.

It's like when we were looking at community engagement and we were looking at how we're going to build Terminal 5 and how we're going to engage the local community in building Terminal 5.

Because when we've got some mega organisations like Balfour Beatty or whatever looking to build the buildings, how are they going to engage with local communities? So we did a lot of work on how to engage local communities in the various different tiers of the supply chain.

and how to identify what packages of work could be done by the local community.

Those lessons in the UK have been learned for many years, and you've seen them go from Heathrow Airport Terminal 5, then they went to Crossrail, now the Elizabeth Line, then they went to the Olympics, and from the Olympics they're going on to HS2.