Dinner 3 - Manchester

Holding the line: inside CLIC's third dinner

"It's not about winning the job," one member said. "It's about surviving it." That single line captured the mood of CLIC's third dinner, which sat sixteen commercial leaders around the table at The Root at Banyan in Manchester in October 2025, under the theme "holding the line: leadership, fairness and judgement in a changing industry." Gas and utilities, nuclear, fire safety, M&E, fit-out, main contracting, civils — a genuine cross-section, talking for the better part of three hours.

Is fairness commercially viable, or has survival replaced it?

The room described a race to the bottom: new entrants bidding for work and accepting risk they can't manage, in a business with almost no margin to absorb a mistake. The numbers laid it bare — developers were said to be working on 20 to 25 percent margins while main contractors are "lucky to clear 3." As one member put it, "it's a cash-flow business, not a profit business."

Pushing risk down the chain was dismissed as an illusion. "You think you've pushed the risk down to subbies," one member said, "but all they'll do is go bust tomorrow and you've still got it." The counter-strategy that drew nods wasn't a clever contractual manoeuvre. It was communication and discipline: get every stakeholder involved early, and be willing to walk away from work that can't be survived. One member described mitigating excessive risk transfer simply by talking to the supply chain early and honestly — "we didn't try and reinvent the wheel" — and leaving partners keen to work with them again.

When compliance delays a project, who carries the cost?

The Building Safety Act and the Gateway regime drew the sharpest grievances of the night. "Gateway 2 is an eight-week period," one member said. "We got our first one through in just under a year." The complaint wasn't with the intent of the regulation but with the resourcing behind it: regulators telling firms they can't start work until designs are validated, "without the resource" to validate them at any pace. The industry, one member estimated, is "4,000 people short to clear this backlog — and it takes three years minimum to train one."

If AI can price, forecast and analyse faster than you, what's left?

Adoption in the room was near-universal and uneven. Real uses were shared freely — AI writing complex Excel formulas and cutting reporting time dramatically, meeting-minutes tools that free people to actually engage in the room, even softening the tone of an angry email before it goes out. But the accuracy warnings were just as vivid: on NEC, one member said, the model "knows the right answer but every clause reference is wrong — that must be the easiest bit," and when challenged it cheerfully admits it hadn't actually read the clause.

Where the room landed was on judgement. AI can't read what one member called the "favour bank" — the £5,000 you give a subcontractor that isn't strictly a variation, to oil the wheels for a favour later. "I'd rather be owed a favour than a fiver," someone said. The structural worry was longer-term: as AI absorbs the work of graduates and assistants, the org chart turns from a pyramid into a diamond, with "nothing feeding the middle." The recurring line, here as at every dinner since: "AI won't replace you, but someone using it might."

What holds a team together when pressure hits?

Overwork was named as the number one reason people leave — and unglamorous, human things were named as what keeps them. Handwritten thank-you cards. Walking across the office to shake someone's hand. One member nearly lost a good QS to a poacher, only for them to come back the following Monday — not for money, but, in their words, because "I want to work where I can make a mistake and learn."

The room was clear that transparency is a tool, not a risk: showing site managers and foremen the actual margin and cost report, rather than hiding it in a commercial-only file, is what wins their buy-in. And honest feedback, done properly, was prized. "Honesty without care is bluntness," one member offered. "Care without honesty is manipulation. You need both."

Are you developing leaders, or promoting survivors?

There was real anxiety about the pipeline, set against a more hopeful reading of the younger generation as more emotionally intelligent, not less committed. The industry's confrontational culture was traced back to its mechanics: bi-party contracts are built for conflict, and, as one member argued, "you can't change the culture unless you change the mechanisms that we contract." But change is possible — the room pointed to the wholesale shift in site drinking culture inside a single generation as proof.

The room stays open

The third dinner's lasting output was a way to keep the conversation going between events: a CLIC WhatsApp community, already around thirty people, where members post leadership and technical questions and get cross-sector answers within the hour. The single piece of written feedback summed the evening up neatly — "relaxed, informal and, more importantly, friendly," with what stood out being "the openness of people to offer opinions." The dinner is done; the group chat is always on.

CLIC is an invitation-only network for senior commercial leaders in UK construction and infrastructure. Dinners operate under Chatham House Rules. If you lead a commercial function and want a seat at the table, apply through the site.