Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps he is taking to encourage innovation in the construction industry.

The Government is working with the Construction Leadership Council and its innovation work streams to drive forward innovation across the sector. It is also promoting innovation through its approach to its own construction procurement, set out in last year’s Government Construction Strategy, including requiring digital construction or Building Information Modelling (“BIM”) on all projects, stimulating adoption of digital construction in the sector’s supply chains. On major projects such as Crossrail and HS2, the client is acting as a powerful driver of innovation in construction. The Government has also set aside £1.7 billion of funding to pilot ‘accelerated construction’ to speed up house building on surplus public sector land. This will seek to encourage small and medium builders, new developers and innovative methods of construction in order to build at double the rate of traditional house builders. In addition, at Budget 2016 the Government committed funding to the next three years of the ‘Digital Built Britain’ Programme further to develop digital construction technologies and the UK’s global leadership in them.