When I started work in the building industry in the middle ’30s my mother, who having been married to a contractor for many years thought she knew a lot about the industry, advised me on the following lines: ‘Maurice, you are going into an old-fashioned, dirty and hard industry, which as far as I can see has made no progress since the time of the Pharaohs when the children of Israel made bricks. Do your best to make it a modern and respected industry. ? There have been very considerable changes since that time, especially in the civil engineering field where in some spheres today, aided by massive amounts of machinery, we use only one-tenth of the site labour that we did when I was a boy. But, for a variety of reasons, on the building side of construction, the rate of change has been much less marked, and progress has been much slower than I would have hoped, and it is still a labour intensive industry. At the end of the Second World War when I became seriously involved in the management of what was in the process of becoming one of the major construction companies of this country, I saw the possibilities of great change, and I have spent a large portion of the intervening quarter-century in endeavouring to effect that potential change; but it has been much slower than it could have been - indeed much slower than I think it should have been. The problems of effecting change on the building side of the construction industry are not just those of Britain, but are virtually world wide. As confirmed by the words of H. B. Finger’s summary where he says: ‘ ...the structure of the housing business, the existing institutions, the regulatory procedures and other factors have discouraged rather than encouraged modernization and improvement consistent with our overall technological, social, economic and political progress.’