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States have intervened with legislation to improve cashflow within construction project supply chains. The operation of the UK’s Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 leads to payment obligations stated either as a contract administrator’s certificate (or equivalent) or an adjudicator’s decision. The purpose of the intervention would be defeated unless there are speedy ways of transforming these pieces of paper into real money. The combination of the legislation, contractual provisions and insolvency law has produced a minefield of complexity concerning enforcement of payment obligations stated in these documents. Unfortunately, the knowledge and understanding required to navigate these complexities have been sorely lacking. The purpose of this paper is to plug this gap.

Legal research methods and case study approaches, using relevant court decisions as data, were adopted.

The enforcement method advised by the court is the summary judgment procedure provided under the Civil Procedure Rules. An overdue payment obligation, either under the terms of a construction contract or an adjudicator’s decision, amounts to a debt that can be the subject of insolvency proceedings. Although the insolvency enforcement method has been successfully used on some occasions, using it purely as a debt collection weapon would be inappropriate and likely to be punished by the court.

The paper contributes to knowledge in two ways: (i) it maps out the factual situations in which these payment challenges arise in language accessible to the construction industry’s professions; and (ii) comparative analysis of payment enforcement methods to aid decision-making by parties to construction industry contracts. It is relevant to the other common-law jurisdictions in which similar statutory interventions have been made.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the potential for generating improved levels of ethical conduct within the construction industry through the introduction of a single industry‐wide professional code.

The Society of Construction Law's Statement of Ethical Principles (the Code) is used as a model. The paper consists of a detailed critical analysis of the Code which it places within the context of previous studies, internationally, on the role of unethical conduct within the industry, and of the role that criminal sanctions can play in addressing this.

The paper concludes that a single industry‐wide code has a contribution to make in improving the ethical standards of conduct within the industry. However, ethical improvement can ultimately only be delivered by reducing the numbers of situations where industry participants consider it necessary to seek an advantage at someone else's expense. Other measures – in particular an increase in the incidence of longer term relationships and collaborative working – are also likely to play an equally important role.

The paper provides a new interpretation of existing sources on business and professional ethics and offers new insights into the topic area by emphasising its relationship with collaborative working.

The purpose of this paper is to demystify the meaning of the term “consequential loss” in relation to the practice of construction law. Parties may have different understandings of the term and typically an exclusion clause will not solely relate to consequential loss, but will also include other heads of losses for which the party will not be liable for, such as loss of profit, loss of revenue and loss of business.

The question emerges as to whether the term consequential loss has a definitive legal meaning in its own right. This study seeks to ascertain the definition of the term consequential loss within the construction industry through a review of the legal position regarding liability for breach of contract and consequential loss through the consideration of the case law relating to this topic and the associated secondary sources of information.

The study concludes by elucidating a clear interpretation of the term consequential loss and guidance of how it should be used in contract law.

Recent cases and established authorities are considered together for the first time in this work which assists in the development of legal principles of direct and indirect losses and the determination of how they apply to the built environment.