Dave Rogers Chief executives such as Balfour Beatty's Leo Quinn and Galliford Try's Bill Hocking have said they have instructed teams to pore over contracts and find out how much they are liable for. Hocking told Building last week, before the crisis intensified further, that his firm was insisting on force majeure clauses in new contracts before it would sign them. And if clients declined? "We are going to have to make a decision." The legal repercussions of who is responsible for delays to jobs caused by the coronavirus are just the start of a few months that are likely to reshape construction for years to come. Take Costain, for example. Its share price, at the time of writing, has crashed by so much that the company as a whole - its market capitalisation - is worth less than £40m. This is a firm that has an order book of £4.2bn which includes £1.1bn worth of work on HS2. Its turnover last year was £1.2bn and it made a pre-tax loss of £6.6m. Its numbers are not great but the week before Kier made a much bigger pre-tax loss in the six months to December 2019 and its share price went up.
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