General elections encourage historical reflection, and in this post-election period I'd like to review the industry over the past 25 years. My first column appeared on 11 April 1980, when Margaret Thatcher had been prime minister for one year and Jimmy Carter was president of the United States. There was no Construction Industry Council, Construction Confederation, Specialist Engineering Contractors Group, or most of the other organisations we read about in Building. "Well," you might think, "that's good. Who needs them? The industry worked perfectly well without them." No, it didn't. Of course, builders, architects, quantity surveyors, engineers and others - most of them in small or micro businesses, many of them just one person - got on with their jobs. Some thrived, some failed. Many household names in 1980 no longer exist; major firms today had not been set up then.
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