Build It — Fix It
Lifetime Warranty • Zero Payment While Broken • PFI Reform
All Contracts • Zero Hiding • Penalties for Failure
You Built It. It’s Your Problem Until It Works.
The Problem
The Royal Liverpool University Hospital. Built under PFI by Carillion. Budgeted at £335 million. Due to open in 2017. Cracked concrete beams. Cladding that did not comply. Operating-theatre ventilation that was not fit for purpose. Carillion collapsed in January 2018 with the building unfinished and unsafe. The public sector took the deal back and paid hundreds of millions of pounds more to put right what the contractor had built wrong. The hospital opened in October 2022, five years late. Nobody who built it paid to fix it.
The state is no better as a client. HMP Dartmoor is a granite prison built in 1809. Radon was measured there in 2020 at many times the level at which the law requires action. In December 2023 the Ministry of Justice signed a new 25-year lease on it anyway, with the rent locked in until 2033. In the summer of 2024 the prisoners were moved out because of the radon. The building now sits empty at a cost of around £4 million a year, £1.5 million of it rent, and the Health and Safety Executive has since authorised a Crown Censure of the prison service over the exposure. No contractor built that failure. The government signed it with its eyes open, and nobody outside Whitehall could see the contract until it went wrong.
This is not an isolated failure. It is the standard operating model for government contracts in the United Kingdom. The contractor builds it. The government pays. The building fails. The government pays again to fix it. The contractor has moved on. The liability sits with the taxpayer. From PFI hospitals that cost three times their build price over the contract, to IT systems that never work, to aircraft carriers delivered without aircraft, to schools built with concrete that rots — the pattern is identical. Build, bill, fail, disappear.
BUILD will end this with a principle so obvious it should never have needed stating: you built it, you fix it. For the lifetime of the asset. At your cost. If it does not work, you do not get paid. If it is late, you pay a penalty. If it fails after handover, you come back and fix it. And if you financed it through PFI, you get back what you spent and not a penny more.
You built it. It’s your problem. Fix it or give the money back. This is not radical policy. This is what every homeowner expects from a builder. BUILD applies the same standard to every government contract in the country.
Pillar 1: Lifetime Warranty
1.1 — The Principle
Every government contract — for buildings, infrastructure, IT systems, equipment, or services — includes a lifetime warranty. The contractor is liable for defects, failures, and performance shortfalls for the operational lifetime of the asset or system they delivered. Not 12 months. Not 5 years. The lifetime.
A prison built to operate for 60 years carries a 60-year warranty. A hospital built to operate for 80 years carries an 80-year warranty. An IT system commissioned for 10 years carries a 10-year warranty. A road resurfaced to last 15 years carries a 15-year warranty. The warranty matches the expected life. If the asset fails before its expected life, the contractor who built it fixes it at their cost.
1.2 — What the Warranty Covers
Structural defects — foundations, frame, roof, walls, floors. If the building develops structural problems within its design life, the contractor returns and repairs at their cost. Environmental failures — radon, asbestos exposure, flooding caused by inadequate drainage design, ventilation failures. If the building is unfit for occupation due to environmental conditions that should have been identified and addressed during construction, the contractor bears the liability. Systems failures — heating, electrical, plumbing, IT infrastructure. If building systems fail due to design or installation defects (not wear and tear from normal use), the contractor repairs at their cost.
The warranty does not cover: damage caused by the occupier; normal wear and tear on consumable components (lightbulbs, filters, seals); modifications made by third parties after handover; or acts of God (flood, earthquake, storm damage beyond design parameters). The distinction is clear: your fault, you fix it. Their fault, they fix it. Nobody’s fault, insurance covers it.
1.3 — Warranty Bond
Every contractor on a government contract deposits a warranty bond — a percentage of the contract value held in escrow for the warranty period. If the contractor ceases trading, the bond funds the repair. If the contractor refuses to honour the warranty, the bond is drawn down and the repair is commissioned independently. The bond is returned to the contractor at the end of the warranty period if no claims have been made. The bond incentivises quality because the contractor’s own money is at risk for the life of the asset.
Pillar 2: Zero Payment While Non-Operational
If it does not work, you do not get paid. This is how every other industry operates. A plumber who fits a boiler that does not heat the house does not get paid until the house is warm. BUILD applies the same standard to a £335 million hospital.
If a government asset is non-operational due to a defect attributable to the contractor, all payments to the contractor are suspended from the date the asset goes offline until the date it returns to full operation. The Royal Liverpool University Hospital was due to open in 2017 and opened in 2022. Under BUILD’s framework, the contractor would have received nothing for a building that could not open, the cracked beams and the faulty cladding would have been its to fix at its own cost, and when it collapsed the warranty bond would have paid for the repair instead of the NHS. Not reduced payment. Zero.
This applies to: buildings closed due to construction defects; IT systems that are non-functional or underperforming against contract specifications; equipment that does not meet the operational standard specified in the contract; and services that fall below the contracted performance level. The principle is binary: it works, you get paid. It does not work, you do not get paid. Fix it and the payments resume. Do not fix it and the payments never resume.
Pillar 3: Penalty for Late Delivery
3.1 — Liquidated Damages
Every government contract includes liquidated damages for late delivery. For every day the project is delivered beyond the contracted completion date, the contractor pays a daily penalty calculated as a percentage of the total contract value. The percentage is set at a level that makes late delivery genuinely costly — not a token amount that the contractor can absorb as a cost of doing business.
The HS2 model — where the project is years late, billions over budget, and the contractor continues to be paid while the deadline recedes into the distance — does not happen under BUILD. Late means penalty. Every day. Automatically. No negotiation. No variation order. No ‘revised completion date.’ The original date was agreed. The penalty runs from the day after it.
3.2 — Over-Budget Penalties
Government contracts are fixed-price. The price agreed in the contract is the price paid. Cost overruns are the contractor’s problem. If the contractor underestimated the cost, the contractor absorbs the difference. The taxpayer does not pay more because the contractor got the estimate wrong.
The current model — where contractors bid low to win the contract, then inflate the cost through variation orders, scope changes, and ‘unforeseen circumstances’ that a competent contractor would have foreseen — is eliminated. Fixed price means fixed price. If the project costs more than the bid, the contractor takes the loss. That incentivises accurate bidding, competent surveying, and realistic cost estimation. If a contractor cannot deliver at the price they bid, they should not have bid.
Pillar 4: PFI Reform — Cost Recovery, Zero Interest
4.1 — The PFI Problem
The Private Finance Initiative was designed to get public infrastructure built without upfront public spending. Private companies financed the construction of hospitals, schools, roads, and prisons. The public sector then rented the buildings back over 25–30 years. The result: a hospital that cost £200 million to build can cost the NHS £600 million over 30 years. Some of that pays for maintenance and services, but a large slice is interest and investor return that public borrowing would never have paid. That return came from the NHS budget. Which came from the taxpayer. The taxpayer paid three times the cost of the building so that a private company could extract a return on investment from a public hospital.
There are still more than 650 PFI contracts in operation across the UK, with around £136 billion of payments still to come. The buildings are built. The cost was incurred decades ago. The payments continue until the 2040s and 2050s. The NHS alone spends approximately £2 billion per year on PFI payments — money that could fund more than 35,000 nurses at BUILD’s £25-an-hour clinical rate.
4.2 — Cost Recovery Only
BUILD will renegotiate every existing PFI contract on a single principle: the PFI company recovers the amount it spent building the asset. Not a penny more. No interest. No return on investment. No profit on the financing. You built a hospital for £200 million. You get £200 million back over the remaining contract period. The additional £400 million that the current contract requires the NHS to pay is cancelled.
The PFI company will argue that they took risk by financing the construction. BUILD’s answer: the risk was underwritten by a guaranteed 30-year government rental stream. That is not risk. That is the safest investment in the country. A guaranteed income from the British government for three decades is not a risk premium. It is a subsidy to a private company dressed up as a commercial transaction. The subsidy is over. You get your money back. You do not get rich from a hospital.
4.3 — New PFI Prohibited
No new PFI contracts will be entered into by any public body. If the government needs a building, the government finances the building through public borrowing at the government’s own borrowing rate — which is always lower than a private company’s borrowing rate, which is why PFI was always more expensive than direct public financing. The only reason PFI existed was to keep the borrowing off the government’s balance sheet. It was an accounting trick. The trick is over.
Pillar 5: Transparency — Zero Hiding
5.1 — Every Contract Published
Every government contract — national, regional, and local — is published in full on a searchable public database. The contract value, the contractor, the specification, the timeline, the penalty clauses, the warranty terms, and the payment schedule are all public. No redactions for ‘commercial confidentiality.’ The taxpayer is paying. The taxpayer sees the contract.
5.2 — Real-Time Performance Dashboard
Every major government contract has a public performance dashboard showing: current status (on time / late / over budget / complete); payments made to date versus contracted value; defects reported and remediation status; penalty payments incurred; and contractor performance rating. The dashboard is updated in real time. Any member of the public can look up any government project and see whether it is on track, how much it has cost, and whether the contractor is performing. The opacity that allowed projects to drift years late and billions over budget without public scrutiny is replaced by a dashboard that anyone can read.
5.3 — Contractor Performance Register
A national register of contractor performance across all government contracts. Every contractor is rated on: delivery to time; delivery to budget; defect rate; warranty claims; and client satisfaction. The register is public. A contractor that has delivered three projects late, two over budget, and one with major defects carries that record visibly. A contracting authority that awards a new contract to a contractor with a poor performance record must justify the decision publicly. The register creates consequences for poor performance that the current system lacks — because currently, a contractor can fail on one project and win the next because nobody checked their track record.
Pillar 6: IT and Digital Contracts
Government IT projects are the most consistently over-budget, late, and non-functional category of public procurement. The NHS IT programme (NPfIT) was scrapped after spending £10 billion. Universal Credit wrote off its first IT system and the programme ran years late and billions over its original estimate. The Emergency Services Network is years behind schedule. The Border Force e-gates fail regularly. The pattern is identical every time: a large consultancy wins the contract, builds something that does not work, charges for the overruns, and moves on.
Under BUILD, IT contracts are subject to the same framework as construction contracts: fixed-price; lifetime warranty (for the commissioned operational life of the system); zero payment while non-functional; penalties for late delivery; and published performance dashboards. An IT system that does not meet the contracted specification does not get paid for. A system that is delivered three years late incurs three years of daily penalties. A system that crashes regularly is the contractor’s problem to fix, at the contractor’s cost, for the system’s entire operational life.
Additionally, all government IT contracts must include: source code escrow (if the contractor goes bust, the government has the code); open standards and interoperability (no proprietary lock-in that forces the government to use the same contractor forever); and modular architecture (so components can be replaced without rebuilding the entire system). The current model, where a single consultancy builds a monolithic system and the government is locked into maintaining it with that consultancy forever, is prohibited.
Pillar 7: Defence Procurement
The Defence & Armed Forces Charter (Pillar 1, and §1.3 on procurement) establishes fixed-price contracts and British manufacturing for all military procurement. The Build It — Fix It framework reinforces this: the aircraft carrier that was delivered without aircraft, the Ajax armoured vehicle built by General Dynamics that left crews with hearing damage, and Lockheed Martin’s Warrior upgrade that was cancelled after £500 million of spending are all failures that would have been prevented or penalised under this charter.
Defence procurement under BUILD: fixed-price contracts with liquidated damages for late delivery; lifetime warranty on all equipment and platforms; zero payment for equipment that does not meet specification; and the contractor performance register applies — a defence contractor that has failed on three previous programmes carries that record publicly and must overcome it to win a new contract. The days of a handful of prime contractors delivering late, over budget, and underperforming — and then winning the next contract anyway because they are the only supplier — are over. The Defence & Armed Forces Charter’s national defence manufacturing authority (§1.3) and shipyard programme (Pillar 2) create the capacity. Competition exists where it did not before.
Pillar 8: Fair Wages on Public Money
8.1 — No Public Contract Below the Living Wage
From 1891 until 1983, Fair Wages Resolutions of the House of Commons required government contractors to pay the going rate in their trade. They were rescinded in 1983. BUILD brings the principle back. No company may win or hold a public contract (central government, a council, the NHS or any other public body) unless everyone working on it is paid at least the higher of the legal minimum wage and the Real Living Wage set by the Living Wage Foundation. That is currently £13.45 an hour, or £14.80 in London.
Once BUILD’s £15 standard minimum is in force (Work & Workers Charter, Pillar 1), it is higher than both, and it becomes the test. Taxpayers’ money does not pay for poverty wages.
8.2 — The Whole Supply Chain
The rule applies all the way down the supply chain. Subcontractors, agency staff, and the outsourced cleaners, caterers and security staff on a contract all count. As with the pay ratio (Work & Workers Charter, Pillar 9.3), outsourcing does not get a contractor out of the rule. Pay rates are stated in the contract, and the contract is published (Pillar 5.1).
8.3 — Breach Means Debarment
The Procurement Act 2023 already keeps a central list of suppliers barred from public contracts. A contractor found paying below the floor on a public contract repays the shortfall to every worker affected. It is then added to that list for three years, and the finding goes on its Contractor Performance Register entry (Pillar 5.3).
The Contract System BUILD Will Deliver
Every government contract carries a lifetime warranty. If it breaks, the contractor who built it comes back and fixes it at their cost. If it does not work, the contractor does not get paid. If it is late, the contractor pays a daily penalty. If it is over budget, the contractor absorbs the overrun. Every contract is published. Every project has a public dashboard. Every contractor carries a performance record that follows them to the next bid.
PFI contracts are renegotiated to cost recovery only. The company gets back what it spent. Not a penny more. No interest. No profit on the financing. New PFI is prohibited. The government borrows at its own rate instead of paying a premium to a private company for the privilege of using a public building.
IT contracts are fixed-price with source code escrow, open standards, and the same warranty and penalty structure as everything else. Defence contracts carry the same framework. The register creates consequences. The dashboard creates visibility. The warranty creates accountability.
The Royal Liverpool was due in 2017 and opened in 2022, finished with public money after the contractor that built it wrong went bust. HMP Dartmoor was leased for 25 years by a government that already knew about the radon, and it costs around £4 million a year to keep empty. Under BUILD, the first contractor would have been fixing its own beams at its own cost, with its bond paying when it collapsed, and the second contract would have been published, with the radon readings beside it, before anybody signed. That is not radical. That is what you expect when you pay someone to do a job.
You built it. Fix it. Or give the money back. Every builder in the country understands this. Every homeowner understands this. BUILD applies the same standard to every contract the government signs. You built it. It’s your problem. For life.
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BUILD UK
builduk.club
August 2026
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