FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Chapter 5 Finding a New Home

were naturally keen to take them on. We needed the resource in order to cope with all the new work. But it wasn’t as simple as it sounded. The workforce, gangs and supervisors, were transferred over to us under an arrangement known as TUPE (Transfer of Undertakings, Protection of Employment). This was basically a guarantee of working terms and conditions. As we quickly discovered, there was an immense gap between our work culture and the work culture that these people had been used to at the Local Authority. It took several years, and a lot of grief, to sort that out. It was a steep learning curve for us, and for John Nuttall in particular. However, there were some moments on the contract that provided light relief. Liam McCay, who had come to us fromThames Water in 2002, was one of the people to start on the Lewisham contract. (By a strange coincidence, Liam’s father, who was also a contractor in the same part of London, came originally from Castlederg, only a few miles from where Dad was born at Broughderg.) Part of Liam’s job was to replace some traffic islands near a large roundabout. This was at the time that the then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, had recently introduced the ‘bendy bus’. When the work was completed, it was found that the bendy buses couldn’t get round the new traffic islands; so everything had to be taken down, redesigned, and reconstructed. Our next win, in 2002, was the City of London, and this was a great victory for us. We were competing with two rivals, Tarmac and Redland, who had controlled the Borough between them for some time. The labour force we inherited from them was a much better match with ours than Lewisham had been. And to run the contract, I

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