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Cardiff Council intervenes to salvage multi-million ISG project
Cristina Lago Deputy Editor
The Fairwater campus. Cardiff Council plans to appoint a new contractor to replace ISG (Image: Cardiff Council)
Cardiff Council has launched an emergency plan to save a £110m education campus in the Fairwater area of the Welsh capital following the collapse of ISG in September.
The council said it is urgently working to novate the existing contracts to a subcontractor which has been working on the job.
Novation in contract law is a mechanism by which one of the parties in a two-party agreement is replaced with a third party. In this case, this means transferring subcontractor contracts from ISG Construction Ltd to a new company.
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The new company will be in place on an interim basis until a full tender process can be held to find a contractor to take over the whole site and see the project through to completion. Retendering will start early in November.
Cardiff Council said this action will prevent works from stopping on site for an extended period while a full procurement process is carried out. It will also avoid the dissolution of the supply chain, job losses, longer delays and likely significant cost increases.
The council expects work to resume in March 2025 with completion in February 2027.
ISG was appointed in 2022 to build the Fairwater Community Campus, Cardiff’s first school campus to be net zero in operation. The project includes construction of three new schools.
The contractor collapsed on 20 September, leaving more than 2,000 staff unemployed and all its projects paralysed.
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