Pull out and reexamine FM contracts under the harsh light of the £150m IT meltdown at BA • Everything is experience or is experience everything? Ask newly branded Landsec • The Tunbridge Wells tortoise and his hare-brained competitors in the race for Number 10 • An ice cube added to the tepid architectural cocktail at Nine Elms.
“Ye Gods! Might we suffer a colossal claim if our FM client experiences consequential losses on the scale suffered by BA when that IT guy from CBRE allegedly blew the computers by switching the power back on in haste?” Agents with FM deals will surely be jerking contracts out of the drawer to re-examine the risks they face in the light of BA’s IT shut-down, which cost the airline £150m when planes were grounded for three days in late May. CBRE is almost certainly insured at a corporate level. The steady share price indicates investors are not panicking. That is not to say the blame game might not become protracted and nasty. BA has set up an inquiry. The results will peer reviewed. Parent company boss, Willie Walsh, has called CBRE “very reputable” without naming it. But he also said “the power was brought on in an uncontrolled fashion.” There are unconfirmed reports of fingers being pointed at CBRE. CBRE says “no determination has been made yet regarding the causes.” While the world awaits, advice from an expert FM lawyer for those hurriedly re-reading contracts: Hope your consequential losses are limited to 100-160% of the annual fee; hope cover is limited to physical damage. Otherwise, fingers crossed. On not-yet-signed contracts she says: “Boys, don’t sell the farm for an annual fee that does not warrant the massive amount of risk.”
Be fatalistic, experiencing everything
Congratulations to Land Securities for imitating Estates Gazette (now EG, please) by rebranding with the familiar tag everyone uses anyway. I tweet-teased newly dubbed Landsec on Monday, suggesting its fresh brand statement “Everything is Experience” would be better reversed. “Experience is Everything” surely rings more true if you are selling the experience of Land Securities? Boss Robert Noel disagrees. “Our updated brand reflects our culture, our people and our approach, putting the experience of our customers, communities, employees and partners at the heart of everything we do.” Well, OK, I can see the subtle difference. Others can’t. A retweeter commented that “Everything is Experience” sounded like a “weirdly fatalistic note of a sign of things to come.”
Tunbridge Wells tortoise in race for Number 10
Watch Greg Clark. The John Major-but-posher MP for Tunbridge Wells has been reappointed to Theresa May’s cabinet as business secretary. That was him, two to the right of the beleaguered PM, in those clips of Team May shown on Monday. The former planning minister may turn out to be the tortoise in the premiership race against more hare-brained colleagues. Health warning: I’m prejudiced, having never forgotten an incident in May 2014. We met on the Commons terrace after a downpour. The seats were puddled. Who skipped down the steps in search of paper towels to mop up the pools of water? Not Clark’s two aides but the decent unassuming man himself.
Cool addition to crass cocktail at Nine Elms
The Nine Elms Vauxhall Partnership is to add an ice cube of cool to the tepid cocktail of crass architecture down Battersea way. Arts group Collective Matter is hosting an event in Ballymore’s Embassy Gardens on 17 June. The blurb asks you to bring along “bric-a-brac from local charity shops, shards from the banks of the Thames” to the New Heirlooms workshop. “Participants are invited to destroy then reinvent ‘orphaned’ objects”. Presumably to make concrete their feelings about reinvented Nine Elms. Mmm… let’s think. Smash a mellow yellow London stock brick then gum the shards to a 10ft tall piece of rusty reinforcing bar? Does that stir your Manhattan?
Peter Bill is the author of Planet Property and a former editor of EG. Follow him on Twitter
