Introduction

Tunnelling, along with much civil engineering in Britain, particularly of projects of high potential risk, has suffered during the late 1980s and 1990s from the unsuccessful experiment-doubtless influenced by the prevailing politics of the time-to apply crude free market principles to the procurement of projects in fragmented elements, each element at least cost, centrally administered but not integrated. To many, the paradox has not been lost that a commercially motivated doctrine applied in an inappropriate manner to an essentially professional field reserved its hardest blows for the commercial interests themselves, as ‘management’ and ‘engineering’ were condemned to part company.