James Wates FCIOB, CIOB Vice President
James Wates has been a builder all his life having started site visits with his father in the family business at the age of four. He first worked on site during school holidays as a 15 year old and after reading Estate Management at the University of Westminster (previously Polytechnic of Central London) from 1979 to 1983, he joined the family business as a management trainee in October 1983 working on the construction side of the business.
He took command of his first site as a site manager in 1986 having completed the CITB Certificate and Diploma studies in site management on evening release at the Hertfordshire College of Building in St. Albans.
He took on a general management role with Wates Integra in 1989. This was a specialist company formed within the construction group to carry out design and build contracting, growing this business from £5 million turnover to a profitable £30 million turnover by 1993. He then went to Harvard Business School for a three month management programme (PMD) on completion of which he spent a month coming back to earth with an American contractor (the Beck Group in Dallas).
On returning to Wates he took on a Construction Board role as Marketing Director and immediately found his knowledge as a builder was invaluable when selling to customers. He joined the main Wates Board in 1997 and was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Group in 2007.
He is currently in his second year as Chairman of the Construction Confederation, has chaired the Strategic Forum for Construction, sits on the OGC’s Public Sector Construction Client’s Forum (PSCCF), has been on the board of CITB Construction Skills since 2002, the newly formed London Skills and Employment Board since February 2007 and he is also a councillor on the London Region of the CBI.
He has a passion for construction in the built environment and, as is evidenced by his CITB and LSEB connections a commitment to the training and development of people to deliver the construction process. James became an associate member of the CIOB in 1985 and was appointed fellow in 2007.
