Sir Maurice Laing rose through the ranks of what is now the Laing Group of Companies and, after his father’s retirement, worked with his brother to continue to expand the business and turn Laing into a household name. The company constructed houses, 53 miles of the M1 and the London Central Mosque in Regent’s Park, as well as numerous bridges, balloon barrage stations and RAF bases.

Laing was a determined character, a Conservative who was worried by Labour government but who spoke in favour of employee rights. As well as from the company, he was heavily involved in industry regulation, becoming the first president of the Confederation of British Industry (1965-66).

John Maurice Laing, the younger son of Sir John Laing, was born in 1918 in Carlisle, where his father had taken over the family firm of builders, John Laing & Sons. Like his elder brother, Sir William Kirby Laing, he was marked out for the construction industry, encouraged by his father to visit the firm’s building contracts in school holidays. In 1926 the firm moved to Mill Hill in North London, and Laing attended St Lawrence College, Ramsgate, before joining the business as a trainee in 1935, aged 17.

He was, however, desperate to serve in the RAF for military service. He managed, despite imperfect eyesight, his father’s disapproval and the illness of his wife, Hilda, whom he had married in 1940. Laing returned to the firm in 1945 to devote his attention to the civil engineering work. He interested himself in ventures overseas and developed an understanding of the principles of economics and management, which resulted in him becoming a director of the Bank of England in 1963. Trade missions to the Middle East in 1953 were followed two years later by similar visits to Egypt, the Sudan and Ethiopia. This work led to his appointment in 1956 to the Board of Trade Advisory Council on Overseas Construction and to the Export Group for the Constructional Industries, of which latter body he was chairman in 1957-59 and later president.

For some years from 1959 he was on the Minister of Works’ national consultative council, and was a member of the National Economic Development Council from 1962 until 1966.

He was chairman of the Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors; and he was the last president (1964) of the British Employers’ Federation and the first to hold that office with its successor, the CBI, in 1965. He was an advocate of the value of self-generated effort in national economic welfare. Speaking at a Chartered Institute of Building conference in 1976 in favour of setting initiative and imagination to work again, and against the mooted extension of direct-labour departments, he advised the minister present that if he wished to nationalise anything more, to nationalise crime “because we all want to make sure that that doesn’t pay”.

Within the firm, Laing became second-in-command and in 1976, by arrangement, he changed places with his brother, Kirby, as chairman of the Laing Group, serving until 1982 when he was appointed life president.

He was knighted in 1965 after the completion of the first motorway in Britain, the M1, the construction of which had been organised by his firm.

Shrewd, enterprising and generous, Laing made an exceptional contribution to State and industry. As a past chairman of the civil engineering contractors, he played an important part in the early 1970s, with his brother, as chairman of the National Joint Council for the Building Industry, in bringing together under one hat as the Building and Civil Engineering Joint Board, the rival unions representing the building and the civil engineering operatives, and so ending a history of leapfrogging of wage rates.

He is survived by his wife and son.

Sir Maurice Laing, industrialist, was born on February 1, 1918. He died on February 22, 2008, aged 90