The Reader's Choice Finalists for the Daily Telegraph Homebuilding & Renovating Awards 2009

Aaaaagh! We agonised over this one (my fellow judges and I) for a long time. It does indeed look more than suspicious that a project has been shortlisted in a category which is sponsored by the major supplier involved. All I can do is to try and reassure you that the commercial interest was not a factor in selecting this project for the shortlist. In fact, the contrary is true: we were very close to not shortlisting the project because of the way it could look and ultimately decided that positive discrimination would be unfair to the owners who are, afterall, the recipient of the prize, not the suppliers.
The awards entry rules do not currently ban entries where there is a commercial conflict/interest because the entrant have used products or services supplied by the category sponsors. Such a rule might seem to make sense, but would potentially eliminate a great deal of sponsorship opportunties and then there would be no awards!
What would be ideal is to have one big sponsor who is not directly related to the homebuilding industry but which is closely aligned - perhaps an energy company, or one of the state owned banks?!! Then there would be no direct conflict of interest. Worth further discussion though.