The CIC was originally formed as the Building Industry Council, an idea that was originally conceived in late 1987. This grew out of the demise of the Group of Eight, an organisation that had lobbied on behalf of the construction industry since the 1960s.

The Group of Eight comprised three professional institutions - the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) ; the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS); and the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE); three trade associations - the Building Employers Confederation (BEC); the Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors (FCEC); and the National Council for Building Materials Producers (BMP); and two trades unions. The Group of Eight was hosted and run by the RIBA until the last year of its life when the hosting was taken over by the ICE. It only came together as a group to meet Government but its weakness was that the only agreed lobbying issue was the need for more public expenditure on building works and this was not the appropriate message to be delivering to Government in the 1980s. It was therefore undermined by the fact that Government increasingly ignored it and also by the fact that many other leading organisations in the UK construction industry were not directly involved in it.

The original intention of the Building Industry Council (BIC) was to provide a more inclusive umbrella organisation for industry bodies.

The first meeting of the BIC was in November 1988 and Professor Edmund (Ted) Happold was appointed as its founding Chairman. The five founder members of the BIC were:

• Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB)
• Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE)
• Institution of Structural Engineers (IStructE)
• Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)
• Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS)

The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) and the Landscape Institute (LI) joined in March 1989 and the Royal Town Planning Institute, one month later. To recognise this wider membership the Council agreed to change its name to the Construction Industry Council in November 1989, by which time membership had grown to 14 organisations.

The first Secretary of the BIC was Andrew Ramsay, then Chief Executive of CIBSE, and in January 1989 Alan Sexton was appointed as the first Executive Secretary on a part-time basis. Graham Watts was appointed as the first full-time Chief Executive in October 1991.