Blogs

To say that the Covid-19 pandemic has affected us all is somewhat of an understatement, although some groups have been affected far more than others. Small charities are one of the groups that have suffered the most. Many of whom diverted their usual services to address the needs of their local community in the pandemic.

Housing construction, particularly within the public sector, is facing more challenges and pressures than ever before. We are all well versed in materials shortages, the skills gap, achieving net zero goals, and the need for more diverse housing solutions to meet the current demand. Finding solutions that combat more than one of these problems is becoming more important than ever before.

Despite now being well into my career, I still feel that Construction gets overlooked as an industry for the immense value it brings into all our lives. Indeed, without the built environment, what would we have?

All workplaces can benefit from the positive effects of a culture of diversity and inclusion, they are well documented with increases in productivity, creativity, and profits – the key message that many of these metrics miss is that at the heart of these numbers people exist. At the core of it, when your employees feel happy, comfortable, and safe to be themselves they perform better.

It feels as though we’re on the cusp of a boom in the adoption of modern methods of construction (MMC) in public sector housebuilding.

You will have read a lot about modern methods of construction (MMC). You may have even investigated where you can incorporate it into your plans. But if you haven’t introduced it to any of your projects yet, now’s the time, thanks to a significant development in government policy, says John Skivington, Group Director of LHC, the contracting authority for SWPA.

Mental Health Awareness Week 2021 is a great opportunity to share with our colleagues, people often talk about friends and family, but we spend around a third of our days with our colleagues. The theme this year is nature, particularly relevant as many of us have discovered spaces close by and have seen them in a different light to life pre-pandemic.

Paul Dawson, group technical manager at LHC; the contracting authority for SWPA, looks at the runaway demand for the latest Public Sector Decarbonisation Fund grants and explains why public-sector led programmes to transform the energy performance of our buildings are the quickest route on the road to net zero.

The UK construction workforce has long included workers from outside UK, most recently from Eastern European countries, including EU accession states.  In 2017, a CITB research paper revealed that while the UK construction workforce was still largely home-grown, migrants played a critical role, particularly in London, where they make up half the workforce, and in the South East.