All Leader articles – Page 45
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Comment
The HSE's masterstroke
When Kier and Wates were hauled up before the beak last month, it was easy to conclude that the basis of the Health and Safety Executive's safety drive was browbeating illustrious contractors. But the shock tactic of raiding London sites gave a misleading impression. The HSE doesn't just want to ...
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Comment
Making the desert boom
Who'd have pinpointed the Gulf as the venue for the next global construction bonanza? With an assault on Iraq looming and the revival of Islamic fundamentalism, there wouldn't appear, on the face of it, to be much of a market for Western-style hotels, malls and casinos. But that is precisely ...
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Comment
Comment
A lesson to us allThe government finally admitted this week that vocational training needed an overhaul. Skills minister Ivan Lewis said employers needed tailor-made training schemes to meet skills shortages, and pledged an overhaul of post-16 education. His comments just happened to coincide with government body the Adult Learning Inspectorate's ...
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Comment
Gateway to salvation
The government has finally acted to ease the South-east's crippling housing shortage.
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Comment
Builders under fire
Will they never learn? A government-backed investigation has uncovered evidence that shoddy workmanship is exposing buildings – particularly those constructed using timber frame – to increased fire risks (pages 26-29). Experts are concerned that failure to properly install plasterboard drylining and fire protection is allowing fire to spread uncontrolled through ...
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Architecture without tears
In that holy trinity of any building project – cost, time and quality – it is quality that causes the longest lasting headaches. Once a building is completed and worries over cost and time have subsided, it is quality, or the lack of it, that the client, facilities manager and ...
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Comment
Desperately seeking Susans
The case of Louise Barton, the latest City high-flyer to sue her employer for discrimination, is a reminder of construction's perennial prejudices. With a booming industry fretting over labour shortages, the debate has centred on whether to assimilate foreign labour or retrain over-25s – mostly men, one suspects. Yet women, ...
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Comment
Is that the time?
Labour’s chance to deliver its £19bn investment in housing, schools, hospitals and transport is rapidly evaporating. Whitehall officials are muttering that without spectacular acceleration in the rate of spending, only a fraction of the planned facilities will be open when Tony Blair goes to the polls in 2005-6. The first ...
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Comment
An illegal dilemma
It was apposite that construction minister Brian Wilson should make immigration the main subject of his first Building column (page 31). The issue is one of the most vexatious facing his government – the latest furore erupted last week when David Blunkett suggested educating the children of asylum seekers in ...
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Comment
Ethics are not optional
A housebuilder, now sadly deceased, once recounted the tale of how he won permission for luxury flats in Europe by agreeing to sponsor the local football team and paying for the mayor and his family to stay at The Ritz for a month. That was 20 years ago, but international ...
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Comment
Another ruddy shake-up
Tony Blair's unexpectedly sweeping reshuffle raises as many questions for construction as it answers (pages 22-23). Few will bemoan Stephen Byers' departure, and Alistair Darling has said that he's not going to "tear up" the 10-year transport plan. But then he was drawn into an ugly spat with Downing Street ...
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Comment
Anatomy of a fiasco
As the World Cup kicks off in the beautiful (and completed) arenas of Japan and South Korea, our attention is again on England’s beautiful (but unstarted) stadium in Wembley. Three consultants’ reports presented to MPs last week cast new light on the cost of the troubled project and the controversial ...
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Comment
Making sense of Potters Bar
We know what caused the Potters Bar rail crash, but we still don't know who. Jarvis, which is responsible for the track, claims to have evidence that the faulty points were sabotaged – a possibility highlighted in Building last week, despite being dismissed by rail experts. Investigators seem adamant that ...
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Comment
Variety the great spice
The simple function of registered social landlords is to provide decent homes for those in greatest need. The approaches that housing associations are adopting as they struggle to meet those needs, particularly in the South, are becoming ever more varied and innovative, as this issue of Homes recognises. Network Housing ...
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Comment
The industry’s Beckenbauer
Mott MacDonald’s merger with Franklin + Andrews, exclusively revealed in Building last week, reopens the debate about the future of QSs. Martin Bishop, Franklin + Andrews’ chairman, thinks copycat mergers are likely, as is another round of soul searching for QSs (page 20). Bishop saw no future in independence, and ...
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Comment
Land and freedom
How far should Whitehall intervene in the housing crisis? Last week's disclosures that the House Builders Federation is lobbying Downing Street to get more land for homes and that Lord Falconer is planning "prefabs for key workers" (see news) has polarised opinion. Interventionists argue that the shortage of homes for ...
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Comment
A fiasco in extra time
'Ere we go, 'ere we go, 'ere we go – again. It came as no surprise to the construction or soccer fraternities that the latest round of the epic Wembley Stadium fixture slipped into extra time this week (page 11). As the government's 30 April deadline passed, a German bank ...
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Comment
Prudence's big gamble
So, what did Gordon Brown do for – or to – us in the Budget? Depending on your degree of cynicism, he either put 42 new hospitals in the post, or republicised those already sent. Either way, the good news is that a glistening 21-century NHS will boost employment through ...
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Comment
Built on sand?
Poor housebuilders. For nearly a decade, they've given the City what they thought it always wanted – year-on-year growth in profits and, latterly, double-digit margins. The response from the Square Mile? Utter indifference. The sector is rated at less than half the stock exchange average. Even contractors, with their 2%-if-you're-lucky ...
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Labour's philosophical fog
So, health minister John Hutton has suddenly realised what construction knew months ago: it is already too late to deliver his new hospitals before the next election. His offer to subsidise bids, truncate tender lists and hire more Whitehall project managers has, therefore, the hallmarks of political panic (pages 28-29). ...