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Constructing Excellence East Midlands Regional Awards
The applications are now officially closed.
The short-listing has begun and those lucky enough to be short-listed for the upcoming 2008 awards will be announced in the August Edition of EMCBE Constructive. On Tuesday, 15th July 9 industry judges reviewed the 67 applications for the inaugural Constructing Excellence East Midlands Regional Awards. Commenting on the submissions the judges said they were very impressed with the extremely high standard, making short-listing a very hard task.
There are still opportunities to take part in the celebration, taking place on Tuesday, 14th October 2008 at the East Midlands Conference Centre, Nottingham. We are offering a range of sponsorship opportunities which represent a unique investment for your business to be associated with the regions construction event of 2008. Association and brand recognition will raise the profile of your operation in the region. Tickets are still available for the Awards Celebration, make sure your team are shown the appreciation they deserve by taking part in this prestigious occasion.
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EMPA - Develop your Business to Win More Work - public Sector Awareness Day
Local Authorities are the largest provider of services in the East Midlands, with expenditure on construction related services the biggest spender – in the region of £600m per annum.
Local Authorities must work smarter and more efficiently, and have come together to form the East Midlands Property Alliance (EMPA) to provide part of the solution. EMPA is a collaborative organisation through which member authorities can co-ordinate their energies to deliver facilities to their communities which rank amongst the best, and are delivered through excellent procurement, practices and processes which give satisfaction to the delivery team and their clients.
The EMPA members have arranged for an information exchange forum at Loughborough University, hosted by the East Midlands Centre for constructing the Built Environment (EMCBE) on 24th July 2008 from 09.00 to 13.00. Please confirm your attendance by completing and returning the booking form
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Higher Skills Key to Successful Regional Economy
Phil Hope, Minister for the East Midlands, on a recent tour of the hi-tech BioCity complex in Nottingham called on the region to get involved in preparing Britain for the future, saying that “everyone should have access to a good school for our children, the opportunity to get onto the housing ladder, be able to work in a flexible way and feel safe and secure in our local communities.” He encouraged everyone to take part in the consultation exercise.
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MPs Say Construction Needs Stronger and Clearer Presence in Government
The Business and Enterprise Committee today (16 July) publishes its Report, Construction Matters (HC 127-1), a major strategic review of the UK’s construction industry. It calls on the Government to create a new post of “Chief Construction Officer” to tackle the problem of the fragmentation of construction policy and procurement across government, and to set the industry on the right footing to tackle the major challenges it faces both in the short and long term.
“Acting at a senior level as ‘champion’ of the sector, the postholder would provide a single point of engagement between the industry and the public sector, having operational involvement in policy and regulatory matters across departments,” the report recommends.
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Olympic Delivery Authority Update
Have you registered yet to gain access to your regional CompeteFor website and upcoming London 2012 procurement opportunities. Complete your business profile to ensure that you are ´business ready´ for London 2012 opportunities and take advantage of the business support services to improve your business's competitiveness. For guidance on how to use the website, registering and completing your business profile read more:
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Land in Limbo: Making the Best use of Vacant Urban Spaces
Across our cities lies a land resource, derelict and neglected, frozen between long-term uses — land in limbo. Sometimes it sits where old buildings are being demolished to make way for new; elsewhere it is simply empty land
that has been left to ruin. Either way, it falls prey to blight and the detritus of city living — shopping trolleys, old bedsteads and dumped cars. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
According to the National Land Use Database, brownfield land in England stood at some 62,000 hectares in 2006, with just over half of that classed as derelict or vacant. That’s the equivalent of around 60,000 football pitches.
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Low Impact Buildings Innovation Platform
The Technology Strategy Board has recently set up the Low Impact Buildings Innovation Platform to help the UK construction industry deliver buildings with a much lower environmental impact. The Innovation Platform will invest jointly with industry and other funders in projects to bring innovative solutions to this growing market, and to overcome barriers to wider use of existing solutions.
The first funding competition for this platform was opened on the 14th June. The competition has £4million funding allocated to it and is focused on the development and integration of materials and components into buildings or building systems to achieve the government’s targets for zero carbon and low water usage for new-build housing by 2016 and new non-domestic buildings by 2019 for England and Wales. Similar targets are being considered for Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The call for expressions of interest closes on the 16th July 2008 and more information on this call and future plans for the Low Impact Buildings Innovation Platform can be found via the link on the MBEKTN website
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Construction Professionals are Positive as they Meet to discuss the Viability of Sustainability
Construction professionals across the region met in Nottingham recently to discuss the viability of creating sustainable buildings in today’s highly challenging construction environment.
The seminar ‘Can sustainability really stack up?’ was hosted jointly by East Midlands Development Agency (emcbe), East Midlands Centre for Constructing the Built Environment (EMCBE) and Loughborough-based contractor and developer William Davis Ltd. Over 100 industry professionals attended the event, which showcased one of the William Davis eco-office developments at Chetwynd Business Park, Chilwell, Nottingham.
William Davis has constructed two bespoke speculative eco-buildings on the final phase of this award-winning £20m business park development and these have each been given a BREEAM ‘Excellent’ rating, which is considered to be one of the first eco-office schemes in the country to achieve this.
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The UK Construction Industry KPIs 2008 - on-line at www.kpizone.com
Since their first publication in 1999, there has been a gradual development of the Construction Industry KPIs and in Loughborough on 2nd July this was witnessed by a group of industry professionals who attended the East Midlands 2008 Launch event.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measures of factors critical to success that are used by organisations to measure performance. The information provided by an organisation's KPIs is used to monitor and improve performance and, if KPIs are chosen that align with the sets of Construction Industry KPIs, they can be used to benchmark performance as a means of moving towards best practice.
The Construction Industry KPIs are published annually and show the range of performance being achieved in the UK construction industry at the time for a range of critical issues such as client satisfaction and project delivery. Using the Construction Industry KPIs enables organisations to:
- Set performance targets at the start of a project
- Monitor progress during a project
- Assess a completed project to measure the team's feedback
- Set targets for improvement
- Form part of the selection/award process on 'best value' rather than lowest price.
Further help and information about KPIs can be found on KPIZone (subscription required to view KPI data and supporting publications).
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Design4Life Knowledge Base
Funded by the East Midlands Development Agency (emda), Design4Life is an initiative led by the East Midlands Centre for Constructing the Built Environment (EMCBE) and Loughborough University.
As the drivers for a more sustainable built environment increase, Design4Life aims to develop the new knowledge & skills needed to enable built environment professionals across the East Midlands to work effectively together, improve the energy performance of buildings and ultimately deliver a more sustainable built environment.
D4L's on-line support has been built to complement the training workshops and helps you as a practitioner improve your sustainable & low-carbon design skills on-the-job. The Knowledgebase will contain an evolving range of support tools and resources.
“Many thanks for the Design4Life cd-rom I have watched most of the cd-rom and placed the website in my Favourites folder. I think that these are really good resources and am encouraging their use in our office. The material is both useful and informative: thanks once again.
Pete Southgate RIBA
Principal Architect
Stephen George & Partners
For a complimentary copy of the CD-Rom contact info@emcbe.com
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ICE Report: Flooding – Engineering Resilience 2008
A copy of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) report Flooding: Engineering Resilience 2008 can be now be downloaded at the following address : http://www.ice.org.uk/downloads/2008_flooding.pdf Compiled by a panel of experts the report assesses the ciritcal issues to be addressed by central government, local authorities, utility companies, planners and developers, posing some challenging questions surrounding the future viability of defending everything against flooding.
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Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnerships
The East Midlands Improvement and Efficiency Partnership (RIEP) is a new partnership formed form the merging of the East Midlands Centre of Excellence (EMCE) and the East Midlands Improvement Partnership (EMIP). The East Midlands RIEP has been allocated £19.6m for the next three years, part of a wider £185m awarded to all nine RIEP’s. The East Midlands will benefit from £5.3m during the first year with a further £7m in each of the two subsequent years in support of the delivery of the 26 stretch targets in the RIES.
A prospectus has been produced to summarise the Governments arrangements for EM RIEP, outlining the roles and responsibilities of the sub regional partnerships, listing the programmes and resources available to all local authorities.
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Sustainability ‘Speak’
Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs)
- An EPC provides ‘standard’ energy efficiency ratings from A (very efficient) to G (inefficient), and recommendations for efficiency improvement and potential cost savings.
- The use of ‘standard’ ratings will allow the energy efficiency of one building to be easily compared with the performance of another building of a similar type.
- A Display Energy Certificate (DEC) will be required for larger public buildings, showing the actual energy usage of a building and its energy efficiency rating, to enable everyone to see how energy efficient the building is.
Timetable
6 April 2008
- EPCs required on construction for all dwellings (homes)
- EPC required for the construction or sale or rent of buildings, other than dwellings having a floor area over 10,000 sq. metres.
1 July 2008
- EPCs required for the construction or sale or rent of buildings other than dwellings with a floor area over 2,500 sq. metres.
1 October 2008
- EPCs required on the sale or rent of all remaining dwellings.
- EPCs required on the construction or sale or rent of all remaining buildings other than dwellings.
- DECs required for public buildings with a floor area over 1,000 sq. metres.
- EPCs must be produced by qualified and accredited energy assessors belonging to an accreditation scheme.
- In the rental sector, an EPC – once produced – is valid for 10 years on both existing and new build properties, and can be re-used any number of times – provided it is always less than 10 years old.
- A new EPC does not need to be produced on renewal of a tenancy agreement, but only when existing tenants at 1 October 2008 actually move out at some time in the future.
- An EPC for a commercial building is valid for 10 years and must be made available to a prospective buyer or tenant before entering a contract for sale or rent or lease, and no later than the release of marketing materials for the property or the request for a visit to the property being marketed for sale or rent or lease.
- Commercial EPCs are exempted for : places of worship, temporary buildings in use for no longer than 2 years, low energy demand buildings (eg farm outbuildings and barns, unheated warehouses, etc) and stand alone buildings of less than 50 sq. metres floor area.
- Surveys will be carried out using one of a number of approved energy assessment procedures depending on the type of building and its use, for example SAP (Standard Assessment Procedure) or SBEM (Simplified Building Energy Method).
- The energy efficiency rating of commercial and industrial buildings using energy assessment procedures and methods, as defined by EPBD (Energy Performance of Buildings Directive), is more complex than those used in the domestic property sector.
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Specifying Skills Training – give your views and win a chance to drive a racing car at Brands Hatch
A recent workshop for construction professionals held at BRE identified a need for training in specifying. Specifications are key to communicating the design intent and technical requirements of buildings, but there is currently little formal training in specifying skills. BRE, NBS and Benoy are considering offering this training and need to assess the demand for and nature of such a course. You are invited to give your views on this via a short questionnaire – and be entered into a prize draw (win the opportunity of a ‘once in a lifetime experience’). All information provided will be in confidence and made available to the research team only. Click here to see the questionnaire.
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ECO-TOWN Options Revealed for Leicester
Plans outlining three potential layouts for an eco-town on land south east of Leicester have been revealed. Providing up to 15,000 new homes of which up to 5,000 will be affordable homes, the eco-town also has the capacity to provide 14,000 new jobs.
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