Right to Rent comes into force

The government’s right to rent scheme is now live across England meaning landlords will be required to perform checks on all new adult tenants to ensure their eligibility to rent property in the country.

Right to Rent was introduced in the Immigration Act 2014 and is also applicable to people who sublet their property or take in lodgers.

Landlords who neglect to undertake checks could potentially face a penalty of up to £3,000 per tenant. The scheme has been in operation in the West Midlands since December 2014, with the next phase of a UK-wide roll-out, seeing the scheme extended across England.

Immigration Minister James Brokenshire said: “We firmly believe in creating an immigration system which is fair to those here legally, but firm with those who try to break the rules. That is why Right to Rent is so important.

“The scheme builds on the Right to Work checks that employers have been making for some time, and we know that many landlords already carry out simple identity checks as a matter of good practice.

Landlords will need to check identity documents for all new tenants and make copies. The government say they have collaborated with housing and homeless charities to create a document list, which is hoped will cover different scenarios such as when people do not have the usual kind of identity documents such as passports or driving licences.

Mr Brokenshire commented: “Over the past year, we have taken time to engage with the people who will be affected by the scheme, and carried out a thorough evaluation. The system we have designed is light-touch, and allows those with a legitimate right to be in the country to quickly and easily demonstrate their right to rent.

“We are building on the work started in the 2014 Immigration Act through the new Immigration Bill, which contains additional powers to target unscrupulous landlords by introducing new criminal offences targeted at those who repeatedly fail to carry out Right to Rent checks.”

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Markit/CIPS UK Manufacturing PMI released for January

Start of 2016 sees UK manufacturing growth increase

The UK manufacturing industry accelerated to a three-month high in January according to the latest figures.

The Markit/CIPS UK manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) grew to 52.9 up on December’s figure of 52.1, and above the growth threshold of 50.0.

The results mark the 34^th successive month that the PMI has remained above 50.0 mark.

Growth was driven by strong performances from larger manufacturing companies, with SMEs only seeing comparatively slight growth.

Exports orders, however, declined with Markit saying companies cited strong competition from abroad and difficult market conditions such as the Sterling – Euro exchange rate as problems.

For the fourth time in the last six-month, employment levels fell, albeit at a moderate level.

Rob Dobson, Senior Economist at Markit commented: ““The UK manufacturing sector registered an uptick in its rate of expansion at the start of 2016, shrugging off a number of potential headwinds, ranging from global financial market volatility to localised flooding in the North of the country.

“The domestic market remains the key growth driver. In contrast, the trend in new export orders continues to disappoint, falling back into reverse gear in January. Even after recent easing in the exchange rate, a number of manufacturers are still finding that the strength of the pound against the euro is impacting order inflows. Reports from companies also highlight how the general operating environment has become increasingly competitive both at home and abroad as firms scramble to win new customers.

“Strong competition on the sales side combined with the ongoing weakness of global commodity prices meant that manufacturers saw selling prices and input costs fall further in January. Subdued growth, rising global headwinds and a lack of inflationary pressure provide further cause for the Bank of England to push its first rate increase into the back and beyond of 2016.”

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London Help to Buy scheme now up and running

From today, first time buyers will be able to take advantage of the London Help to Buy scheme, which will enable Londoners to buy a home with just a five per cent deposit and a mortgage as low as 55%.

Communities Secretary Greg Clark made the announcement today that will give first time buyers and second steppers the chance to purchase a home in London with a deposit backed by a 40% equity loan from the government, which will be interest free for the first five years.

The Chancellor George Osborne said the government was “determined” to help people get on the property ladder. He said: “Our Help to Buy scheme has already helped tens of thousands get a step onto the housing ladder, and the Help to Buy Isa means many more will get a top up from the government as they save for a deposit.

“Today’s new scheme means an even better deal in the capital, where buying a home remains out of reach for too many.

“And to ensure there are more homes to buy for people across the country, in my Spending Review I set out plans to deliver the biggest affordable housebuilding programme since the 1970s.”

Commenting on the scheme, Communities Secretary Greg Clark said: “Our multi-billion pound investment will open the door to thousands of Londoners wanting to own their own home, following in the footsteps of nearly 270,000 people who have already bought through government-backed schemes.

“And now with the improved Help to Buy scheme launching in London, I would urge anyone who thinks home ownership is out of reach to look again at the help on offer.”

London’s own Help to Buy scheme is an extension of the Help to Buy scheme that has been used by 130,000 people across the country since 2013.

Under the current scheme, loans of up to 20% of the property’s price are made available to first-time buyers and home movers on new build homes worth up to £600,000. In London the loans will now be doubled to up to 40%.

Housing Minister Brandon Lewis said: “Anyone thinking about home ownership and those who believe it is out of reach should look again at the range of government schemes available to them.”

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Scottish government provide £12M fund for energy skills retraining

The Scottish government is to provide support and training to those people who face losing their jobs in the oil and gas sector through the Transition Training Fund.

First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon has announced that the £12M delivered through the newly created Transition Training Fund will help those affected to make the transition into other energy and manufacturing industries.

It is hoped the fund will help to maintain the skilled energy workforce in the North Sea region by providing grants to people to undertaking retraining or pursuing further education. Help will also be given to individuals with the costs of continuing any licences they are required to hold to work in the sector.

The Transition fund will enable bodies like Skills Development Scotland, in conjunction with the Energy Skills Partnership and Energy Technology Partnership, to give practical training and education that will help people qualify for other specialist jobs in the wider sector.

The First Minister said: “There is no doubt that the conditions facing the North Sea oil and gas sector are extremely challenging and the downturn in the oil prices is having a very real impact on the workforce, with significant and hugely concerning job losses.

“This is not just distressing for those individuals affected; it has a wider impact on the industry, with the risk that the highly skilled workforce is lost to the sector as they look for opportunities elsewhere.

“It is therefore absolutely crucial that we take every possible action to retain the expertise that the industry has built up over decades so that it remains flexible enough to capitalise on exploration investment and future oil price rises.

“That is why I have announced a new £12M Transition Training Fund to provide financial support to individuals as they retrain or undertake new education to allow them to take on specialist roles elsewhere in the energy industry and related roles in the manufacturing sector.

“This fund will augment the work of the Energy Jobs Taskforce, which is already providing much-needed help to people affected by redundancy by working with bodies such as Skills Development Scotland to support redeployment and training.”

The new fund will support the work of the Scottish Government’s Energy Jobs Taskforce, which is already providing support through the PACE process and other measures such as the Adopt an Apprentice initiative.

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Amtech promote and encourage BIM adoption across the MEP sector

Having recently published volume one of its BIM Digest, an eBook offering a comprehensive guide to Building Information Modelling through the views, opinions and observations of leading market professionals, Trimble company, Amtech, is pleased to promote and encourage BIM adoption across the MEP sector and beyond.

With the UK government BIM level 2 mandate deadline fast approaching, the AEC sector continues to register mixed opinions as to its benefit on cost. According to Stephan Jones, Segment Manager at Trimble company, Amtech, the government BIM level 2 definition has partially contributed to these differing perceptions by not promoting the central pillar of the standards as originally developed by the IAI (International Alliance for Interoperability) now rebranded as BuildingSmart.

A firm believer that the biggest prize in the BIM sweepstakes is concurrent working, Jones explains that were concurrency as a principle taken to an extreme, it would allow users to simultaneously manipulate the same information; perhaps a CAD model object, a property of that object, an associated cost or other BIM information facet.

“Likely you’ll probably be exclaiming that such a proposition is inherently chaotic and completely undesirable in the construction delivery context, but bear with me,” he says.

“If you have been exposed to systems such as Google docs or slides and have collaborated in the development of a presentation or commercial proposal then you may never wish to go back to a text editor on your isolated machine. I can attest it’s happened to me and I wouldn’t go back!

“Using Google’s collaboration tools you will notice that you no longer send files to each other, you don’t sit there wondering whether or not you are looking at the latest version, or whether you need to wait to add those other changes that just entered your consciousness.

“Construction delivery is riddled with the exact same experiences, only they are hugely magnified. Swap out the simple doc and replace it with a highly complex, multifaceted, detailed and interdependent BIM!” he explains.

“Standard data management techniques generally take a pessimistic approach to sharing, if you work on a network and share an Excel file you may have noticed that when it has already been opened by a colleague Excel warns you that you cannot edit information before you receive notice that the other user has closed the file, normally a source of frustration resulting in leaving the task you were going to do undone. Pessimism in this instance however is there to ensure that information is not and cannot ever be corrupted, a principle most of us are generally happy to endorse!”

“As you might expect, the computing world does offer up a second paradigm characterised as being optimistic. This allows multiple copies of the same information to be accessed and manipulated by more than one user; when the changes are saved the system uses techniques to attempt to merge the disparate changes,” he explains.

“Imagine a sentence edited by one user is wholly deleted by another, what results from the merge operation? It would be fairly chaotic if we have no semantic notion of what a ‘sentence’ is. Understanding what a sentence is, we might conclude that the sentence edits are only relevant in the context of the sentence and should therefore not be kept as a result of the merge process.

“The pessimistic approach does suggest that concurrent working can only succeed when a single shared data source exists. We would need to be simultaneously connected and wait for transactions to be committed one at a time. This approach can work quite well in simple scenarios where the transaction length is small and can be quickly processed. When dealing with BIM data the transaction length quickly becomes a serious bottleneck and untenable.

“Is the optimistic approach therefore the preferred solution to provide a platform for concurrency? Unfortunately, BIM does not at level 2 equal IFC (industry foundation classes, the standard for storing construction information). Remember we are happily using our proprietary files and at this stage in our evolution the data objects inside those files do not have semantic meanings. In simple terms nothing allows us to formally distinguish a toilet from a door or a work rate from a window, this becomes a problem as illustrated earlier (semantics). Classification systems are being used to circumvent the problem but they cannot substitute the need for more complete ontologies or semantic definitions that are inherent in the IFC schema.

“Whilst concurrency can positively impact the whole construction delivery process it is design production and management where concurrency perhaps the biggest practical benefit”.

He adds: “Presently (within the context of PAS1192-1) designers are advised to adopt information segregation strategies, creating innumerable files to logically divide space and disciplines such that teams can function properly, of course it’s not limited to file names, depending on the system used careful control of layer names also exist. Design managers actually need to consider and manage file names using multi-part codes that are hugely obscure for all but the most frequent of project participants.

“Designers across disciplines receive a common brief, often not co-located, they disperse and work in isolation for a period of time. In the future there is a need to integrate the design outputs and coordinate. If any margin for misinterpretation or misunderstanding exists, these will be reflected in the designs; the greater the time delay between coordination meetings the greater the extent of design issues, indicated as ‘amplitude of change’. The greater the amplitude the greater the level of rework.

“Concurrency also plays an important part in enabling change management, or ‘value engineering’ as it is commonly described. In simplistic terms the greater the cost of operating a design iteration the less benefit and therefore inclination there is to engage in the process. If the costs in undertaking design iterations can be reduced by for instance generating quantity revisions from a model rather than manually recalculating them, time is saved not just within the cycle but more widely across the supply chain and a projects’ mobilisation costs.”

“The final benefit of concurrency is that information is always up to date, you can trust it, you don’t have to search for it, what you need is there, what you see is the same as everyone else. Whether you are a designer, a client, a cost estimator, or a planner your calculations and views can be kept up to date enabling you to identify issues and react to change”, he concludes.

To download a free copy of Amtech’s BIM Digest click here.

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Ten steps to BIM

BIM – Building Information Modelling – is a co-ordinated set of processes, supported by technology, that add value by creating, managing and sharing the properties of an asset throughout its lifecycle. BIM incorporates data – physical, commercial, environmental, and operational – on every element of a development’s design.

1. Better outcomes through collaboration All project partners – different design disciplines, the customer, contractor, specialists and suppliers – use a single, shared 3D model, cultivating collaborative working relationships. This ensures everyone is focused on achieving best value, from project inception to eventual decommissioning.
2. Enhanced performance – BIM makes possible swift and accurate comparison of different design options, enabling development of more efficient, cost-effective and sustainable solutions.
3. Optimised solutions – Through deployment of new generative modelling technologies, solutions can be cost-effectively optimised against agreed parameters.
4. Greater predictability – Projects can be visualised at an early stage, giving owners and operators a clear idea of design intent and allowing them to modify the design to achieve the outcomes they want. In advance of construction, BIM also enables the project team to ‘build’ the project in a virtual environment, rehearsing complex procedures, optimising temporary works designs and planning procurement of materials, equipment and manpower.
5. Faster project delivery – Time savings, up to 50%, can be achieved by agreeing the design concept early in project development to eliminate late stage design changes; using standard design elements when practicable; resolving complex construction details before the project goes on site; avoiding clashes; taking advantage of intelligence and automation within the model to check design integrity and estimate quantities; producing fabrication and construction drawings from the model; and using data to control construction equipment.
6. Reduced safety risk – Crowd behaviour and fire modelling capability enable designs to be optimised for public safety. Asset managers can use the 3D model to enhance operational safety. Contractors can minimise construction risks by reviewing complex details or procedures before going on site.
7. Fits first time – Integrating multidisciplinary design inputs using a single 3D model allows interface issues to be identified and resolved in advance of construction, eliminating the cost and time impacts of redesign. The model also enables new and existing assets to be integrated seamlessly.
8. Reduced waste – Exact quantity take-offs mean that materials are not over-ordered. Precise programme scheduling enables just-in-time delivery of materials and equipment, reducing potential for damage. Use of BIM for automated fabrication of equipment and components enables more efficient materials handling and waste recovery.
9. Whole life asset management – BIM models contain product information that assists with commissioning, operation and maintenance activities – for example sequences for start-up and shut-down, interactive 3D diagrams showing how to take apart and reassemble equipment items and specifications allowing replacement parts to be ordered.
10. Continual improvement – Members of the project team can feed back information about the performance of processes and items of equipment, driving improvements on subsequent projects.

Submitted by Quadrasol

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Timber Frame, the solid solution to the housing crisis

In January, Prime Minister, David Cameron, announced that the Government will directly commission small to medium sized housebuilders to build 30,000 affordable homes on underused brownfield sites. Here, Andrew Carpenter, Chief Executive of the Structural Timber Association (STA), discusses this Government initiative and argues that timber frame housing can provide a timely, cost effective and sustainable solution to help solve the housing crisis.

The Government’s move to commission the construction of 30,000 new homes marks a positive start to 2016 for the housebuilding industry. By actively promoting the use of SME contractors, the Government has shown a clear will to reach its 2020 target of building one million new homes whilst diversifying the housebuilding sector.

 

Currently, the eight largest housebuilders in the UK provide 50% of new homes. As this policy is aimed at smaller housebuilders and developers, it will inevitably stimulate competition, opening up opportunities within the sector. Previously, the cost and difficulty in obtaining planning permission provided the main barrier to entry for these smaller contractors.

 

In fact, the legislative and bureaucratic logjam created by delays in planning permission applications is a huge frustration within the housing industry and has severely stymied the rate of growth of new builds. The Government has bypassed this impediment by identifying sites that already hold planning permission.

 

Cutting through this red tape will buoy smaller housebuilders as potentially more entrants will be attracted to the SME housebuilder market. Consequently, their position and accumulative autonomy within the housing sector will be bolstered and ultimately there will be an increased capacity to build homes at a faster rate.

 

Although this news is positive, the housing sector must capitalise on the momentum created by this announcement by positioning itself to build quality homes in a cost effective and time efficient manner. As such, timber frame is the ideal choice of material for UK SME housebuilders today.

 

Timber frame’s inherent strength, durability, sustainability, availability and relatively low cost give it a competitive advantage over other methods of construction. Structural timber, manufactured offsite, is monitored at every stage of its production and is not reliant on a multitude of other trades and determinants. Frames are constructed in a controlled and precise manner using the latest industry innovations and technology such as breathable membranes with thermal, acoustic, and fire protection inbuilt into the timber’s design.

 

Furthermore, a factory-based environment ensures safer working conditions for employees. Offsite timber construction doesn’t carry the same height risks as construction carried out onsite and is not weather reliant. This is a huge benefit given our changeable climate. Using offsite construction methods, strong winds, heavy rain and below freezing conditions has no effect on workers which leads to safer, better quality, more efficient and quicker production.

 

Moreover, an increase in offsite construction, as offered by timber frame, will improve the construction industry’s image among young people, helping to alleviate the chronic skills shortage within the sector. The government report, Construction 2025, outlined how the construction industry’s poor image was having a “detrimental effect on companies’ abilities to recruit and retain the best talent”. A more professional setting, away form the elements, will help convince prospective apprentices and graduates that their skills are best served within the construction industry.

 

Additionally, there are various cost benefits associated with building timber frame housing. Timber is a readily available material that can easily meet industry demands. Supplies of brick and block have recently suffered shortages and when a material is in short supply, a premium is placed on its price. There is also an alarming shortfall in the numbers of skilled bricklayers within the UK construction sector, with a recent Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) survey revealing 60% of respondents have difficulty in finding bricklayers for projects. These skill and supply shortages not only increase the financial burden on housing projects but at this moment when speed of construction is of the essence, they create unwelcome and unnecessary delays.

 

Timber not only enables specifiers to choose a material that is precision engineered and cost effective but also sustainable. Structural timber’s low heat conductivity, low embodied carbon, high structural strength, airtight construction and traceable supply chain make it an ideal choice for housebuilders with sustainability in mind.

 

With consideration to all these benefits associated with timber frame homes, it is the STA’s belief that an increase in the use of timber frame within the house-building sector would provide a solution to the perennial housing shortage crisis.

 

David Cameron’s announcement to directly commission the construction of thousands of homes is welcome news for SME housebuilders and the construction industry in general. However, whilst the priority is on the cost and speed of delivery, the issue of quality must not be overlooked. The construction industry and the Government must make a commitment to building more affordable homes, better, as to leave a social legacy beyond its 2020 mandate and accordingly, the choice of timber frame housing is the first step to achieving this.

 

ENDS

 

 

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