Hampshire County Council ‘Educational Opportunities’ initiative Highly Commended

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Reading Borough Council and Hampshire County Council, in partnership with Galliford Try and Balfour Beatty, created a working group to optimise their schools programme. Their objectives – to improve the educational experience of pupils; ensure local residents benefit from the works, and to highlight construction industry career opportunities. Each partner championed the initiative within their own organisation, which has enabled a consistent joined-up approach to each school.

One of the group’s successful initiatives is the creation of a universal ‘Educational Opportunities’ toolkit that can be utilised by any contractor or any school. It defines a common process to facilitate engagement with schools for the duration of the construction activity and the creation of an implementation plan. The toolkit, which is user-friendly and jargon free, provides the opportunity for children to learn everything from planning and building, to maintaining a school.

New major construction framework for public sector projects across the South of England

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The Southern Construction Framework (SCF) is now being established with the appointment of the successful contractors and will be launched on 29 April.

This new framework supersedes the very successful South East and London (SEaL) construction framework for major projects, which has so far had a £2 billion turnover and has generated more than £100 million of collective savings.

The 11 contractors appointed across the three lots will deliver up to £3.9 billion in the four-year life of the framework. The SCF builds on the success of previous frameworks for major schemes in the South East and South West, and is designed to complement existing arrangements for smaller projects that are run separately in the three regions. The SCF provides one framework of three lots for the more major projects in these areas. Owing to the variance in arrangements for smaller projects, the values of major schemes that are eligible to use the new framework will be:

  • Greater than £1million in the South West
  • Greater than £4million in the South East
  • Greater than £5million in London

Click here to view the list of successful contractors

LGA Cost Benchmarking Latest…

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The LGA has sponsored the development of school construction cost benchmarking, and the Regional Frameworks have been a valuable source of information to support the exercise. The link below will take you to reports on the 2014 study, and details of the new update study currently under way.

www.local.gov.uk/web/guest/productivity/-/journal_content/56/10180/5924109/ARTICLE

Cameron Government Requires BIM Construction Procurement for UK Public Projects by 2016

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Across the pond, a revolution in construction procurement and supply chain logistics is happening with a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and unlocking process efficiencies that can create better buildings and better-followed budgets.

Under the leadership of Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, the UK Government is implementing a construction strategy that states 3D Building Information Modeling will be a key part of the government’s procurement of public buildings and, by 2016 model-based BIM will be mandatory on all public sector projects, including delivery of all project and asset information, documentation and data.