Opinion – Page 396
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Comment
House price falls in 2008 more than double those of the 1990s
2008 will go into the record books as the year house prices fell at their fastest rate, with prices dropping over the year at more that double the pace of the previous record fall in 1992.The Nationwide data out today puts the annual rate of collapse in prices for 2008 ...
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Comment
Construction industry ends 2008 on a record low
Happy New Year, or is it? The first piece of hard data on performance of the construction industry we get and it is a "new" record low for the Purchasing Managers' Index compiled for the buyers' body CIPS.The overall PMI measure for construction in December came in at 29.3 against ...
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Comment
Adjudicators jurisdiction
The CaseDeerglen (Jersey) (“Deerglen”) was the main contractor employed to design and build a six-storey office building known Liberty Wharf Phase three in Jersey. Deerglen engaged Air Design (Kent) (“Air Design”) as a subcontractor to carry out the mechanical services work for the project. A written agreement for “basebuild” works ...
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Comment
It means what you want it to mean: Force Majeure
‘Force majeure’ can mean just about anything, which is a problem if you want to invoke it in a contract dispute. So, how is this Napoleonic throwback best used?
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CommentMy digital life: Richard Burgess
This festive season, Mr Burgess will be watching TV and meeting friends – strictly offline. But he did bravely venture into the ether to make sure his daughters meet Father Christmas
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Comment
Luck of the Irish
On a recent visit to Northern Ireland, I was amazed by how easy it was to acquire a CSCS card there compared with mainland Britain.
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Comment
Negative charge
I cannot disagree more strongly with the media’s dismissal of the government’s zero-carbon target for new housing.
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Comment
A game of risk
Confidence in the construction sector is at rock bottom. What construction firms badly need is a scheme that eliminates most of the risk associated with doing business.
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Comment
We gotta rep to protect
It has been brought to our attention that your publication (10 October, page 95) used the term “formica” in a manner that could be interpreted to mean decorative plastic laminates in general.
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Comment
A Christmas cheer
On behalf of our charity Wishes 4 Kids, I would like to thank you and all those involved for the generous donation of £6,000 that was raised during Building’s poker tournament in October. We decided to use the money to grant the wishes of six very poorly children.
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CommentSafety blunders: Dances with death
We had an astonishing selection of entries to our health and safety blunders competition in 2008. Here is our selection of the best, which reveal how construction workers around the world laughed in the face of danger and demonstrated shocking brutality towards trees…
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CommentCountdown to Christmas!
Regardless of our straitened circumstances, fun must be had. Chris Addison explains how, with a bit of ingenuity and a set of crayons, we can make the most of what we have
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CommentBuilding buys a pint... for Quattro Design Architects
This must be some sort of a record. No, not the drinks tally, which is tame by some standards, but the distance that tonight’s group has travelled. Representatives from architect Quattro Design have made the trip all the way from the West Country – Bristol and Gloucester to be exact.
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CommentComplete baubles
Plenty of seasonal fare here: a ghost story that Dickens would have been proud of, at least one joke worthy of a Christmas cracker, 10 Santas, and a well-earned nap in a snoozarium
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CommentSleeping through it all
When we published our third issue of this year with the cover line “The slump of 2008”, few of us could have predicted just how quickly the water would rise around the construction industry.
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Comment
If 2008 was bad for the housing market, 2009 looks much worse
There are plenty of scary figures in the latest forecast from the Council of Mortgage Lenders not least the expectation that half a million homeowners will fall into arrears.The expectation that 75,000 homes will be repossessed by mortgage lenders is pretty scary too, especially as this in practice would mean ...
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Comment
Taylor Wimpey and the Siamese twin chimpanzees
The Taylor Wimpey email from boss Peter "call me Pete" Redern to staff that did the rounds yesterday raised as few eyebrows in the City.Not least for its humorous reference to Angelina Jolie giving birth to Siamese twin chimpanzees when describing how much press coverage the housebuilder has had ...
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Comment
Construction workforce grows by 30,000 - it's official, but surely it's wrong
The official labour market figures suggest that the construction workforce is growing. Surely this can't be the case?When I eagerly opened the latest press release on Labour Market Statistics this morning, I was looking for some clues as to how much damage has been done to the construction workforce.The official ...
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Comment
The beast of inflation may be in retreat, but it can still bite
As if the confusion over the credit crunch's causes and effects is not enough, we now have the related confusion over inflation. What is a good level for inflation to fall to if deflation is a fear?We have just experienced a steep decline in inflation with the CPI measure dropping ...
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Comment
What's going on at Panceltica?
What is going on at structural steel specialist Panceltica?The Qatar-based company defied the downturn by floating on AIM in March and had been hailed in the City as one of the few success stories of 2008. The share placement was heavily over-subscribed.The £86m-turnover group uses technology that means large-scale housing ...