Opinion – Page 407
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CommentShe’s so out of here!
Wow! What a legacy! Just before crazy, wacky housing minister Caroline Flint got reshuffled, Chris Addison was passed another of her memos. And it makes one thing clear: Margaret Beckett has a tough act to follow …
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CommentBuilding buys a pint … for Faber Maunsell
Chosen watering hole: Ye Olde Mitre, Ambience: Tucked-away 16th-century hidey hole, Topics: Beer, pubs, pub games, the difficulty of remembering nursery rhymes, Drinks drunk: 9 pints of Adnams, 10 pints of Oakhams, 2 pints of Deuchars IPA, 7 pints of Exmoor gold
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CommentMy digital life: Philippe Rapin
Despite teaching other people how to escape from the digital world, Philippe Rapin likes a bit of Wii, Facebook, and is a veritable eBay wheeler-dealer
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CommentThis is no time to think short-term
Sooner or later the market will come back and when it does we’ll be needing young talent. So keep hiring, says Richard Steer, otherwise we’ll lose another generation of professionals
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CommentWebmaster review: Benoy website
International architect Benoy’s website, Benoy.com, does the job well but has one rather surprising feature
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Join my Hub
In reference to your article “OFT clears housebuilders – but raises zero-carbon fears” (26 September, page 11), while it is true that zero carbon could potentially prove a barrier for small housebuilders, we strongly believe it is also an opportunity.
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Government Gamesmanship
Before Peter Whitbread condemns the whole Olympic team for what he says is a budget overrun of £90m on the media centre (26 September, page 34), he should be aware of government budgetary practice. I will try to put the whole process in context.
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Any answers?
Is there someone out there, perhaps a genius in “price indexing” , who might be able to help me with this pricing exercise:
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Extension of time: Birmingham council vs Paddison Construction
Birmingham council (“BCC”) engaged Paddison Construction (“Paddison”) to undertake construction work for a new community and training centre in Birmingham. The contract provided for a completion date of 24 February 2006 which was revised to 17 April 2006. Practical completion was certified as at 23 June 2006. Paddison alleged that ...
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Construction faces a worse recession than in the 1990s, says forecast
My good friend Martin Hewes passed me a copy of the latest forecast from Hewes & Associates. It's not good news, I'm afraid. His last forecast was pretty bleak, this is bleaker still.The headline figure of note is the 11.3% drop in new work next year. With a slightly more ...
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Down again and more house price falls to follow
Another month, another fall in the Halifax house price index.And we can expect that to continue for some while yet, despite the cash transfusion pumped into the financial system and the monetary defibrillation provided by a concert of central banks cutting interest rates.The patient is ill and recovery will take ...
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After the banks are nationalised - will we see a renaissance of public works?
One question has been twitching at the back of my brain for some weeks now.It is this: If the Government is prepared to invest "whatever it takes" to get the wheels of the "unreal" economy that is banking back on the rails, then will it be prepared to invest "whatever ...
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Houses set for a revival as flats wane in the wake of credit crunch
If one thing epitomised the boom years in the housing market it was the building of high-density blocks of apartments that were sucked up off plan by eager investors.The credit crunch has changed all that. Outside of London dense schemes of flats are rapidly going out of fashion.Having been for ...
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Surveyors smell an ill wind across all construction
The RICS construction survey provides a valuable early indicator of workload trends, so its latest figures showing the slump widening out from house building is cause for concern.You don't see too many charts showing sentiment collapse as fast as it appears to have looking at the charts produced by the ...
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House building in the history books
The surveyors' body RICS seems pretty convinced that annual rate of house building in England will fall below 100,000, unless of course something dramatic happens to pick the market up - what who knows?This had me wondering just how low this puts the house building industry compared to periods in ...
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Comment£22m later …
As the mood of the times moves smoothly from neurosis to outright hysteria, the return of the Wembley soap opera is strangely reassuring, in a perverse kind of way.
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Forecasters see an £8 billion drop for construction work by 2010
So the latest stab by the Construction Products Association to make sense of the economic chaos suggests that construction output will fall 7% over the next three years. That is a loss in cash terms of about £8 billion in work by 2010.The pace of decline in sentiment within construction ...
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CommentMy digital life: Neill Pawsey
Enthusiastic cyber-citizen Neill Pawsey is happy to have meetings, study, chat and read the paper online. The only thing that holds him back is his bandwidth