Opinion – Page 487
-
Comment
Quality over quantity
Your editorial on Building Schools for the Future (3 November, page 3) got the wrong end of the stick. The real challenge for Tim Byles is not to deliver 3,500 schools or to spend £45bn; it is to find a way to marry quantity with quality.
-
CommentBSF fails the history test
Building Schools for the Future may be in deep trouble. After a six-month review, Pricewaterhouse Coopers is expected to supply a solution.
-
Comment
Less competition won’t help
There is no such thing as a free lunch, especially with consultants or bidders. Someone has to pay. Your editorial about school bids urges less competition and less regulation. Three bids are the minimum basis for competitive tenders to indicate the area of price. Extend your logic, why have any ...
-
Comment
A lesson plan
What a sad story of waste and stupidity (3 November). In a week when our children are reported to be the worst in Europe, our government creates so much red tape that it costs a contractor £2m to be unsuccessful in bidding for Building Schools for the Future.
-
Comment
Don’t close the college!
We the undersigned are all leaders in the construction industry, and we back the National Construction College in its fight for survival. Your editorial piece and associated feature (Building, 29 September) highlighted perfectly the scale of the investment challenge that the College faces.
-
CommentDon’t try this at home, kids
We’re doing wrong by our children all over the letters page this week. Andy Hopkins, a planning supervisor at BCHT Group, sent us this snap of devil-may-care window fitters in a Bradford school zone. Should do wonders for construction recruitment …
-
CommentHow to play the green card
David Cameron rode into Westminster on his bicycle almost a year ago as the new leader of the opposition, and promptly captured the high ground on what is becoming the leading domestic issue of the day – climate change.
-
Comment
First, engage the brain
What do Olympic venues and nuclear decommissioning have in common? Both require contracts that force the project team to think through everything that is to happen – which makes them ideal for NEC3
-
Comment
A leaky roof
TFW Printers Ltd (“TFW”) engaged Interserve Project Services Ltd to carry out certain building works. The building contract was the JCT Agreement for Minor Works. The works included the replacement of a pressed steel valley gutter to part of one of the roofs of the building. In carrying out these ...
-
CommentOpen sesame
WEB WATCH — Desperate for up-to-the-minute construction news and job alerts? Then look no further – access to Building magazine’s website is completely free for the next four weeks.
-
CommentRealpolitik
Gus Alexander The construction industry, like the arms industry, is more concerned with doing the work than with what the work does. So how are we going to persuade it to stop following orders and think?
-
-
CommentThe best laid plans
Rival engineers accidentally lay on parties at the same location, Frank Lampard fails to organise a trip to the zoo and Building hacks somehow conspire to win an intelligence test...
-
CommentCausing death and saving lives
The bill on manslaughter and corporate homicide that is midway through its second reading in parliament must ensure that senior managers can be held personally to account
-
Comment
Men behaving badly
A survey by the Chartered Institute of Building reveals that many in construction have a shockingly complacent attitude to corruption – and don’t even realise that certain practices are criminal
-
CommentIt’s going to be a long, long time
STATE YOUR CASE — The latest idea for disposing of nuclear waste is to offer councils financial incentives to bury it in their backyard. But, says Nigel Robson, the progress is measured in decades
-
CommentRead the signs
Thanks for the interesting article about waste management (27 October, page 46).