Opinion – Page 511
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CommentIt's raining men
My wife and I were in Tallinn, Estonia, last summer when we saw these three lads re-roofing a building in the old town - soft hats and soft brains, and the rain was pouring down.
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Giving and receiving
Melville entered into a contract for the design, construction and completion of a residential development in Glasgow. The contract form was the Scottish Building Contract with Contractor's Design Sectional Completion Edition (January 2000 Revision) issued by the SBCC. It incorporated the conditions of the JCT With Contractor's Design 1998. ...
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CommentThe collaboration game
The non-adversarial NEC3 contracts could serve the Olympic project well, but the design team needed to drive it forward raises some tricky questions of its own
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CommentIt'll run rings round them
The Olympics will be like every other project - ridden with bluffers, slackers and buck passers - but a dispute resolution board can keep them all in order
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Want your money back?
The problem of bid costs in PFI schemes has been highlighted again at Bart's. It therefore makes sense to know when and how you can claw back your cash
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CommentBefore the tribunal
Firms that don't deal with discrimination on the grounds of sex, race, disability and - from October - age, risk being hauled up by employment tribunals
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CommentSimplicate your language
The government wants housebuilders to treat customers fairly, and has threatened to crack down on those who use arcane and unintelligible language in their contracts
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Keeping at arm's length
The government should temper its move to replace the Decent Homes standard with a wider benchmark by taking into account the achievements of many arm's length management organisations to date.
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Wey off the mark
I was surprised to read your article headed "Key scheme a year late as Weymouth prepares for 2012" (7 April, page 22), which I feel contained several inaccuracies, in particular the suggestion that the scheme is running late.
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Don't blame the software
I have no wish to defend the shambles of the implementation timetable of Part L, forced on the ODPM by its political masters and the European Union. The development of the Simplified Building Energy Model was part of that sorry process, but to criticise SBEM because it doesn't give the ...
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Private concerns
As the newly appointed chairman of the Association of Consultant Approved Inspectors (which represents about 30% of the building control industry), I would like to endorse the five manifesto proposals, particularly the first two. It is noted however, that the private sector building control was not included in the summit, ...
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Some scandal
In response to Colin Harding's assertion that expecting taxpayers to subsidise the public sector's "pension extravagance" is a "scandal" (7 April, page 37), can I check that this pension extravagance would be the average pension paid to public sector workers of about £3500 a year (probably just enough to ...
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A question of recyclability
I refer to the article on recycled content (31 March, page 71). While applauding initiatives to improve resource efficiency within construction, the steel construction sector has concerns that the "single issue" focus of setting minimum recycled content targets has the potential to throw up spurious decisions that may in fact ...
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CommentAh, they've finally made that safe, then
This classic safety precaution comes to us from Tony Rackliffe, of Farnham, who explains it was one of a series of similar holes in a fairly busy street in Kuala Lumpur. It was much more dangerous before the planks went across, presumably
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CommentNow is good
Now is a great time to be an architect, with liberated aesthetics, resurgent creativity, rethought modernism - and a welcome new distraction …
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CommentNo end of a lesson
The government's 21st-century schools extravaganza is in deep, deep trouble.
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Comment
When is an agreement a contract?
This was an application for declaratory relief to establish that the payment claim issued by United Group Infrastructure Pty Ltd dated 14 November 2005 was not a payment claim that is subject to the regime for assessment and adjudication established by the Building and Construction Industry Payments Act 2004.Pioneer Sugar ...