Author Archives: Lem Bingley

The government has delayed post-Brexit changes to the certification of construction products by one year, easing fears that the planned schedule would worsen current shortages of key building materials. Following the UK’s departure from the EU at the start of this year, the government had planned to halt recognition of…

Kier has launched an investigation after the emergence of a video appearing to show a child being put at risk at a major site in Watford, Hertfordshire. The video, uploaded by local newspaper the Watford Observer, appears to show a young girl of roughly primary school age standing next to…

Royal Bam has boosted its profit and turnover to levels above both the COVID-affected results seen in the same period a year ago, and on the first half of 2019. The Dutch parent company of Bam Construct and Bam Nuttall increased revenue by 17 per cent to €3.63bn (£3.10bn) in…

In July, Construction News held its second virtual conference on Decarbonising Construction. Ten months on from our inaugural event, a lot had changed. For one thing, there was a marked uptick in the number of speakers from large contractors, keen to talk about realistic roadmaps and timelines for reaching carbon…

Balfour Beatty has won the contract to construct a new campus for Fife College in Dunfermline, Scotland. Preparatory work is due to begin in September on a 58-acre site. The Scottish Government agreed in September 2019 to provide £90m in capital funding for the work, and the procurement process began…

Modular housing specialist TopHat is drawing up plans to open a second factory, with annual capacity for 3,000 homes, despite reporting significant losses. The firm’s current Derby factory has capacity for 1,000 homes, so the planned expansion would quadruple the company’s potential output. The plans were revealed in an annual…

A pair of financial firms have set up a joint venture to invest £500m in suburban build-to-rent projects, with the aim of delivering 2,500 homes in the North and Midlands. The JV partners are Gatehouse Bank, a London-based Islamic finance bank, and California-based investment firm TPG Real Estate Partners (TREP).…

Post-lockdown growth in the construction sector shrunk back to its slowest pace for six months in July, according to the Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) of industry activity. The reduced pace of recovery followed a sharp peak in growth during June, which was not sustained, according to the long-running index of…

Bam Construct has appointed Danielle Aberg as its head of social impact, a newly created role reporting directly to chief executive James Wimpenny. The company said Aberg has worked in the related fields of social value and diversity and inclusion for more than 16 years. Before joining Bam, she ran…

Work will begin on the second phase of the £750m Station Hill project in central Reading on 9 August, with the start of demolition work to remove a multi-storey car park on the site. Planning permission for the second stage of the development, adjacent to the town’s mainline rail station,…