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Wednesday, August 23, 2017

DfMA – just what the built environment needs?

Rob Driscoll, BESA Director of Legal and Commercial

We live in an age where UK industry has identified, and by its own admission accepted, its inability to unlock productivity. Within each industrial revolution (except this one), wholesale economic growth and profitability has enjoyed an accelerated increase due to efficiency savings thanks to technological advancement. BESA has been leading for some time on the issue of how ‘technology is the key...

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

GRENFELL - WHAT ELSE ARE WE MISSING PART 6

Rob Driscoll, BESA Director of Legal and Commercial

PART 6 - Less speed more haste – Grenfell – when will we learn It has been a little over two months, but over the coming weeks, many questions will still be asked around the Grenfell tragedy. These are questions which we should not predict the answers to, given the severity fire, but questions that will need to be answered. People are already asking questions – questions asked like ‘did the...

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Taking Advantage of an Ageing Workforce

MICHAEL MURDOCH,  DIRECTOR OF EMPLOYMENT AFFAIRS Findings from the World Bank show that the increase in UK life expectancy has shot up from an estimated 76 years old in 1990 to an average of 81 in 2013. A paper published in the medical journal Nature last year even claimed to have evidence that a human lifespan could be up to 115 years old1 . Over the next decade almost 20% of the construction...

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Grenfell - what else are we missing part 5

Part 5 – Flues, Chimneys and Exhausts: Installation and Maintenance   Continuing our series of looking at the non-cladding aspects of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, we now move onto a key part of a passive fire safety strategy; flues and exhausts. A flue is quite simply a duct, pipe, or opening in a chimney to get exhaust gases from a fireplace, furnace, water heater, boiler or a generator out of...

Thursday, August 3, 2017

The folly of build and design

David Frise, BESA Head of Sustainability

Assembling buildings as a single, integrated system For a building to be a 'product', you have to start the process off correctly by designing it before you start.  Not rocket science, but rarely achievable in the “crack on” world of construction.  Most projects start on site far too early and well before the design is fully completed. This means that we end up not in design and build mode, but...