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Midgard bags world’s tallest octagonal resi tower job
JRL-owned main contractor Midgard has scooped the job to construct the world’s tallest pure octagonal residential building at the Paradise site in Birmingham.
Under a 44-month contract Hertfordshire-based Midgard will now demolish the existing 77 Paradise Circus Queensway office building ahead of starting work on the 49-storey building.
Singaporean real estate developer City Developments Limited (CDL) has just bought the scheme, which will cost £110m to develop including land cost.
The team leading Paradise Birmingham, MEPC, will remain as the development manager of the 155m building.
Construction will involve installing a 179m tower crane on site in the first half of 2022 – the tallest tower crane ever used in the city and the same height as the Gherkin in London.
Designed by Birmingham-based Glenn Howells Architects, the 155m tall tower will provide up to 370 new build to rent homes and marks the latest phase of the £700m Paradise scheme, so far delivered by BAM and Sir Robert McAlpine.
Prefabricated elements including the facade and modern methods of construction will contribute to a lower embodied design for the Octagon
Neil McGinty, UK development director at CDL, said: “We are delighted to collaborate with MEPC to develop the visionary Octagon residential tower, which will transform Birmingham’s skyline.
“Since we made our foray into the UK BTR segment in 2019 with the acquisition of The Junction in Leeds, we have been looking for opportunities to grow our portfolio strategically through the development of iconic BTR residential landmarks.
“Our investment in the Paradise project allows us the unique opportunity to actively participate in the rejuvenation of the Birmingham city region.”
Under the Glen Howells design eight flats on each floor will boast uninterrupted views
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First pier poured for UK’s longest rail viaduct – video
Construction of the UK’s longest railway bridge has taken a major step forward with completion of the first of 56 giant concrete piers to support the Colne Valley Viaduct as it crosses a series of lakes on the outskirts of London.
Stretching for 3.4km, the viaduct near Hillingdon was cast by concrete specialist Kilnbridge working in partnership with engineers from HS2’s main works contractor Align JV.
Weighing in at around 370 tonnes, the 6m tall reinforced concrete pier was cast on site using a specially-designed formwork. This was then removed after four days to reveal the final product.
Each pier is designed to support the full weight of the deck above and rests on a set of concrete piles going up to 55m into the ground.
This foundation work began earlier this year and will require the construction of 292 piles and 56 pile caps across the whole length of the viaduct.
The construction team have also now completed the first of four jetties across the lakes to get equipment into position to support the construction thereby taking construction vehicles off local roads. Where the viaduct crosses the lake, the piles will be bored directly into the lakebed, using a cofferdam to hold back the water while the pier is constructed.
Align’s project director, Daniel Altier, said: “I have no doubt that the viaduct will become one, if not the most striking element of HS2 phase 1 once complete.”
The main deck of the viaduct – which supports the railway line – will be built in 1000 separate unique segments at a temporary factory nearby before being assembled from north to south, starting next year.
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Race starts for Sellafield £250m steelwork and cladding deal
Sellafield’s project delivery team is starting the hunt for two key delivery partners for a combined steelwork and cladding package worth nearly £250m over 18 years.
The tender is the latest to hit the market from a new pioneering procurement model that uses Project 13-style integrated collaborative teams.
The big procurement shake-up is being delivered by Programme and Project Partners (PPP), driving forward the clean-up of the Sellafield site in West Cumbria.
This overarching integrated team is made up of a Kellogg Brown and Root (Integration Partner); Jacobs (Design and Engineering Partner); Morgan Sindall Infrastructure (Civils Construction Management Partner) and Doosan Babcock (Process Construction Management Partner), and Sellafield.
Peter Hogg, the PPP head of supply chain, said: “We are keen to hear from potential key delivery partners to take part in an exciting long-term partnership to design and deliver steelwork and cladding of industrial buildings at the Sellafield site.
“This is the latest Multi Project Procurement process to be announced and we are looking forward to hearing from innovative organisations in these fields.”
The package includes early contractor involvement, final design, temporary works, supply and erection services. Contracts may be divided into two lots, due to the scale of the undertaking.
Key delivery partners will be expected to deliver a third of their works using small and medium-sized enterprises.
A full strategy paper outlining the procurement approach, commercial model, timeline, and other important information will be issued to interested firms at the start of the market engagement phase, which runs until 2 February 2022.
Pre-tender schedule
Complete Tender Management portal expression of interest – deadline (7 January 2022)Initial supplier briefing – Microsoft Teams briefing to present the package (week commencing 10 Jan 2022) presentation date scheduled for 13 January 2022.Questions and answers – Sharing of questions and answers following the briefingOnline survey – responses due by 19 January 2022)Pre-Qualification Questionnaire (PQQ) issued (2 February 2022)Matchmaker process – Promoting the process for SME engagement (ongoing throughout)
To register interest firms need to email: PPP
by 7 January.
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Skanska wins £53m Slough data centre job
Skanska has signed a £53m contract to build a new data center in Slough for developer Virtus.
The LONDON11 data centre design and build job includes fit-out of six new data halls, construction of external steelwork plant gantries, plant rooms for mechanical and electrical and public health services, all MEPH infrastructure across the site and office fit out.
Construction work begins this month to complete the project by Spring 2023.
The construction of LONDON11 will add more than 13MW of new capacity within 5,500m2 of net technical space at the Slough campus.
This increases Virtus’ total data centre estate to more than 178MW and 77,000 sq m across its UK locations.
This includes the four data centres within Virtus’ Stockley Park Campus, all built by Bouygues Energies & Services and makes Virtus Data Centres one of Europe’s leading data centre providers.
Neil Cresswell, CEO of Virtus Data Centres said: “The start of building LONDON11 is a significant milestone in a busy year for Virtus.
“Throughout the COVID-19 epidemic our focus on operational excellence has enabled us to provide safe, reliable service to our valued customers, from our five live data centres, whilst also safely bringing two additional new data centres live in the past six months.”
Balfour Beatty US arm to pay £49m over military housing fraud
Balfour Beatty’s US operation has been ordered to pay out £49m after pleading guilty to major fraud on its military housing maintenance contract.
The Balfour Beatty Communities pay-out is made up of £25m in fines and £24m in damages relating to its military housing contract at 21 Air Force, 18 Navy, and 16 Army bases across the United States, in which tens of thousands of service members and their families lived.
As part of the settlement with the US Department for Justice, BBC pleaded guilty to one count of fraud and has agreed to the appointment of an independent compliance monitor for a three-year period, while it has also been placed on probation for three years.
According to court documents, from around 2013 to around 2019, Balfour Beatty Communities staff falsified performance information for incentive fee requests at various military housing projects.
Specifically, BBC staff altered or manipulated data in property management software and destroyed and falsified resident comment cards to falsely inflate performance to obtain pay performance incentive fees that BBC had not earned.
US Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco said: “Instead of promptly repairing housing for U.S. service members as required, BBC lied about the repairs to pocket millions of dollars in performance bonuses.”
“This pervasive fraud was a consequence of BBC’s broken corporate culture, which valued profit over the welfare of servicemembers.
“Today’s global resolution sends a clear message to companies that if they do not maintain adequate compliance programs, voluntarily self-disclose misconduct, and fully cooperate with the government, they will pay a price that outweighs the profits they once reaped.”
In a statement today Balfour said: “Balfour Beatty is committed to the highest standards of ethical conduct.
“The wrongdoing that took place is completely contrary to the way the company expects its people to behave.
“The company apologises for the actions of Communities to all its stakeholders. It has been made clear to all employees that breaches of policies, procedures, or law will not be tolerated.
“Communities welcomes the appointment of the independent compliance monitor and looks forward to a constructive engagement.”
In 2019, the Balfour Beatty undertook an in-depth review of operations at Communities and, as a result, introduced a series of changes to prevent misconduct from occurring in the future.
These involved therestructuring of the Communities management team including the additional appointment of several key executives and aChief Compliance Officer for the US.
It said: “Communities also has enhanced its ethics and compliance training for all employees and has made significant improvements to the maintenance work order processing system, underpinned by enhanced controls and protocols that are aimed to prevent misuse and strengthen oversight.”
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M Group buys Babcock power lines arm for £50m
Infrastructure specialist contractor M Group Services has bought Babcock’s Overhead Line Power business for £50m.
Following the acquisition, the business will be rebranded to form part of Morrison Energy Services, sitting alongside and enhancing existing electricity, gas and green energy capabilities.
In latest accounts to March 2021, the power business reported total revenues of £70m and pre-tax profit around £7m before allocated overheads.
The overhead line electric transmission and distribution business counts among its clients including National Grid, Scottish Power Energy Networks and Western Power Distribution.
Jim Arnold, Chief Executive M Group Services, said: “It is important for us to deliver sustainable growth both organically and through acquisitions and we are pleased to strategically enhance our capabilities with this acquisition which provides the means to accelerate our growth by delivering a greater breadth of electricity transmission services to our clients.
“The culture, capabilities and reputation that have become synonymous with this business make it a perfect fit for us. We are delighted to welcome David Maddocks and his team to M Group Services.”
David Maddocks, Director of Babcock Power, added: “I am extremely excited to be joining M Group Services. Our overhead line capability compliments the existing range of services and provides a solid platform to grow in a market that has great opportunity for expansion.”
This acquisition takes the total number of strategic acquisitions made by M Group Services to 15 since December 2016.
52 jobs axed as industrial coating specialist goes under
Staffordshire-based specialist Industrial Coating Services has fallen into administration with the loss of 52 jobs.
ICS, which specialised in the surface preparation and application of protective coatings, suffered from critical cash flow issues arising from a sustained period of working on loss-making contracted work.
Since last year ICS was working on the major Wandsworth Bridge refurbishment in London which is now due to be completed next summer after further additional critical works were identified on the structure.
The original contract with VolkerLaser is understood to have been secured for around £3m.
The business, which operated from an industrial paint shop building in Rugeley, was marketed for sale prior to the administrators’ appointment, but a buyer could not be found.
Ben Jones from administrators FRP Advisory , said: “Without significant investment or the prospect of new ownership, ICS was unable to trade through its difficulties and continue as a going concern.
“All trading and operations have ceased. Regrettably, all of the 52 employees have been made redundant, although a small number will continue to support the administrators with their statutory duties. ”
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Building collapses after foundation blunders
A building contractor has been prosecuted after carrying out unsafe excavation works which resulted in the partial collapse of a residential building.
Manchester Crown Court heard how on 14 August 2019, Iproject Cheshire Limited had been carrying out refurbishment works on a building in Didsbury.
Employees of the company undermined the foundations while digging out the ground around the building causing a partial collapse. There were no injuries or fatalities, but the collapse presented a risk to life.
An HSE investigation found that the company failed to properly plan or carry out the work safely. A risk assessment into the excavations had not been carried out. There was no safe system of work in place and the work had not been sufficiently supervised.
Iproject Cheshire Limited of Stockport pleaded guilty to safety breaches and was fined £31,500 and ordered to pay costs of £13,500.
Speaking after the hearing, HSE inspector David Argument said: “This was a very serious incident, and it is fortunate that nobody was injured as a result of it.
“This incident could have been prevented if the company had carried out a suitable and sufficient risk assessment prior to commencing work on the excavations and by properly supervising the work.”
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A Simple Clear Construction Staffing Distress Indicator
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Well before the pandemic, the construction sector was worrying over what was perceived as an acute shortage of labor. Much of the discussion on this topic over the past several years has been anecdotal. Or reference has been made to employment gains that have been less than they should be and unemployment rates that have sometimes turned spectacularly low.
But it would be better to find some easy-to-understand visual representation of the problem. It’s my hope that Graphs 1 through 5 below, making use of JOLTS data, fit the bill.
From the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), for ‘all jobs’ and 14 major sub-sectors, I’ve taken ‘openings’ levels and ‘hires’ levels and calculated openings-to-hires ratios for every month back to July 2009, which was the first period of recovery after the ‘fiscal crisis’ recession (a.k.a., the Great Recession).
The openings-to-hires ratio essentially captures the degree to which vacant positions are being snapped up (a low ratio) or going begging (a high ratio).
To enable easy comparisons between industries, I’ve indexed their openings-to-hires ratios.
The indexing I’ve adopted takes the July 2009 value for each series and sets it equal to 100.0. (The number could just as easily be set equal to 1.0 but choosing 100 leaves more room for following numbers to move not only up, but also down, should that become the case.)
For each series, the value of each subsequent month is divided by the value in the base month (July 2009) and multiplied by 100.
Since all the series have the same starting value (July 2009 = 100.0), when a couple of them, or several of them, are shown on a graph, their movements over time can be readily compared.
In Graphs 1 through 5, I’ve stuck with only one-on-one comparisons.
The higher the curve, the greater the sought-after employee shortage distress.
From Graph 1, it’s apparent that the increase over time, since July 2009, in the openings-to-hires ratio for construction has far outpaced the increase in the openings-to-hires ratio for ‘all jobs’. (The openings-to-hires ratio will increase in an expanding economy.)
By the way, I must point out that the patterns apparent in Graphs 1 to 5 stay essentially the same even when the base period is shifted (e.g., if January 2015 is chosen = 100.0 rather than July 2009).
In Graphs 2 through 5, the worker shortage in construction is shown to be more severe than in the following: manufacturing; retail trade; transportation, warehousing, and utilities; and accommodation and food services.
As for nine of the other ten industrial sectors not set out graphically below, construction’s labor shortage is far more acute than in any of them except one.
The worst labor shortage in the U.S. is currently being experienced in another goods-producing as opposed to the services-producing corner of the economy, ‘mining and logging’.
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Birmingham Council cuts KPIs to simplify £2.7bn highways deal
Birmingham City Council has cut hundreds of KPIs during a restructuring of its troubled £2.7bn highways PFI contract.
The tender process for a new contractor for the revamped 12-year deal will start in February.
Birmingham originally signed a 25-year, £2.7bn highways management and maintenance contract back in 2010 with Amey.
But the contractor became embroiled in a lengthy performance dispute with the council which ended in March 2020 with Amey paying £215m to terminate its involvement in the PFI deal.
Kier stepped in as interim contractor while the council and Birmingham Highways Limited – the special purpose vehicle owned by Equitix and PIP Infrastructure Investments – have been working to restructure the contract.
The new contract will cover the remaining 12 years of the initial agreement, from April 2023 to June 2035.
It will be a bespoke deal similar in length to a standard long-term maintenance contract, with operational terms and a performance regime that enables it to be “brought up to date to better reflect current industry standards which have changed over the past decade.”
Birmingham said: “The new contract has been structured to provide better governance of the project and more balanced risk between the Council, the SPV and the future contractor.
“A key element of this is a reduction in key performance indicators from over 600 to around 28 as well as prioritisation of deliverables, addressing both areas which routinely plagued the previous contractor Amey during its tenure as subcontractor.”
Prospective bidders will go through a competitive and transparent tendering process which is due to begin in February 2022, following the supplier day in January.
The process will be conducted over a period of nine months and be structured to provide bidders with sufficient time to undertake due diligence.
During the interim period, an updated Management Information System (MIS) was implemented to collect data from across the road network to provide a greater understanding of current conditions and areas for improvement.
Bidders will be provided with access to this information via a data room, which includes a database of assets and will allow bids to be informed by bidders’ due diligence and analysis.
The data room will include new information about the current status of the road network from improved data collection and analysis, including full network surveys of carriageway conditions that have been undertaken by independent surveyors.
This information will be shared with bidders during the tendering process, providing them with the most detailed understanding of the status of the network to date and provide greater clarity over what can be delivered over the term period.
The contract covers capital works and maintenance of more than 2,500km of roadways and 5,000km of footways across the UK’s largest authority and second largest city, as well as 846 structures, three tunnels, 94,000 street lighting columns, 76,000 highway trees and the city’s traffic control system.
Kevin Hicks, Assistant Director for Highways and Infrastructure of Birmingham City Council, said: “Extensive work has been put in over the last two years by all of the project parties and with the close support of the DfT in order to establish a workable and deliverable contract framework.
“Many lessons have been learned from the first 10 years of the project and with the insight we have gained from the industry through previous engagement exercises believe that we have an attractive prospect for the market.”
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