Archive for category: General News

“We’ve got a huge new Towns Fund which is going to be giving £3.6 billion altogether”

That was the claim from Boris Johnson on Friday. In March this year, Theresa May announced £1.6 billion for a new “Stronger Towns Fund”. The idea was to boost the local economies of towns that had been “left behind”.

In July, the new Prime Minister committed to add an extra £1 billion to the pot, bringing the total value of the Stronger Towns Fund up to £2.6 billion.

So where’s the “£3.6 billion” figure from?

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government say that the “Towns Fund” now comprises the “Stronger Towns Fund” and another pot, the “Future High Streets Fund”.

The Future High Streets Fund was announced in October 2018 and given £675 million to spend. Boris Johnson has since topped that up with an extra £325 million to bring the total to £1 billion. When you add that to the Stronger Towns Fund, you get a grand total of £3.6 billion.

So is Mr Johnson right to refer to this as “new”? If he means that the Towns Fund itself is new, then he’s right — before he took office, the Stronger Towns and Future High Street Funds were separate, and now they are combined.

But the key question is: how much of that £3.6 billion is new money? The answer, as the government’s own press release comes close to admitting in paragraph 11, is £1.325 billion.

It’s not the first time Mr Johnson has referred to the “£3.6 billion” figure — it cropped up in July during one of his first speeches as Prime Minister — though on that occasion he didn’t indicate whether this was all new money or not.

Source: 4 NEWS

Trains for the London Underground are to be built at a new facility in Goole.

Siemens has received a planning permission grant for this to go ahead. This is combined with Croda Europe’s planned move to Goole 36 Underground, as well as Beal Homes’ new housing development in the area.

All of these projects are set to unlock the potential of the 30-acre Capitol Park Goole, according to Capitol Park’s developers Sterling Capitol.

Siemens has just been given approval by the East Riding of Yorkshire Council for its proposed £200m rail manufacturing facility on a 67-acre site at Goole 36. The plans include 860,000 sq ft of manufacturing, commissioning, warehouse buildings and stabling sidings, as well as a four-storey 54,000 sq ft office building.

As part of the project, Siemens is planning to create up to 700 jobs and a further 250 during the construction period, with an additional 1,700 potential UK supply chain roles.

Richard Beal, chief executive of Beal Homes, said: “Our plans amount to a huge economic boost for Goole – we’ll be investing more than £100m over the next 15 years.

“Our development will provide the high-quality housing, from starter homes to executive properties that Goole needs to support current and planned investment, encourage further growth and realise the town’s rich potential.

“Pending planning approval, we expect to be on site later this year and delivering the first new homes in the second half of 2020. That means much-needed, high–quality homes for local families and people attracted to the area. It also means many new jobs working directly with us or with local sub-contractors and suppliers.

“We’re proud and excited to be among many investors who are leading the way in delivering the regeneration of Goole and creating an exciting future for the town and its people.”

The factory will manufacture 94 trains for the Piccadilly line. The new trains are part of London Underground’s ‘Deep Tube’ upgrade programme to modernise the Piccadilly, Bakerloo, Central and Waterloo and City lines.

Meanwhile, East Yorkshire-based Beal Homes has submitted detailed plans for the first phase of a large-scale development of 800 homes on a 73-acre site close to Junction 36 of the M62 in Goole.

The overall scheme will be the largest residential development in the Goole area for many years. Covering an area equivalent to almost 50 football pitches, the development will include the provision of a new primary school and additional open space.

Mike Heydecke, of Starling Capitol, said: “Capitol Park Goole, adjacent to the M62 at Junction 36, is perfectly positioned to take advantage of these investments. The park has been opened up by the new link road from the motorway to the port and has massive economic potential for employment. This potential can now be further unlocked.”

Source: BDaily News

A record 62% of all UK excavation work is now preceded by a thorough search for underground assets, such as pipes and cables, according to a report by LSBUD (Linesearch BeforeUdig).

The report entitled ‘Digging up Britain 2019′, shows that there were 2,585,862 searches made through LSBUD’s online portal last year – a 14% increase on the previous year. As a result, almost a quarter of a million more potential asset strikes to the UK’s energy infrastructure were averted.

Part of this increase is because more utility owners are now members. Of the UK’s 1.5 million kilometres of underground utility infrastructure, about 800,000 kilometres is currently covered by LSBUD’s collaborative portal, a 23% increase on last year. This includes more than 60% of the UK’s electricity and gas networks, a 20% increase on the previous year. This is partly due to Wales & West Utilities registering its assets at the end of 2018. With SSE set to add their assets in 2019, over 60% of the UK’s electricity and gas distribution networks are now members.

Richard Broome, managing director of LSBUD, said: “We have record numbers of searches going through our system – one every 12 seconds. Some of this is down to having such good coverage from the DNOs and GDNs, and this is improving every year. There’s a definite ‘safety in the herd’ effect – the more asset owners registered with us, the more enquiries every utility member receives. That said, it’s a worry that nearly four in 10 projects are still taking place without proper searches being completed – leaving workers and the UK’s utility infrastructure at risk.”

The report bears this out. Since SGN joined LSBUD two years ago its enquiries have increased from 2,500 to more than 58,000 per month.

Despite the promising increases in searches, more than 1.5 million projects out of an estimated total of four million still took place in 2018 without a detailed search for underground assets being completed. This equates to 38%, or a dig every 21 seconds.

Broome added: “We can’t be complacent. We still need to educate everyone to complete a comprehensive search before they put a spade or digger in the ground – as the implications of a strike can be huge.”

If the searches through LSBUD’s portal are indicative of what’s happening nationally, the biggest threats to utility assets came from utility companies themselves. Telecoms contractors and operators completed 881,000 searches, making up 34% of all searches in 2018. Water related information requests came next, with 574,000 searches, accounting for 22% of the total.

Work by contractors on the nation’s roads also grew by 18%, with 360,000 requests submitted in 2018.  Housing grew its share of excavation work with a 21% surge in searches from firms involved in housebuilding. Solar farm project searches leapt by 64%, tree planting enquiries more than doubled, mining and quarry projects increased by 43% while searches relating to agricultural works increased by 86%.

LSBUD’s report also explores the costs of asset strikes, sharing data from a study by the University of Birmingham. Factoring in indirect costs such as worker ill-health or injuries caused by a strike plus traffic disruption, impact on the immediate neighbourhood, loss of custom to local businesses and so forth, the true cost of an asset strike is 29 times the direct cost; for every £1,000 of direct cost arising from a utility strike the true cost is £29,000.

LSBUD’s report highlights a strong correlation between the severity of a strike and the nature of work being carried out – incidents are twice as likely to occur on jobs that are medium or high risk than on planned work.

Broome concludes: “This is why we urge all asset owners to register with our service; with more emergency works than ever taking place, and more people searching than ever before, for every type of project, it’s crucial to make it easy for firms to rapidly check what’s under the ground.”

Source: Network

As the Bahamas begins its long recovery process after Hurricane Dorian ravaged Grand Bahama and the Abaco Islands, the country faces an uphill battle rebuilding hotels and its tourism industry.

“The Bahamas is the most tourism-dependent country in the Caribbean and perhaps the world,” said Rick Newton of Resort Capital Partners, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based real estate investment advisory firm focused on the resort and hospitality market in the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America.

Tourism accounts for about 50 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, according to the Bahamian government’s website, and most of the nation’s workers are employed in some aspect of tourism, as well.

The dependance on hotels and tourism makes the rebuilding process even more difficult for the Bahamas, after the hurricane made landfall over Labor Day weekend, bringing wind speeds of more than 180 miles per hour to two of the country’s largest population centers, Grand Bahama and the Abacos.

The hurricane, fortunately, missed the country’s capital city Nassau, along with Paradise Island, where the largest resorts and hotels are located, including Baha Mar and Atlantis, Paradise Island.

Frank Comito, CEO of the Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association, said the hotels and resorts in Nassau were not impacted by the hurricane and never closed.

The Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama have a much different hotel landscape than Nassau.

“They have a large vacation home business. A lot of it is rental and timeshares and lot of single-family, high-end homes in the Abacos,” Comito said.

The Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama have a total of about 2,250 hotel rooms, which equates to 15 percent of the total hotel inventory in the country, according to Newton.

Recently the Bahamas has experienced a boom in its hotel industry, growing at a much faster rate than the rest of the Carribean.

Hotel occupancy jumped 19 percent in the first half of this year, compared to the same period of the previous year, according to the hotel-data firm STR. Meanwhile, revenue per available room was up 27 percent to $231 in the first half of this year.

The sizable upswing was due to the completion in 2018 of Baha Mar, a 2,300-room resort and casino.

Experts say that as repair and construction companies start heading to the affected islands in the Bahamas, hotels in Nassau and other nearby areas could see a bump in revenue and occupancy as repair workers need a place to stay.

After Hurricane Irma damaged parts of the Florida Keys in September 2017, the Miami region saw double-digit increases in occupancy, revenue and demand. In October 2017, Miami area hotel occupancy was at 74.5 percent, up 11.2 percent from the same month of the previous year.

Rebuilding in the affected areas in the Bahamas, however, is likely much more challenging than after a hurricane in the Keys or South Florida. In the Bahamas, there are only a few institutionally owned properties in Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama that can afford to make repairs and rebuild dilapidated hotels, according to Newton.

Similarly, the Bahamas can’t tap into federal resources to rebuild infrastructure, like Puerto Rico did after hurricanes Irma and Maria. Following the hurricanes, Puerto Rico quickly sought to take advantage of the Opportunity Zones program.

The federal program designated almost the entire territory of Puerto Rico as an Opportunity Zone, which means that investors who build new real estate projects or redevelop an existing property could get substantial tax breaks. The Island’s governor said that the program could bring more than $600 million in new investment to Puerto Rico, and some investors are already taking advantage of this tax benefit.

In the Bahamas, however, it’s hard to see this same scenario playing out, according to Newton.

Real Estate Investment Trusts will likely be hesitant to put money into the Bahamas, because there is less of an exit strategy than putting the money into the United States, he said. So the bigger question is who will pay to rebuild properties that are torn down?

”Where will the capital come from?” he asked. “It’s not coming from insurance companies. I hope it’s private capital.”

Source: The Real Deal

The worlds first amazing Sky Pool is due to arrive in London in Summer 2020.

Over the past year teams of architects, engineers and consultants have been busy testing and developing the pool structure in its factory in Colorado. The innovative pool is pushing boundaries in the capability of construction and engineering and will be a feat of engineering, never seen before. It is an intricate and challenging process for which we have some of the best minds in the world working together to accomplish.

The stunning outdoor pool will link two residential buildings at the 10^th storey – a world first – and allow residents to swim from one building to the next. The sky deck at the top of the two buildings incorporates a spa, summer bar and Orangery for residents to relax and take in the views of London icons which include the Houses of Parliament, London Eye and new US Embassy located next door. The pool is entirely transparent, 25m long, 5m wide and 3m deep with a water depth of 1.2m. Designed by Arup Associates, with specialist input from Eckersley O’Callaghan and aquarium designers Reynolds, the experience is intended to be more akin to an aquarium than a pool.

The acrylic is now in its final phase of construction and is currently undergoing its final testing and treatments before it will be prepared for shipping to the UK, itself a lengthy and complex process.

The pool is expected to arrive at Embassy Gardens next Summer, when this vision becomes a reality. We will then need to lift and secure the structure in place and complete works on the Sky Deck but the pool will be open next Summer.

 About Embassy Gardens:

Embassy Gardens will see the creation of nearly 2,000 new homes, stunning landscaped gardens, vibrant new bars and restaurants providing a variety of al fresco spaces and 130,000 ft sq. of shopping space. Phase two is being delivered by EcoWorld Ballymore and phase one, which is now complete and occupied, was delivered by Ballymore Group. Phase 3, which is also under construction, includes One Embassy Gardens, the development’s flagship commercial building, with space pre-let to Penguin Random House UK and DK Publishing, and EG:HQ, a 13-storey, 217,000 sq. ft office space, which was recently submitted for planning.

The apartments at Embassy Gardens are a 10-minute walk from Vauxhall station and connectivity will be further improved with the forthcoming extension of the Northern Line, creating two new stations at Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station. Future home to the Sky Pool, Embassy Gardens is a landmark development which will establish a totally new community within central London, wrapped around the new US Embassy.

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