News

Crossrail is not just about engineering: artists, designers and archaeologists are all involved in the £15bn new railway. The amazing tunnel-boring machines now approaches halfway. Sometimes, when flying over a landscape, you see a seam of unexpected fecundity – lush trees, richer green – that indicates the presence of water or a change to a more fertile soil. Something similar is happening across London. If property values could be made visible (and often they are, by increases in new construction), you would already see a long strip of intensification, in a city that already is hardly a desert, running from east to west. Over the next few years, it will become more and more apparent. This is the effect of the underground Nile called Crossrail and it …

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Help to Buy is a start – but we can never build enough homes unless the State lets go of its land: Barratt boss calls on Ministers to help ease property crisis Mark Clare may be the boss of Britain’s biggest housebuilder, but he has to admit that he has never bought a Barratt home. As perhaps is more fitting for the chief executive of a company whose profits rose 74 per cent last year, he lives in a five-bedroom Edwardian house in the leafy commuter town of Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire. Then there is the 60ft motor cruiser moored in the Solent. The boom in profits at Barratt is of course thanks to the resurgence of the British housing market. Official mortgage lending figures last week showed a 37 …

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Housebuilders’ shares have more than doubled in two years as home prices have recovered, but an uncertain interest rate outlook and rising costs mean gains look more modest – and more precarious – in 2014. Government schemes, including the “Help to Buy” programme, which guarantees up to 15 percent of applicable mortgages, helped push house prices to an 11-year high by one measure last month, fuelling concerns about a potential bubble that could burst when interest rates eventually rise. House prices will rise on average 4 percent this year and 5.5 percent next and even more in London, according to a Reuters poll of market watchers. The Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has played down talk of overheating and asked the Bank of England for annual recommendations on the …

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Ealing Council has signed off on a plan to build nearly 200 homes as part of a £155 million estate regeneration scheme. The build will focus on the West of the borough, and will see the creation of 187 new homes at a time when the government has been under pressure to build affordable housing. In July the government announced a £220 million investment into affordable housing in Britain to push the build of up to 14,000 new homes to cope with a growing population, but work won’t start until 2015. The scheme by Ealing Council, contracted to A2Dominion and Rydon, will see phase two of the Green Man Lane development, designed by Conran & Partners, put into full swing. David Price, Regeneration Director at A2Dominion said: “This …

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Fassi will launch a new 15 tonne/metre loader crane next week at the Solutrans exhibition in Lyon. The F165AZ has been developed with a eye on the French public works market, and features a built in foldable control station and unusual over centre geometry, both intended to take up less space and free up the truck bed from obstructions, especially handy when used for loading/unloading loose material with a clamshell grab. The three section boom has two telescopic sections which use a single cylinder and extension chain saving space which allows hoses to be routed internally. Maximum reach is eight metres. The prototype at the show will be in the Basic configuration with direct hydraulic controls. A version is also planned with Danfoss compensated proportional …

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Swift action by employees at Sims Crane & Equipment Co. helped emergency responders quickly locate the body of a railroad worker crushed in a train derailment on October 25 in Sanford, FL. Chris Arnold, Sims’ Orlando-based crane application specialist, said that minutes after he heard about the derailment on a radio newscast, he was in touch with his Railworks Corporation client contact at the Sun Rail accident site, and offered to send a crane to lift the derailed cars back on track. Arnold said he did not know then that a railroad employee had been crushed beneath one of the cars, which were carrying gravel at the Sun Rail expansion construction site. “We work derailments regularly, but this was the first fatality for me,” said Arnold. …

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Construction of a congestion-busting link road between Sheffield and Rotherham is set to start ‘in the coming months’ after government and European Union funding was approved. The £16 million route will run beneath the M1 junction 34, allowing vehicles to bypass congested roundabouts at either end of Tinsley Viaduct. The investment is part of the £30 million North Bus Rapid Transit scheme, which aims to reduce journey times on public transport. Planning permission has already been granted – and the approval of £15.9 million from the Government and £8m from the EU has now meant the project can begin. The rest of the funding is coming from Sheffield and Rotherham councils and South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive. Construction of the link road and bus priority measures elsewhere in …

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The Port of Southampton has expressed an interest in buying the local military docks at Marchwood after a boom in car traffic reduced expansion space at its own facilities to a single acre. A surge in car handling at the 700-acre port has put space at a premium, forcing Southampton to build its fifth multi-deck storage facility – due to be opened next month by Stephen Hammond, the transport minister. The need to build “upwards” is testament to the recovery in demand for new cars in both Britain and overseas, with Southampton seeing strong growth in car exports. Such traffic at Southampton rose 72pc to 439,000 vehicles between 2009 and last year, when the port handled 31pc of UK car exports. Total car traffic at the port last…

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Land-banking’ culture to be scrapped to encourage house-building Firms have been exploiting loophole in order to wait for house price rises New rule comes weeks after Labour’s criticised ‘land seizure’ policy Housebuilders will no longer be allowed to delay big developments after the government introduced stricter rules to prevent so-called ‘land banking’. Planning minister Nick Boles has scrapped a 2008 measure – introduced in the midst of the financial crisis – which allowed three-year permissions to be easily extended. Some developers exploit the loophole and hoard plots for years as they wait for house prices to rise before starting to build homes. Mr Boles said: ‘This measure to extend planning permission was always intended to be temporary and, while it…

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Britain’s recovery hopes have been dealt a double blow as official figures showed the construction sector shrank and the UK’s goods deficit with the EU reached a record high in September. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said construction output decreased 0.9% month-on-month. It meant a previous estimate for impressive growth of 2.5% over the third quarter in the sector was revised sharply downwards to 1.7%. Separate ONS data on trade showed the monthly deficit failed to narrow from £3.3 billion while the balance of goods exports to the EU compared with imports from the region reached a record negative of £6 billion. The setback for construction comes despite signs of improvement in the housing market and Government initiatives such as Help to Buy buoying …

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