Supply Chain

Wayne Connolly’s earliest memories are of a cramped terraced house in Didsbury, Manchester. The Connolly Scaffolding boss grew up in the 1980s in a large Irish family, with no hot water, an outside toilet and a bedroom carved out of a bathroom. “I came from a very poor home,” he…

Workers at a Tarmac plant in Alfreton have voted to accept an improved pay offer, averting a strike that had been due to begin next week. More than 30 members of the Unite trade union, including maintenance staff, quality technicians and fitters, had been set to walk out in a…

Construction professionals are being offered new training to address widespread competence gaps in fire safety engineering, in direct response to one of the recommendations in the Grenfell Inquiry’s final report. The Fire Engineering Principles course has been launched by Local Authority Building Control (LABC) and is aimed at tier one…

A new industry association has been launched to represent the scaffolding and access sector on the global stage. The International Access and Scaffolding Association (IASA) was formally established at the ScaffEx25 conference in Manchester on 11-12 September. It brings together the UK’s National Access and Scaffolding Confederation (NASC) with its…

More than 1,500 construction workers at the Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria have gone on strike over a dispute concerning site-specific pay premiums. The action, led by trade union Unite, began on 15 September and will run until 19 September. It added that the walkout affects “multiple trades including electricians,…

Police have made an arrest and seized £400,000-worth of suspected stolen construction machinery from a suspected cannabis site in Wolverhampton. West Midlands Police said yesterday (15 September) that they seized the plant machinery – which included a JCB handler, two forklifts, two scissor lifts and a cherry-picker – from the…

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) has opened a six-week global consultation on new professional standards for the construction sector. For the first time, RICS is preparing a single professional standard that will combine global principles of quantity surveying and project management. It will replace 32  guidance notes RICS…

Administrators for collapsed contractor Tolent are considering taking action to claim back debts owed to the firm when it went under. In an update to the administration process published this week, administrators at Interpath Advisory said they had “continued to review [Tolent’s] affairs to find out if there are any…

Will Hunnam is managing director of Forza Doors The construction industry is undergoing its most significant environmental transformation in decades.  “For teams managing thousands of products, EPDs make identifying low-carbon options faster and more reliable” As regulatory pressure and client demand for low-carbon buildings rise, embodied carbon is expected to…

London-based fit-out specialist Oktra’s turnover and pre-tax profit has held steady, its latest accounts show. Revenue decreased slightly compared with the year before, but the firm’s pre-tax profit and margin slightly improved. Oktra’s latest accounts show a profit of £8.8m from turnover of £112.5m in the year to 31 May…