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CIC Cascade17 June 2005
1. CIC appoints Nick Raynsford as future
Chairman Nick Raynsford served as a Government Minister throughout the 1997-2001
and 2001-2005 Parliaments: he was Parliamentary Under-Secretary
of State at the DETR from 1997 to 1999 before becoming Minister
for Housing and Planning from 1999 to 2001 - throughout this time
he had direct ministerial responsibility for the construction industry.
From 2001 -2005 he was Minister for Local Government and the Regions
at the DTLR and then the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Following
the recent General Election, in which he retained Greenwich and
Woolwich with a majority of more than 10,000, he has stepped down
from Government. 2. National Construction Week 2005 - new
NCW portal aims to increase support for all The portal, still at www.ncw.org.uk, features an ‘event case studies’ section to give inspiration to schools and companies by showcasing successful events which have been run in previous years. The ‘help wanted’ section has also been improved to ensure that companies who may not be able to run their own event, can still get involved by supporting an existing event. All event organisers can upload their events to the portal. An NCW PR Toolkit was developed in 2004 to give guidance on how to run and market events, and was distributed to employers, organisations and schools who requested email updates through the web site. Due to popular demand, this resource has been updated for 2005, including more detailed guidance on taking photography at events and contacting the media. Julian Humphreys, Business Manager, CITB-ConstructionSkills comments: “The real focus for CITB-ConstructionSkills this year is on quality of events, rather than quantity. Having loads of events going on around the country in one week is obviously great publicity in itself, but we want to make sure people benefit from the events and receive a positive image of our industry. We are also focussing our events on some of the key challenges facing the industry, such as diversity and sustainability.” “CITB-ConstructionSkills Education Teams will be using pre- and post-event evaluation questionnaires to see how the perceptions of teachers and students are affected by their participation. This will give us a strong steer as to the most successful types of events, and we would encourage all event organisers to go through a similar process.” Companies can request a copy of the NCW PR Toolkit by emailing: info@ncw.org.uk 3. New Higher Education Graduate Common
Learning Outcomes Read the full document at http://www.cic.org.uk/activities/lifeEducation.shtml 4. BIAT launches the Alan King Award Alan King PCSAAT HonMBIAT was the first Chairman of BIAT in 1965
and a key figure within the Institute’s history. Now celebrating
its 40th anniversary, BIAT is paying tribute to its founding Chairman
with the launch of The Alan King Prize; recognising technical excellence
in projects valued £500k or under. This prize sits alongside
the BIAT Open Award for Technical Excellence in Architectural Technology,
for information on this award please contact BIAT or visit www.biat.org.uk/practice
First prize Second prize Third prize For further details and an application form contact: Applications to be received by 19 August 2005 5. CROSS- Confidential Reporting on Structural
Safety The aim of CROSS is to identify concerns about structural safety so that Engineers can avoid or reduce future problems. Learning from past actions is a powerful way of improving future safety, but contributing to a learning culture is not straightforward in a fragmented industry, particularly if experiences relate to a failure or a near miss situation. Engineers can voice concerns or make suggestions through their employer or professional institution, which is to be encouraged, however SCOSS believes that there will be significantly more feedback for the benefit of our industry, if there is in addition a confidential route available. Industries such as aviation and shipping have overcome these fears
by having confidential reporting schemes. Individuals and companies
have gained as a result. Further details can be obtained from the CROSS website at www.scoss.org.uk/cross 6. Trustmark - new scheme to protect consumers
from cowboy builders Botched home improvement work costs consumers £1.5 billion annually. Over 111,000 complaints about cowboy builders were registered with trading standards officers last year. Complaints are growing and substantially outstrip those about the next highest category, second hand car dealers. The scheme will 'go live' in the autumn when consumers will be
able to use TrustMark to help them source a reputable firm for a
wide range of work. Only enthusiastic and consistent construction Industry involvement and support will make TrustMark a success and help to drive up standards. I'm glad Government has supported and facilitated this scheme but now it's over to you. "I urge everyone in the construction industry to sign up to become approved scheme operators and help make TrustMark a valued and respected scheme." In future, consumers using a firm registered with TrustMark will know that the firm they have chosen has:
The Government has committed £2 million to set up and support TrustMark while it establishes itself. The scheme is expected to become self-financing within two years through the registration fees of members. Around 25 trade organisations have already expressed an interest in becoming approved scheme operators that could deliver up to 14,000 TrustMark registered firms. TrustMark is based on the existing set of core standards for the construction industry and includes the improvements in quality that trade bodies have made in recent years to raise standards and offer better, more responsive customer care. Industry trade associations, certification bodies, Competent Persons schemes and commercial organisations can apply to become approved scheme operators for TrustMark with a licence to award the TrustMark to their registered firms, such as general builders and specialist trades. Dan Bernard, chair of TrustMark said: Graham Bowler of AJA Registrars, one of the first organisations
to apply to become an approved scheme operator for TrustMark, said: Ian Davis, Director General of the Federation of Master Builders
said: Pete Tynan from Which? said: The key requirements of the new scheme can be found on the TrustMark website: www.trustmark.org.uk. 7. Wise Wise Men Wise Wise Men Musings on Old Habits… and New Climate Change by one Homo sapiens: Dave Hampton, past Emma graduate (Matric 1977) The author is a self-confessed ‘LowCarbon bon Economy’ fanatic. His career, since studying Engineering (and rowing!) at Cambridge, has been anchored in ‘greening’ the built environment. He is Director of ABS consulting. He believes there are great career opportunities ahead – in designing the radically different sustainable built infrastructure solutions that are badly needed. If Global Warming is half as serious as most now think, there will be jobs galore in mitigation and adaption. Architects- of our species survival. Engineers- of a carbon free global economy? It was the week Kyoto got signed. (K-day - 16th Feb.) I was enjoying coaching – and taking a week’s holiday. Time to think. Dangerous. Holiday: yes, before you sense it, I know, I’m a lucky man! And lest you also sense undue emphasis on the masculine, let me say I’d rather coach the Emma 1st Women, but the ‘queue’ is longer. As for "wise man", the name humankind gave itself a long time ago, I distance myself from that decision. It does make me laugh though, how, (like New York) our once male-dominated species considered itself "So good it named it twice." If I’d got home from a hard day at work in the Biology lab in the C16th, and proudly announced to my wife that I’d coined a new scientific term for our species - ‘wise wise man’ - I’d have got a ‘telling’ look. I’d have reconsidered. On both counts! (Are we so wise?) What’s my point? It is a ‘power’-point, if you haven’t already guessed. I want to express a personal view about the power, mobility, heat and light that we, intelligent beings (well, at least we fortunate ones) take for granted. I want to tip-toe, in trepidation, into the moral maze of whether or not we should give a ‘monkeys’. (Sorry, Darwin.) My week was spent coaching the optimisation of efficiency of conversion of naturally generated (renewable, random and highly excitable!) 8-human, ‘horse-power’ into harnessed and focussed forward boat speed. Hold that thought. Success in bumps = happiness. Route to success = clever use of finite energy resource. You, reader, are clever. That is a given. You know what you know, and you are aware of some of what you don’t. You’ll have prejudices and opinions, and you’ll be subjected to vast amounts of propaganda and ‘wisdom’ shaping your mind and colouring your judgement. Talking of colour, K-Day in February was International "Go Purple" day. Many folk sported a .dash of purple - in support of governments tackling climate change. Did you? Imagine if the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were coloured purple (and not invisible.) If CO2 were a coloured gas - we would have witnessed the sky changing colour in our lifetimes – there is 20% more CO2 in the air now than there was just 45 years ago, when I was born. Purple is the colour we’d go if we couldn’t breathe. It can be the colour of sunsets, sunrises, awakenings… If we angrily looked at blue sky – we’d see red! That’s purple! Falling just two days after Valentine’s, the colour purple is at least popular and passionate, and so K-Day gives a heaven sent opportunity for striking up in conversation with total strangers, (chatting them up if you like!), as in "Are you wearing that lovely purple chiffon scarf/ pashmina, for Kyoto?"…Let’s not descend further into conjecture about undergarments! Again, I stray. Suffice to say that if you read ‘Grown Up!’ Newspapers, you will be aware that many Editors still have lingering doubts about The Climate Change Story, and regularly commission highly articulate and persuasive commentators – of unsurpassed economic, political and social wit and status - to write pieces for them. Pieces that rekindle the embers of doubt, and so reinforce the reader’s (and the world’s) state of denial. Denial, that’s what it is! Fortunately our hearts, souls, instincts and innate grasp of nature tend to keep us connected to the less well reported ecological truth. That our Planet is in Bad Shape. And that the Economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ecology! Also fortunately, the IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change, and other independent bodies (e.g. British Antarctic Survey) provide us with a single "commanding consensus" message that fossil fuel abuse is a huge real and present danger to us all – now. It’s that big! Bear in mind too that some worthy journals depend heavily on advertising revenue from, for example, luxury car ads. So the truth is not always as plain to see as we might hope. New Scientist ran a Global Warming special edition, debunking and exposing all of the many and various highly organised, and highly funded, climate change denialist lobbies. The funding of these lobbies is usually ‘big oil’. They are many, and their infuence is pervasive and insidious. Almost as bad as people like me, they would have you believe! Honest folk can get labelled environmentalist ‘scaremongers’ - when they speak out. So, what is to be done? Life goes on, albeit in a bit of a truth vacuum. Our combined daily UK energy and fuel use habits causing nearly half a million tonnes of precious carbon-based fossil fuel reserves to be burnt – every day! Combusted - irreversibly - into a boggling 1.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide waste, overloading nature’s ability to cope as never before and causing reckless irreversible ecosystem damage. A curious twist in this tail is that the raised CO2 levels in the air we breathe today, stem from our cumulative recent historical excesses. If we could stop tomorrow (and we can’t) we still have a problem. (Houston?) The UK, which led the world into the Industrial Revolution, is historically accountable for about 15% of all the extra CO2 that’s already up there! That brings me onto this moral maze thing. Whilst it’s true “what can one person do?” it is also true that most forms of institutionalised stupidity can only ever be challenged and reversed by small numbers of people going it alone - and “being the change they wish to see in the world” – (Ghandi.) As individuals, communities, countries even! The way to communicate our beliefs to US and China is to act them out - in our lifestyles. To lead from the front. Not such a heroic act, really. Is the UK not morally obliged to lead the world out of the mess that we led it into, during the 1st Industrial Revolution? Hey. Doesn’t this sound like a big idea to you? Doesn’t it sound fun, and a huge opportunity? It is. It even has a name. In a flash of inspiration, Tony Blair called it “The Low Carbon Economy” (but then he mostly forgets about it!) One of the brightest (Oxford I’m afraid) economists predicts that “Carbon will be the currency of the C21st”. That is how big this is. Assuming we chose to do something. And that we don’t sink into the mire. Or drown in a depressed sea of purple carbon dioxide and despair. So what does this mean, to you and me, here and now, today, as we live in college rooms? Emmanuel is at last investing in a further bulk purchase of the latest energy efficient light bulbs, that reduce - by an awesome factor of 5 – the volumes of CO2 that power stations need to spew - to keep us happy and bright! How many intellectuals does it take to change a light bulb? We can also exercise some self-control, in tweaking the settings of radiators, etc. (In my college room as I write this, I can moderate my use of the electric fire provided!) On cold days we can be wise enough to seek to turn the heat down without resort to opening windows. Not rocket science. (Sapiens sapiens!) As I edge closer and closer to the ‘sanctimonious self-righteous self”, let me explain that I have lived for a week in a shared college ‘house’ where ‘collective responsibility’ created snags. Last to bed turns the lights off. Simple! But who is last? Whoever he or she was, (who was last) each ‘good night out’ this week, has been too ‘high’ to know or care! So ALL lights stay on. Just one old-style light bulb, 60 Watts, left on in the toilet all year, is an invisible downstream 250 kilogrammes, a quarter of a tonne, more CO2 unleashed into the heavens! Get that! And is it really ‘upstream’? We, and our descendants get to breathe it in time. I could switch my electric fire on for 20 whole minutes – luxury now! -and still do less damage than that one old WC light bulb left on 8 hours overnight! Obsessive? Perhaps! But carbon will be the currency folks. And I’m advocating happiness not gloom. (And avoiding doom!) We can easily meet our human needs, enjoy the ways that power and technology can liberate us, and stay bright. We can keep warm enough to be healthy. We can moderate frequent long-haul flights. We can re-consider buying that big 4WD for the commute to London (especially when the train is so much quicker!) A low carbon lifestyle is entirely compatible with our fundamental and universal desire - to be happy and to avoid suffering: the wisdom that Buddhism and all other faiths offer us! For some strange reason I woke up early this morning, feeling cold under the thick duvet. Half-awake I contemplated the cold (and switching on the electric .fire!). But my mind strayed (again!) this time to what it would feel like to be sleeping rough - on this freezing windy week. I counted my blessings again (four, and my wife, you will remember!). I got up, and put on several layers. The fire stayed off as I happily shared these idle musings with you through my laptop computer. Cold body, warm heart. Thanks reader. If you liked this, do go forth and shine a beacon! Of happy low carbon futures… Some references:
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