Welsh Water is looking to sign up a host of contractors to deliver a £330m programme of emergency and planned pressurised pipeline work over seven years.

Separate panels of firms will be picked to operate in North Wales, South East Wales and South West Wales, sharing an annual forecast spend of around £47m. Under the present plan each region will be broken down into three further lots based on the complexity of the project with three firms being selected for each lot.

Initially the framework will run for four years, with a possible three-year extension bringing total spend to £330m. For high complexity jobs involving repair and renewal of large diameter high pressure mains including emergency repairs, three firms will share an estimated seven-year spend of around £160m.

Medium Complexity Works will require contractors to deliver a £100m anticipated programme of renewal and repairs to high pressure mains of up to 16 bar and pipe diameter of up to 500mm. Low pressure mains and small pipe diameter work is expected to account for around £70m of total spend. This panel will be open to firms with turnover of more than £1.5m.

House builders – do you provide good HUGs with your new homes? A HUG is a home user guide. Did you know that and are you providing them?

At Constructing Excellence in Wales we have a privileged position and are able to hear from academia, policy makers and industry. This provides us with a fairly unique position in which to join the dots up and see how we could realise real change in our built environment. One area receiving a lot of our efforts at the moment is housing, both in terms of retrofit activity as well as low carbon new build.

It’s in these new low carbon houses that we have the opportunity to really secure low energy lifestyles and to help reduce fuel poverty and Wales’ carbon footprint. But this will only be possible if occupiers know how to best use the technologies within their homes.

So, we’re calling on house builders and those commissioning new housing to take part in the Welsh Government’s consultation on Building Regulations Sustainability Review and in particular the potential to introduce guidance to encourage developers to create Home User Guides (HUG) for all new domestic developments in Wales.

The guidance would potentially include the provision of a HUG template, to assist SME developers and improve the consistency of the information provided to homeowners. Review the guidance route to determine its success, with a possible regulatory route in the future, making the creation of a HUG mandatory. Be sure to take part in this consultation as we need to find the right level of detail to ensure that HUGs are useful and relevant documents for homeowners is important. As is the need to avoid adding unnecessary cost and burden on housebuilders completing sites and handing over the keys to undoubtedly excited new occupiers.

This is already happening in Scotland. You can see Scotland’s own quick start guide here - http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0040/00409085.pdf . This could be something for Wales’ to follow or learn from. The guidance is already within Scottish building regs - http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Built-Environment/Building/Building-standards/techbooks/Sustainability/s7domquickstartguide.

Use the links. Check all the information and by all means contact CEW for further information. Consultation responses are to be submitted by 24^th May 2016.

Andrew Sutton, associate director BRE Wales, explains how the Lenders project takes Wales a step closer to being a low carbon society.

Although it often feels too big and too remote from our daily lives, we all need to be engaged in the efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change - the “stopping” climate change boat has already sailed. This means all those little steps do matter: cycling not driving, turning the lights off and using electricity off peak, wasting less and recycling, and so on.

However, there are big changes we need to make to the fabric of our society too. These include decarbonising the energy grid and introducing demand/supply sophistication, as well as improving the quality of public transport. Critical to this is embedding in our institutional processes the need for energy efficiency.

Energy must become second nature.

For landlords, the “Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards” (MEES) coming in from 2018 represents a first step in this – properties with EPC’s lower than “E” will no longer be allowed to be let, albeit with some exceptions. For homeowners, CEW is working alongside Nationwide and Principality Building Societies, BRE and others, to drive energy into the way mortgages work through the LENDERS project.

The “LENDERS” project, conceived by BRE and developed from initial research with CEW, is a collaboration between BRE, Nationwide Building Society, Principality Building Society, Energy Savings Trust, UKGBC, UCL, ARUP and CEW.  Part funded by Innovate UK the project proposes to make a subtle change to the way mortgage companies assess what customers applying for their loans can afford. Currently, a customer’s incomings and outgoings are assessed via an ‘affordability calculation’. Energy costs represent the largest unavoidable cost that is factored into this calculation for a customer after the mortgage repayments themselves.

But, despite the availability of Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) on all properties being sold, no consideration of the energy efficiency of the property being mortgaged is made, and the assumed energy costs currently only vary by around £25 per month and therefore have little impact on the capital mortgage amount the customer might be offered.

The LENDERS project is generating, and robustly evidencing via large scale data analysis, an alternative approach. Through collecting data from the EPC alongside information on the occupancy gathered in future mortgage applications, the project believes it can provide a mechanism to the mortgage industry that more accurately predicts the customer’s energy costs. This will provide estimates of energy costs with a far greater range (perhaps £20 – £200 per month), and through the rest of the ‘affordability calculation’, will therefore much more significantly influence the capacity of the customer to repay a mortgage and, by consequence, change the capital mortgage amount the customer might be offered.

If adopted by mortgage companies, this subtle change in the ‘affordability calculation’ could result in geared mortgage offers, with higher capital amounts of up to £15,000 or more being offered to purchase low energy homes compared to otherwise similar inefficient properties. It also opens the opportunity for mortgage companies to offer mortgages with conditions, or home improvement additional loans, based on enhancing the energy performance of an existing property, meaning that those in poorly performing homes also have a route to finance energy improvements.

Through the LENDERS project, the goal is to embed energy efficiency into the bedrock of our mortgage institutions, and through this society’s approach to thinking about energy when making the important step of buying or selling a property. After all, who buys a car these days without at least looking at the fuel economy and road tax costs?

More on the LENDERS project can be found on the dedicated LENDERS website, www.epcmortgage.org.uk  

Congratulations to our SME shortlisted entries! Please see list below in alphabetical order.
Shortlisted entrants will be required to attend an interview with judges on 25th May. An email will be sent to you with full details over the next few days.
Category 1 - 50 
Cambria Consulting Ltd Caulmert Limited CD Gray & Associates Ltd
Category 51 - 250

Andrew Scott Boyes Rees Architects Ltd Contract Services (South Wales) Limited Morganstone Limited    Have you booked a table?

The awards evening is taking place on Friday 15^th July 2016, Celtic Manor resort, Newport.

Details of how to reserve a place are available here

Sponsorship opportunities

Confirmed 2016 sponsors

The Conygar Investment Company has submitted a planning application to Carmarthenshire Council for its 9.96-acre development site in Cross Hands, South West Wales.

Even as Sainsbury’s pulled out of a major retail development in Carmarthenshire, another developer Conygar has opted to take up the site and develop a major retail space. 

The site was acquired by Conygar Investment from Sainsbury’s in October 2015 with consent for a 90,000 sq. ft. store. The supermarket giant had planned a £60m scheme at the site but pulled out last September.

The application is for a 106,000 sq. ft. retail development with a 562 space car park. The proposed development will create over 100 jobs during the construction phase which Conygar wish “to be sourced locally.” If consent is received this summer construction should start later in the year.

Robert Ware, CEO said: “The proposed development will offer attractive new retail outlets, which will not only support and enhance Cross Hands town centre, but offer significant regeneration benefits in the locality.”