Blogs

I’m English. I live in the United Kingdom. My politics are informed by my life here in the UK and, to a lesser extent by what I see happening around me in the world.

The Government may well have decided that it wants to push through its planning proposals from the Housing White Paper as Sajid Javid the planning minister told the National Housing Federation conference last week. However, that doesn’t mean that the message has yet got through to local authorities – many of them Tory-run.

As long as I have been in this industry, there has been talk of factory-built houses, of ways we can reduce the time it takes to turn a plan on an architect’s drawing into a home.

Whenever I ask anyone in this industry what it is they like about it so much and why they’ve hung around it so long, the answers are usually a variation on one theme – the people. It doesn’t matter whether you are on the merchant side, the supplier side, working for a buying group, a…

It’s that time of year again when I form part of the judging panel for the BMJ/BMF Young Achiever Awards.

Sometimes things happen that you can’t believe won’t become total game changers. And if the game isn’t changed, then is it a game that we really want to be playing anyway.

Climate change is our problem, everybody’s problem. The changing weather patterns are relentless reminders that our built environment and infrastructure are unable to cope with extreme storms and heavy rainfall. And it’s only getting worse. There will be more rain, more flash flooding and more extreme weather.

Recent surveys have suggested that an increasing number of us Brits are relatively unskilled in basic DIY tasks, and becoming more so. Yet many of us also say that we would like to do more if we had more confidence in our own abilities. Whilst the main customer base for …

The social and economic environment that we are living in is changing at an unprecedented rate and whilst building and construction is often considered as a traditional and conservative industry, which changes very slowly, we cannot expect it to remain immune from these changes.   The natural customer base of …