Manchester office development increases

Office developments are increasing outside of London, and London development is the lowest since 2014. This is according to the latest Deloitte Regional Crane Survey.

This survey measured construction in Belfast, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester.

In Manchester, more than 2 million square feet of space was recorded as under construction, for the second survey year in a row. 27 of these schemes completed in 2019, and 47 more are due to complete in 2020.

Commenting on the findings, Deloitte Real Estate partner and regional head Simon Bedford said: “Regional cities continue to show huge resilience in the face of recent economic uncertainties in delivering record volumes of city-centre living, offices and education [schemes].

“Developers are moving away from big schemes, favouring smaller projects. Developer sentiment remains high, but we’re seeing real challenges arising in the need for infrastructure investment to keep up with the pace of real estate.”

Many construction contractors and clients require contractor staff to hold and display Construction Skills Certification Scheme (CSCS) smart-cards, which prove their qualifications, before allowing them on site.

Here at Time and Attendance North West, we are an IT partner of the CSCS through our parent company, Tensor plc. This means that we can provide seamless integration between the CSCS smartcard and our WinTA.NET software, which provides time management, visitor/contractor management and fire/evacuation roll-call systems.

The integration takes the end-user form of a CSCS “card wizard”. This set of rules allows a company to quickly grant construction contractors recognition by and access to our hardware, such as clocking terminals, turnstiles, and door controllers. The wizard will run one of three scenarios when giving access rights to contractors. These are:

• Contractors who are completely new to the system.
• Contractors whose name exists on the system but their CSCS card has not been entered.
• Contractors who are fully recorded on the system and have used their card at other sites, but are new to this particular site.

For each different scenario the wizard will guide the user through the enrolment procedure. The result is that:

• The contractor’s CSCS card is read (using a USB card reader attached to a Tensor.NET Client PC)
• Details are extracted from the card to update the contractor’s details within the system
• Options such as a company, site, shift group and department are assigned to the cardholder

To make it easier to include new contractors in your site’s existing health and safety and security procedures, please contact us today. We can handle any size site: our Enterprise software is able to perform for global, multi-site corporations with thousands of employees/users, while our Start edition helps small businesses with less than 50 users.