Weekly news round-up 10 September 2014

Atkins takes on 365 graduates and apprentices, Thames Tideway Tunnel planning decision this week, and rail fare protests in the north.

Jackie Whitelaw
10 September 2014

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1. Balfour Beatty has won the £70M Crossrail Woolwich station fit out contract. Work also includes finishing works at the two portals where the Crossrail trains will surface from either end of the Thames Tunnel at North Woolwich and Plumstead.

2. Atkins has taken on 293 graduates and 72 apprentices this month. The energy business will take the highest number of graduates (77), while the Rail business is employing the most apprentices (25). 

3. Protests have taken place at railway stations in the north of England after the introduction of new peak evening fares on Northern Rail Services where some weekday tickets have gone up 117% as trains between 16.01 and 18.29 were no longer classed as “off peak”. Cost of a ticket from Wigan to Manchester Piccadilly has risen from £4.20 to £9.10 and from Bradford to Leeds from £4.60 to £6.50.

4. Edinburgh’s trams have carried more than 1.5M passengers in their first 100 days of operation which puts them on track to hit their first-year targets of 4.5M passengers.

5. Plans to increase the number of passengers using Stansted airport could create up 10,000 new jobs over the next decade. The airport aims to double passenger numbers to 45M a year by introducing new routes and handling more flights from its single runway.

6. Work on nearly 13,000 homes stalled by the 2008 housing crash are set to be restarted with the help of £0.5bn of government investment. Ministers have published a shortlist of over 160 smaller housing developments across the country that could benefit from a share of the £525M Builders Finance Fund.

7. Planning decision for the £4.2bn Thames Tideway Tunnel is due on Friday but Fulham Council is threatening a legal challenge because residents face eight years of “avoidable misery”. The tunneling work should be located at “a much more appropriate site just across the river” in Richmond, it argues.

8. Dubai has announced plans to invest £19.8bn into its Al Maktoum International airport which will become the largest in the world, handling 240M passengers a year. That is 100,000 more than the number of travellers who used all of London’s airports put together last year.

9. Plans to build up to 5,000 homes in Kent on a site that is said to be key to the UK's nightingale population have been condemned by environmental campaigners. The Wildlife Trust said the move could cause "environmental destruction on a scale not seen for more than 20 years". Medway Council approved Land Securities proposals for Chattenden Woods and Lodge hill last week. The developer said the area's 84 pairs of nightingales would be re-homed nearby.

10. Kellingley Colliery in North Yorkshire is to be transformed into a state-of-the-art energy centre which will use residual waste to generate low carbon electricity and heat. Peel Environmental has been given the green light to go ahead with the project, which will produce up to 26MW of electricity - enough to power around 63,000 homes in the local area.