Weekly round-up 4 June 2014

Plans to (eventually) name poor payers, build homes above hospitals and find more reliable gas supplies - all in your weekly news round-up.

Jackie Whitelaw
02 June 2014

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1. Business Secretary Vince Cable is proposing new measures to help smaller firms get paid on time including requiring larger firms to publish information of their payment practices. Where legislation is required, it will be introduced “when parliamentary time allows.” Government will work with the Institute of Credit Management to strengthen the Prompt Payment Code and to increase accountability of signatories. 

2. Cuadrilla has submitted an application to drill, hydraulically fracture and test the flow of gas from up to four exploration wells on a site just outside Blackpool. Environmental statement for the planning application has been produced by Arup.

3. Balfour Beattyhas been awarded a £43.9 million contract to design and build the Highways Agency A1 Coal House to Metro Centre improvement scheme in Gateshead. In a busy week the contractor also announced a record £1bn spend with SMEs across the country, the largest ever by a construction contractor. And that it had sold its 50% interest in the University Hospital of North Durham PPP project and its 100% interest in the Knowsley Building Schools for the Future (BSF) project to Dalmore Capital for £97M.

4. Edinburgh’s tram service opened on 31 May and took 21,000 customers on it’s first day. The 14km route has taken twice as long to build as originally planned and the network has halved. 

5. CBI’s latest quarterly Service Sector Survey has revealed growing optimism, business volumes rising briskly and firms taking on more staff. In the three months to May, firms were increasingly confident about the business situation, with optimism rising at the fastest rate since the start of the survey in 1998, while business volumes rose again, marking a full year of growth. The survey of 151 firms also revealed that companies have continued to take on more staff and increased expenditure on training.    

6. Redeveloping existing NHS buildings to include floors of apartments above the service buildings could provide 77, 000 news homes in London, WSP has said. This would represent almost 20% of the 400,000 homes needed in London in the next decade. WSP’s estimation is based on its analysis of 79 individual existing NHS buildings in London, allowing for 100m² per apartment and using a mixed height overbuild development strategy, with a combination of six, 12, and 18 storeys.

7. Europe will need to tap more diverse sources of gas and develop increased supplies of shale gas within the continent, according to a new energy security strategy unveiled by the European Commission.

8. Flash flooding could increase dramatically by the end of the century with rainfall hitting 30mm in an hour, the Met Office and Newcastle University researchers say. Research based on a new computer model suggests that there could be five times the number of "extreme rainfall events" per hour, under extreme warming projections.

9. Competitive bidding for local government transport funds could result in wasted expenditure on unsuccessful bids and could favour better resourced authorities, the Commons Transport Select Committee has said. Strategically important transport projects could end up not being funded if they do not deliver immediate benefits for Local Enterprise Partnerships or local authorities, it has warned in its report Local transport expenditure: who decides? Department for Transport needs to maintain strategic oversight of the new arrangements, it said. 
   

    

10. Announcement of the Mayor of London’s Low Carbon Entrepreneur 2014 is due today (Wednesday). The budding student’s up for the Siemens sponsored award can be viewed here.