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Housing Forum Demonstration of the Month - August

No. 1207 - Derwent Builds Pilot Programme

Region: East Midlands
Team: Derby Homes, Derby City Council, Derwent Delivers Ltd & Learning to Work
Value: £42m

Part of The Housing Forum 'Sustainable Training for Sustainable Communities' project, this demonstration is combining the work of a number of organisations working in the New Deal for Communities area in Chaddesden, Derby. The New Deal area has been granted £42m to assist in the regeneration of approximately 4000 properties, including 1,793 council properties.

The purpose of the project is to train unemployed people in construction trades. This will be done in two ways:

• via college day release.
• via on site training through placement with local contractors dedicated to training within the construction industry.

  In particular this project will:
  

  • Train and develop eight local people.
  • Increase employment opportunities for those excluded from the labour market and increase qualifications and skills among this group.
  • Combat youth unemployment in the area.
  • Provide a positive example of a successful and supportive training package.
  • Allow local people to carry out work that will have a positive impact on their own community.
  • Improve the perception of ownership amongst the trainees, particularly as they start to see the benefits of their work.
  • Improve local interest in training and development, particularly with young people.
  • Promote the work that New Deal for Communities is doing to regenerate the Derwent area.

In the long term, the aim is to create a large number of skilled young people to help bridge the skill shortage that the construction industry has in Derby.

Traditionally, this type of training would have been carried out by one organisation. The Derwent Builds programme is being carried out by a several local companies and bodies in order to ensure that it meets a number of individual employee initiative and training requirements. The trainees themselves are employed and supervised by Derwent Builds but their on-site training and issuing of work is the responsibility of Derby Homes and Derby City Council's Commercial Services Department. Further support will also be provided by Learning to Work who will assist with college placements and off-site supervision.

To find out more go to www.constructingexcellence.org.uk/sectors/housingforum/

Housingbuilding 2004

Housebuilding Conference 2004

The Housing Forum is proud to support the Housebuilding Conference 2004 being held at the Business Design centre on September 7th and 8th.

Our new chairman, Steve Lidgate, will be chairing the session on Reducing Risk and Waste Through Improved Procurement and Supply Chain Management: "Managing procurement and the supply chain more effectively has been proven to bring huge savings and many other benefits, such as greater certainty, improved relations and safer sites. Is it time the industry looked beyond seeking the lowest price for goods and services and began to view the supply chain more systematically? This high-powered panel of speakers will provide insight and inspiration for those who recognise the opportunities that improvements in the supply chain promise."

Speakers:
Dr Brian Rarity
Garry Flanagan
Jonathan Berney
Tony Palombo

• Delivering business- friendly sound solutions to Part E through robust Standard Details.
• Reducing risk and waste through improved procurement and supply chain management.
• Understanding the implications of tightening planning rules and developing appropriate marketing strategies.
• Balancing risk and reward when introducing modern methods of construction to housebuilding.
• Combining private and social sector skills to meet the challenges of the affordable housing market.
• Improving your market position by creating a positive image with customers and the public.

Our Housing Forum stand will be at the conference so please come and have a chat with us about our current work and ideas for the future. Also our very own Krystyna Blackburn will be presenting the Housing Forum Online Toolkit at 4pm in the Technical Seminar Theatre on the 7th September. Looking forward to seeing you there.

Please download the flyer here or for more information click on the Housebuilding logo above to go to their website.

Constructing Excellence London Cluster Event

Peer Review Meeting- Thursday 28th September 2004 9.00am
Constructing Excellence Offices- Warwick House, 25 Buckingham Palace Rd, London, SW1W 0PP
No charge

Peer review workshops afford the opportunity to find out more about projects participating in The Housing Forum Constructing Excellence's programme of demonstration projects in the London region.

September's meeting will include presentations from:

Family Housing
Family Housing Group had a responsive maintenance service being delivered by 58 organisations working from a Schedule of Rates. Tenant satisfaction was generally low and all the contractors were on different uplift rates and afforded varying levels of service. The driver for change was to cut back on the administration of multiple contractors and to move to a non-adversarial procurement method whilst providing a consistent and sustainable service across the whole stock.

Best of Breed Property Repair Network
Norwich Union Insurance (NUI) has created an Integrated Network of thirteen supply partners to manage the distribution of household property repairs. Through collaborative working and joint problem-solving, the whole team (NUI and its partners) has been successful in streamlining processes, eradicating waste, generating continuous cost and performance improvement and delivering sustainable benefits for all.

Hounslow Homes
Hounslow Homes- Building Futures is a joint recruitment and training initiative to be launched in 2004/5 leading to a 5 fold increase in the number of apprentice training opportunities available through Hounslow Homes. It aims to improve future sustainability by working with partners to jointly recruit and train building trade apprentices for the benefit of both the local community and the building trade generally. This is part of The Housing Forum and CITB partnership, Sustainable Training for Sustainable Communities, set up to plan for the housing sector's growing labour and skills needs.

This promises to be an interesting and informative session and would be beneficial to many of our Housing Forum network. A full programme is available from Jonathan De Souza on 020 7592 1100 or email jonathan.desouza@constructingexcellence.org.uk.

Membership News

Why become a member of the Housing Forum?

What are the benefits? Click here to link to the membership section of the Housing Forum website and find out ...

Events

KPI Masterclasses

Constructing Excellence are running a series of KPI Masterclasses providing a comprehensive overview of how to use KPIs successfuly.

Attend the Masterclass to:

• Learn the principles of using KPIs to benchmark and improve performance
• Learn the 7 step process of implementing KPIs, with the help of practical examples
• Hear from organisations who have implemented performance measurement successfully- how they did it and the benefits they gained.
• View the latest software

The three sessions will be held in Manchester on the 16th September, Birmingham on the 28th September and London on the 18th November.

Housing Forum members will be able to attend for the special discounted price of £195 + VAT (£229.13)*. Please see the flyer for the event.

*When booking the Masterclass please mention your membership of the Housing Forum to obtain the discount.

Items of Interest

Open Days

We enjoyed a very successful series of Open Days with around 100 people coming to visit our new offices over the three days. Dennis Lenard, the new Chief Executive of Constructing Excellence and Judith Harrison, the Housing Forum Director, amongst others, gave interesting presentations. These provoked some lively discussions and pointers for the housing sector in the future.

After the presentations, refreshments were provided and our visitors had the opportunity to network with Housing Forum members and potential members as well as finding out more about Constructing Excellence as a whole. Displays and presentations from the Best Practice, Productivity and Innovation teams on the first floor of our offices received excellent feedback. We hope that our visitors found the sessions as interesting and informative as we did. If you would like further information on the open days please contact Zoe Le Grand.

Contact details

The Housing Forum has moved to Constructing Excellence's new offices. They can now be found at 25 Buckingham Palace Road, London, SW1W 0PP.

The following people can be contacted through the switchboard number
020 7592 1100:

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