Geoff Wilkinson, of Wilkinson Construction Consultants, has blogged on the issue here, and it is well worth a read.

The mystery, he says, is that “each individual flat should have been constructed a fire tight cell, such that fire should not spread from floor to floor, or flat to flat.”

Yet the fire spread both up and down the building.

He thinks refurbishments may have played a role. “Whilst it will be some time before the results of an investigation are made available, I would be asking the question - was the building refurbished and did the Building Inspector sign the alterations off?”

So far the Tories have hinted they don’t want to commit to the BSF programmes for the time being, and there have also been worrying signs over Crossrail.

We’re going to start collecting any references to Tory policy on capital projects here; if anyone can find references to what the Tories do and don’t plan to do if (or rather when) they get in, either e-mail the newsdesk at cneditorial@emap.com, or feel free to post them here.

There are 15 categories covering all aspects of marketing and business development and the awards are open to both agencies and in-house marketing teams. The deadline for entries is not until 24 July but go to www.cnplus.co.uk/bema and start planning your entry now!

The FT visited the East Sussex home of a significant former owner, South African-born businessman, Trevor Michael Hart-Jones who said “the stone is jinxed”.

“It was bad luck and from the moment I bought it everything went wrong.”

Mr Hart-Jones, 66, bought the Gem of Tanzania in 2002 for a modest £13,000 given its recent £11 million valuation.

On 10 March, Wrekin Construction, a private civil engineering business with about 500 staff, collapsed into administration.Wrekin’s 2007 accounts revealed the bizarre fact that the company’s “other investments” consisted of a “ruby gem stone known as the Gem of Tanzania” valued at £11 million.

Acquiring the gem had helped turn Wrekin’s net assets from a £7.6 million deficit to a £6.3 million surplus.

Tottenham Hotspur Football Club’s FD Matthew Collecott told Bloomberg that a planning application was due in “the next few months”.

“The stadium build cost has come down by about £40million because of a fall in the price of steel and cement, and people who want to do this project have greater availability than they did a year or so ago.”

Liverpool also hope to make savings on their stadium as a result of the crunch, of about 25-30 per cent, according to the newswire.

Read more:

Read the Bloomberg piece

Spurs stadium planning application “within months”

The research shows that there appears to be at least a widespread acknowledgement of the problem: 64 per cent of respondents thought the issue was a threat to their business.

But the fact that chief executives and chairman were less likely to treat the threat seriously was also interesting: do they know something we don’t about how they’re going to deal with the threat, or something we don’t about other threats, like recession?

There are lots of other interesting numbers in the report: head over to cnplus.co.uk for the full rundown, and video interviews with Tarmac head of sustainability Dr Martyn Kenny.

Click here for the full report.

The £3 billion London Array in the Thames Estuary and Npower’s £2.2 billion Gwint y Mor off the coast of Wales are both held off as the cost of building them has doubled in the past three years, the Sunday Times reports.

The British Wind Energy Association wrote to the government last week about the issues, which have left a funding gap of about £2 billion for nine projects with planning consent.

If the government does not provide the cash crucial renewable energy targets will not be met. One suggestion is that the government could provide tax breaks on the construction costs.

Eon and its partners Dong Energy and Masdar are expected to decide by June whether to build or abandon the London Array, the largest proposed wind farm in the world, the Sunday Times said.

Read more:

Read the Sunday Times piece

The figures come from Emporis, a German company which tracks development worldwide.

“When everybody’s feeling buoyant and they all think they’re going to be billionaires overnight, that’s when these ‘biggest’ plans come about. If you get them going before the bust hits, they get built right away. Otherwise you’ve got to wait and sometimes they don’t get built at all,” John Norquist, of the Congress for the New Urbanism, told Reuters.

Newswire Reuters has detailed the problems facing Chicago, which hopes to win the 2016 Olympic games to revive its flagging construction sector. 

“Maybe if every town, every city, in the United States had an Olympics, that would be the only thing that would save us,” sprinkler system installer Jeff Switalski told the newswire.

Read more:

Read the Reuters piece on skyscrapers

Mr Matthews told the Movers and Shakers breakfast club for property and construction managers on Friday that the proposals backed by London mayor Boris Johnson did not add up.

“The option of building a brand new airport is very attractive and I understand why people would hope for that but the environmental and economic cost of building in the estuary is excessive. It would cost £30-40bn, four or five times the cost of that capacity at Heathrow.”

He said that the likely prospects of a Conservative government next year could not be allowed to slow down planning, despite the party’s opposition to a third runway. “We have to deal with the policy of today. I can’t secondguess what a future government will be. It would be irresponsible to stop work for two years.”

Two separate BBC broadcasts, Five Live Breakfast, and the BBC London television news, ran the story. It was also covered on the BBC news website.

A final decision on the contract, which is to oversee and project manage the tunnelling work rather than actually build it, is expected in the next few weeks.

Insiders have said Bechtel are in the lead, but there could still be a surprise.

If you want to read more about Bechtel and its record in the UK and elsewhere, Bechtel shouts about its performance on High Speed 1 here; there’s a balanced assessment of the company from the BBC itself in 2001 here; and an example of a recent UK project at Rugby that didn’t go so well here.

Further Reading:

Read the original story

Read the BBC’s story