Regional focus: England Central

The representatives of the APS England Central region want to use their considerable experience to help other APS members in the region and beyond – through online CPD for example. 

As director of CDM services at Bureau Veritas UK, Fran Watkins-White often provides principal designer services under the CDM Regulations, and works alongside colleagues providing service to support clients under the Building Safety Act.

Allan Binns, as a director of Project Four Safety Solutions, provides CDM services and is at the forefront of delivering services and advice for the principal designer under the building regulations.

“As a region, I’d say we are still fact-finding, investigating what members want from us,” says Watkins-White. It may be organising webinars, online get togethers for learning and mutual support, or in-person networking. 

Now that people work more remotely, and APS organises CPD webinars centrally, both acknowledge that their role may be more as a conduit for members’ views to be passed up to the APS senior team. Representatives across all six regions meet regularly to discuss pressing issues with APS president Mark Snelling.  

“Come and join the LinkedIn group, in the first instance,” says Watkins-White. “If people want to meet up in, say, Birmingham and have a drink and a chat, we’re very happy to organise that.”

There’s plenty happening in the region, including the Midland Metro Extension to Birmingham Airport and the East Birmingham Extension to Solihull, both worth £735m. The £571m HS2 Phase 1 – Central Birmingham (Curzon Street) Station is another mega-scheme. Also there is the £210m Birmingham Health Innovation Campus, a collaboration between the University of Birmingham and two local NHS foundation trusts. 

Watkins-White is based in Wolverhampton, with her local office in Birmingham, but she and the team work nationally. Similarly, Binns works across the country, with a lot of work in Leeds, London and Manchester. He is based in Newark, on the eastern side of the region.

Both point to a buoyant market and skills shortages. “The biggest problem now is a lack of building control professionals – or people who have those types of skills – available to satisfy the building regulations principal designer,” says Binns.

“There is a lot of demand for our services. Many clients want us to start on projects immediately. Unfortunately, this isn’t always possible, and we are asking for four to eight weeks’ grace.”

In terms of the mechanics of working under the Building Safety Act, he says: “The big challenges at the moment are on the gateway submissions, which a higher-risk scheme now must pass through – at planning, before it can start on site and then at handover. 

“One of the things that we have found is on the government portal that you have to be very careful about your file names. They will only accept file names with letters, numbers and hyphens. So, if you’ve got any spaces or underscores or any other special characters, it won’t let you upload your file. 

“It’s important that people get their naming conventions sorted at the start of the project – otherwise you could end up going back and renaming potentially thousands of drawings and files.”

Skills and competence are issues close to Watkins-White’s heart. She would like to explore how members can work collaboratively to drive consistency in standards of compliance to the CDM regulations. Not just in construction of buildings, but also in the design and installation of green energy schemes’ equipment, such as battery storage, solar and wind farms. 

With so much infrastructure being built, alongside the increased focus on building safety, Watkins-White says that growing talent for people to work in safety in all its guises is a pressing issue that APS and all its members need to prioritise – particularly in how we attract and enable young people to pursue careers in safety.

For details of the LinkedIn group or to contact Fran Watkins-White and Allan Binns go to www.aps.org.uk/regions/england-central.