Weekly round-up - 13 March 2015

Hayes confirms Highways England start date, Spaghetti Junction repairs extended, big firms will have to reveal gender pay gap and Crossrail tunnelling last leg.

Jackie Whitelaw
13 March 2015

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1. Start date for Highways England has been confirmed by roads minister John Hayes as 1 April when the new company and its £15.2bn budget will go “go live”. 

2. Crucial repairs to safeguard the future of Spaghetti Junction have been extended to spring 2016. The Highways Agency is currently replacing vital waterproofing at The Gravelly Hill Interchange in Birmingham, known the world over as Spaghetti Junction. Engineers have found clusters of damage around loadbearing supports and joints – the location of which will make the necessary repairs very challenging. In some areas, water has breached the old waterproofing, damaged the concrete deck and corroded the internal steel reinforcement. "We expected to carry out concrete repairs as part of this work,” explained project manager Jess Kenny. "But we were also aware that we wouldn’t know the full extent of what needed doing until we began the work and were able to remove areas of the road surface. Unfortunately, we’ve now discovered that the location of the damage is such that the repairs will be more extensive and take longer than at first thought, so the work won’t be completed until next year." Spaghetti Junction is now more than 40-years-old, and carries the weight of 200,000 vehicles every day. Engineers will have to tackle the repairs in small sections, as the integrity of the bridge structure would be compromised if large areas of concrete are removed. “We’d love to be able to pull up all the surfacing and complete this work in one go: but that would seriously weaken the integrity of the bridge deck and cause a real threat that the structural stability of the bridge will be compromised,” Kenny explained.

3. MP Nick Raynsford hs welcomed news that Government will make it obligatory for private landlords to install smoke alarms in rented properties. Raynsford said he was “delighted” that after 12 months of him campaigning on this issue, the Government had decided to act.  He said: “I first called on the Government to make the provision of smoke alarms mandatory this time last year, and in May 2014 I introduced a 10-Minure Rule Bill in the House of Commons to require smoke alarms to be installed in all privately rented homes. The Bill received significant cross-party support and MPs voted in its favour by 245 to 8. Despite this the Government dragged its feet, even though its own impact assessment showed that implementation of this policy would result in 231 fewer fatalities and 5,860 fewer injuries over 10 years. Whilst I am pleased by the announcement that smoke alarms will become mandatory in privately rented properties, it does mean that in the year that the Government needlessly dithered, more than 20 lives are likely to have been lost and over 500 people injured”. Read about Raynsford’s campaign here. 

4. Crossrail’s 1000t tunnel machine Victoria has broken into Liverpool Street station marking construction of 40km of the project’s 42km of train tunnel which finishes this spring. Victoria now has 750m to bore before arriving at Farringdon. Ahead of Victoria, her sister machine, Elizabeth has already  started her final journey from Liverpool Street to Farringdon and her arrival will link the Crossrail tunnels for the first time.

5. Also at Crossrail Liverpool Street, archaeologists have begun excavating around 3000 skeletons from the Bedlam burial ground used during the period of the Great Plague in 1665. Tests on excavated plague victims will further understanding of the evolution of the plague bacteria strain. The skeletons will be excavated over the next four weeks, after which archaeologists will dig through medieval marsh deposits and Roman remains. A Roman road runs under the site, which has already yielded several interesting Roman artefacts such as horseshoes and cremation urns. Once the archaeologists leave site, Laing O'Rourke can get on with construction of the Liverpool Street ticket hall.

6. Large firms will have to reveal differences between average pay for male and female workers under a change to a law passing through Parliament. Firms with more than 250 employees that don't comply with the new rules could face fines of up to £5,000.

7. A major new report by the government’s business champion for older workers wants businesses to set out ways to help more over 50s stay in or move into work. The report by Dr Ros Altman says the economy as well as individuals will reap benefits. If half the 1.2 million older workers – who are currently unemployed or inactive and would like to work – were to move into employment this could boost GDP up to £25bn a year, she said.

8. AECOM’s investment platform, AECOM Capital, is looking to increase its activity in Europe and collaborate with developers on urban mixed use, commercial, leisure and residential development opportunities in London where it can take an equity stake. The business was established in 2013 to invest in public infrastructure and private real estate opportunities as a joint venture partner. Globally it has an open-ended fund with seed capital of £100M and typically considers joint venture projects where the AECOM equity requirement is between £6.5M and £20M million. In the US, AECOM Capital has a development pipeline of almost £2bn of projects totalling 650,000 square metres.

9. Garden cities will deliver just a third of the new homes needed by 2020, according to a think tank. The 250,000 homes in the new developments mean the country will still need another 500,000 to house the growing population. Higher density cities are the answer, the think tank argued.  London and the home counties alone would need 67 garden city settlements, comprised of 30,000 people each, to reverse the region’s supply crisis over the next 25 years, warned the Future of Spaces Foundation, a group made up of representatives from the Centre for Cities, Shelter and the National Trust.

10. Government has announced £60M of extra funding to transform rail stations around the UK. Train operators and local authorities will be able to bid for a share of the money, which can be put towards improvements such as car parks, ticket gates and better facilities. The first round of this funding, worth nearly £100M, has been used to improve 45 stations across the country since 2011.