Battersea Power station is to be demerged from the loss-making Irish property company that now owns it, and floated on the Aim market. There have been many false starts on the redevelopment of the station over the years...
Commission for Sustainable London 2012 calls for transfer of low-carbon lessons from Olympics to the wider UK industry
Organisers of the London 2012 Olympics risk missing a golden opportunity to inspire a step change towards a low-carbon economy, the green watchdog for the games has warned.
The Commission for a Sustainable London 2012 released its annual review on how the games' sustainable vision is taking shape. The UK's green promises were key reasons why Seb Coe and his team won the bid in Singapore in 2005.
Although the report said that the Olympic Delivery Authority, which has responsibility for construction and design of the venues and infrastructure, had maintained a high standard of sustainable design, the benefits to the UK's wider green economy could be lost before the games even begin unless "the knowledge in people's heads is captured before they leave".
With just over two years to go until the games begin, planning has now reached a critical stage as the ODA scales back in anticipation of the completion of venues next year.
The Local Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, responsible for running the event, will take on an increasingly greater role in delivering the sustainable targets for London 2012.
The report, Raising the Bar, says: "Our main area of concern lies in the wider commitments that were made during the bid or just afterwards. Broad promises have been made in official documents: 'to make the Olympic Park a blueprint for sustainable living' and 'to be a catalyst for new waste management infrastructure in east London'.
"With the exception of a few worthy initiatives, there is no comprehensive plan to make this happen. Furthermore, it is not clear what definitions lie behind these expressions or who is responsible for making them happen.
"With just over two years to go before the 'inspirational power of the Games' moves to Rio, never to return to London, these issues need to be resolved."
Shaun McCarthy, head of the commission, said: "Having an Olympics is an inherently unsustainable thing to do. To build all this stuff to watch some people run around – what's sustainable about that?
"We have to ask ourselves is it good enough just to have some great sustainable venues and put on a sustainable games which we are increasingly confident about, or will the Olympics really make a difference?
"Is this going to be something in isolation so we have one great big sustainable Olympics and then go back to business as usual?
"Or will the games actually change things? Because that was the promise that was made when we won the bid.
"A lot of carbon has been saved by comparison with business as usual construction techniques. If we can transfer that knowledge to the wider industry, we can save a lot more carbon than will be emitted in the whole of the Olympic Games.
"How can we use the magic of the Olympic Games to make that happen?"
McCarthy cited lower-carbon cement, low-toxin plastics and a zero landfill waste target as some of the achievements so far.
The stadium is the lightest Olympic stadium, using a quarter of the concrete used for the Beijing games, and features a lighting system suspended from a compression wheel made from re-purposed gas pipes left over from a different construction project.
McCarthy singled out the velodrome as an especially good example of sustainable design, with its ultra-lightweight roof and natural lighting and ventilation.
But he admitted that results have been mixed on the Olympic park. Zaha Hadid's feted aquatic centre, with a roof made from 3,000 tonnes of steel, was a "sharp lesson" in sustainable construction.
"That is a lot of steel just to cover a swimming pool and it is not necessary to have that much," McCarthy said, adding that the architect had simply been asked to design "a beautiful building" before the bid gained momentum.
But he said he was "very disappointed" that the energy centre in the Olympic park would run on gas, not biogas from onsite waste.
He also said he had concerns about London mayor Boris Johnson's approval of the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower in the park.
"It's very early days for the Orbit tower. Yes, I am concerned that it is a lot of steel. We are asking the Greater London Authority questions about it but we haven't yet had a satisfactory response.
"We would expect the mayor's office and the GLA to work to at least the same high standards of sustainability as the ODA."
An ODA spokesperson said: "We welcome the scrutiny of the commission and will continue to work with them to address any concerns they may have.
"The report states that the commission is pleased with our progress and they believe we are on track to meet challenging and extensive sustainability targets that have never been achieved before on a project of this size and scale.
"Our sustainability strategy was embedded into our processes at the start of the project and is already being delivered onsite.
"We are currently pulling together the best practice and lessons that have been learnt from the project so that they can be used by the industry for future projects."
• Institute urges ministers to 'unblock' funding
• Building workers' union seeks social housing boost
• Professions worst hit by the recession (pdf)
Architects are joining the ranks of benefit claimants at a faster rate than any other profession, according to a Guardian analysis of figures for the last 12 months.
Other jobs related to the construction industry, including managers, surveyors, engineers, bricklayers, carpenters and scaffolders, also feature prominently among the 20 professions that have seen the biggest increases in benefits claimants.
Construction unions and professional bodies said the actual numbers out of work were much higher than the official figures suggest and reiterated their pleas for the government to revive the industry by underwriting public building projects.
Office of National Statistics figures released this week show that between February 2008 and February 2009 the number of architects claiming benefits rose by 760% from 150 to 1,290 - the biggest increase among recorded professions.
The second biggest increase was among architectural technologists and town planning technicians.
The Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) said the figures came as no surprise and estimated that the level of unemployment and under-employment among its members was at least 30% higher than official figures.
Riba's president, Sunand Prasad, said the problem was "gigantic". He added: "I would estimate that those figures represent a fraction of the reality, based on our returns, anecdotal material and our projections. And the reason is simple: construction always gets hit in the neck in a recession. It's one of the first casualties of a decline in the economy."
He predicted levels of unemployment in the industry would get worse: "Architects are a bellwether for what's going to happen to the construction industry - buildings that are not being designed today are not going to be built tomorrow."
Prasad said that in spite of the government's commitment to public projects, work had stalled because of a reliance on private finance. Riba had urged the government to "unblock the pipeline" by funding the building of schools, clinics and other public buildings directly from the exchequer for a period of three years, he said.
Riba is also pressing for a project to make social housing more energy efficient as an eco-friendly means of creating jobs. Prasad added: "The biggest danger is that we lose people that don't come back and we are unprepared when the recovery does happen. In the early 90s we lost a whole generation who went on to do other things and that's noticeable in the profession now."
The construction union Ucatt said the numbers out of work might be double the ONS figures because about half of its members were self-employed and did not qualify for some benefits.
The union wants the government to back a huge social housing building project to help create jobs in housing - the worst hit sector of the building industry - and to help the 1 million people living in inadequate accommodation.
"If the money spent on propping up the banks had been spent on social housing then the economy would be in a much healthier state," said Alan Ritchie, Ucatt's general secretary.
Paul Kenny, the GMB general secretary, said: "Large parts of the construction industry is on its knees.
"The GMB has asked the government to acquire unsold blocks of flats and turn them into social housing but that programme is stuck. The government needs to look again at getting it working."
The legal profession has also been badly hit. Lawyers came ninth among the professions with the biggest increases in benefits claimants - up from 350 to 1,570 over the last 12 months - an increase of 349%. Legal secretaries came 12th.
The Law Society said it had set out a detailed agenda to help solicitors survive the recession, including practical guidance for members facing redundancy, a pastoral care helpline and online seminars on "surviving the downturn".
The society's president, Paul Marsh, has also written to Revenue and Customs asking it to suspend its system of taxing law firms before they have received payment for their services.
• This footnote was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday 25 March 2009. Above we quoted the Royal Institute of British Architects as estimating that unemployment and underemployment among its members was at least 30% higher than official figures. In fact, Riba's president, Sunand Prasad, said that in his estimation 30% of architects were currently unemployed or underemployed.
The building trade is struggling, yet architecture courses are more popular than ever before. It makes perfect sense
It seem paradoxical – yet as the recession bites and building projects grind to a halt, a record number of British students are applying to study architecture. With so many architects underemployed, or plain unemployed, surely these legions of young people must be either oblivious to what's going on around them, or else slightly mad?
But no: they're simply following a burgeoning passion and, however they might express this themselves, they are optimists. And, they have many reasons to be, not least because even the deepest recessions have proven to be short in comparison with the length of an architect's career and with the life of buildings themselves.
Architecture students study for around seven years before serving the modern equivalent of apprentices and then establishing themselves in practice. Few really get going until their early thirties. So students starting off this autumn can expect to wow the public with their first notable buildings in the early 2020s. We should, hopefully, be out of recession by then, although, perish the thought, we could even be entering the next.
Even then, many former architecture students will find themselves gainfully employed, or setting up in business, in spheres other than architecture itself. Why? Because an architectural education is both happily demanding and hugely varied. Which other university course combines art, science, mathematics, history, philosophy, politics, economics together with some understanding of media and marketing? No wonder so many young architects are employed as chefs, restaurateurs, set designers, developers, publishers, fashion designers, teachers, chief executives of companies and Le Corbusier-only-knows what else.
With this level of adaptability, many architects – although they may well have to tighten their belts considerably – are better able than many other professionals to ride out recessions. The brightest will write, teach and consult. They will use the lean times to think hard about the directions architecture might take when the good times roll once more.
Previous recessions have encouraged or led to major shifts in architectural design. Brutalism and controversial concrete public housing projects came to the end of a rocky road with the 1973-74 oil crisis. The decorative excesses and sheer kitsch of postmodern design (think wacky Docklands apartment blocks, offices topped with jokey split classical pediments, Porsches with spoilers, padded shoulders) that characterised the 1980s fell from favour with the stock market crash of 1987.
And now? Well, we're likely to see an end to the kind of flamboyant, look-at-me architecture that we have come to expect in every city centre since King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia opened the Bilbao Guggenheim, designed by Frank Gehry, twelve years ago.
And, yet, as anyone passing through central London will be well aware, massive buildings are still soaring into the city's cloudscape. Why? Again, because the architectural cycle is a slow one. Many of the buildings you see rising behind scaffolding were designed several years ago. They continue to employ architects, contractors and builders. Some of these buildings will be completed while the current recession is still with us. But their time may well come. Remember that the Empire State Building, for decades the world's tallest building, was opened in 1931 at a time when the US economy was very much down in the dumps. For pretty much the rest of the decade it was known as the "Empty State Building" because few companies were in a position to rent space there. Today, the 102-storey skyscraper is a cherished national monument as well as a profitable business.
With so much spare talent at the moment, though, the British government really should try to help Britain build itself out of recession. Public architecture projects could yet save the moment, holding the fort until the national and global economy booms again. Unfortunately, this isn't so very easy to do because over the past decade, a government in thrall for whatever reason to free market economics has presided, wilfully, over the flogging off and even the collapse of great parts of the public realm. This needs to be set on firm foundations once more before we can build and use architectural talent for the public good. Perhaps, though, when this recession ends, we'll have a newly invigorated public sector working hand-in-hand with a new generation of architects and new forms of design. Whatever the story, and no matter how bad the job market is at the moment, architects need to remain optimistic.
• Lack of private finance forces government to act
• Roads, schools and waste management to benefit
The Treasury will announce a £2bn lifeline today to rescue construction programmes for motorway widening, new schools and incinerators after British and foreign banks pulled out as backers.
The cash injection is aimed at kick-starting up to 110 major projects on a £13.5bn private finance initiative programme by putting Treasury cash alongside money from contractors with, it is hoped, some contribution from investment banks.
The extra money, to be available from next month, is the latest initiative from the government to spend more to try to lift the economy out of recession. Public bodies will have to apply to the Treasury through their government ministry for help.
Yvette Cooper, chief secretary to the Treasury, hopes the cash will breathe new life into controversial PFI schemes, in which banks and contractors build new projects and then rent them back to the state for up to 35 years. The schemes were highly profitable until the credit crunch, with banks being criticised by the National Audit Office and MPs for making too much money from the taxpayer. But since the downturn foreign banks have drawn back from investing in them, on a similar scale to their withdrawal from offering loans and mortgages to customers.
Top of the list for new investment are incinerators and waste recycling schemes, including a government contribution to a £4.4bn waste scheme for Greater Manchester. The government still hopes that some private capital will go into this scheme, which is being managed by the Bank of Ireland. Investment in waste disposal is seen as essential to help the UK avoid being heavily fined by the European Union if it misses mandatory targets to halve landfill use by 2013. Some of the schemes are so big they will take four years to build. The cost would fall on the council tax payer.
Other important schemes that could benefit are plans to widen motorways, notably the M25 around London, and build schools. The £2.4bn school building programme announced by Ed Balls, the schools secretary, has been hit by the failure of banks to invest.
Cooper said: "We need to get these important infrastructure projects moving quickly to support jobs right now. That's why government is stepping in to accelerate the process and safeguard these major projects in the face of financial market problems."
The extra money could also be used to build some of the last 10 PFI hospital projects, which have been delayed for a year because they could not get money from the banks. It will also allow a number of new courts to go ahead.
The Tories were sceptical. George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, said: "We all want to see planned projects go ahead ... But this announcement looks suspiciously like Alistair Darling is applying a sticking plaster to Labour's failed PFI model. What is really needed is a wholly new approach that involves the private sector while delivering value for money for taxpayers."
Jeremy Barker, a director with accountants KPMG, said: "Any source of new money is clearly going to help free up logjammed transactions but the idea of a government bank acting like a private funder is potentially at odds with the philosophy underlying PFI."
He warned the government not to go "back to old-style procurement and the bad old days of cost overruns and delays".
The Scottish National party was highly critical of the move yesterday. Its Treasury spokesman, Stewart Hosie, said: "Labour have bailed out the bankers, and now Alistair Darling seems set on propping up PFI projects. This humiliating bail-out is not only the clearest indication that PFI has failed but is the economics of the madhouse. Why is public money being used to prop up a system that gives such a bad return compared to traditional public procurement?"