City Hall construction hits milestone

Sunderland’s new City Hall has reached a construction milestone as the roof is assembled.

Bowmer + Kirkland is the construction company leading the build. Construction of the 33m tall structure began in November 2019 and is on track to complete by this autumn. The new city hall will house a range of public sector and support organisations, with enough space for almost 2,000 workers.

Councillor Graeme Miller, leader of Sunderland City Council, said: “City Hall will act as a hub for a range of organisations that offer help and support to people living in Sunderland, bringing them together under one roof to make it easy for our residents to access the assistance they need to prosper.

“We’re looking forward to seeing it completed, and topping out marks an important moment in the construction programme, which we’re pleased is moving ahead on schedule despite UK lockdown earlier this year.

“Topping out is an exciting moment, because you really get a sense of how the building will ‘sit’ in the city. Designed by award-winning Faulkner Brown, this will be a beautiful building that is a really significant part of the development plans for Riverside Sunderland, which is focused on creating opportunities for local people.”

Paul Anderson, senior project manager at Bowmer + Kirkland, added: “We are delighted to reach this key milestone in the development which is all the more satisfying given that the structure has been erected in the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. We can now look forward to making the building watertight with the architectural façade and commencement of the fit out works.”

Many construction contractors and clients require contractor staff to hold and display Construction Skills Certification Scheme (CSCS) smart-cards, which prove their qualifications, before allowing them on site.

Here at Time and Attendance North East, we are an IT partner of the CSCS. This means that we can provide seamless integration between the CSCS smartcard and our WinTA.NET software, which provides time management, visitor/contractor management and fire/evacuation roll-call systems.

The integration takes the end-user form of a CSCS “card wizard”. This set of rules allows a company to quickly grant construction contractors recognition by and access to our hardware, such as clocking terminals, turnstiles, and door controllers. The wizard will run one of three scenarios when giving access rights to contractors. These are:

  • Contractors who are completely new to the system.
  • Contractors whose name exists on the system but their CSCS card has not been entered.
  • Contractors who are fully recorded on the system and have used their card at other sites, but are new to this particular site.

For each different scenario the wizard will guide the user through the enrolment procedure. The result is that:

  • The contractor’s CSCS card is read (using a USB card reader attached to a Tensor.NET Client PC)
  • Details are extracted from the card to update the contractor’s details within the system
  • Options such as a company, site, shift group and department are assigned to the cardholder

To make it easier to include new contractors in your site’s existing health and safety and security procedures, please contact us today. We can handle any size site: our Enterprise software is able to perform for global, multi-site corporations with thousands of employees/users, while our Start edition helps small/micro businesses with up to 50 employees.

Please get in touch if you have queries, or to organise a product demo or quote.