Construction company bringing £1m to Durham town

Miller Homes, a housebuilder with headquarters in Edinburgh, is constructing a housing development in Durham, in the town of Bedlington.

Longridge Farm consists of a range of housing sizes from two to five bedrooms, along with 22 affordable homes.

The scheme is bringing more than £1m to local infrastructure, including education, sports facilities at Gallagher Park, health care facilities and off-site highway improvements.

Andrew Somerville, sales director at Miller Homes North East, said: “We’re expecting Longridge Farm to be a very popular development and we can’t wait to see it take shape. We had over 600 people register their interest ahead of the recent sales launch and hope to help these house hunters find their dream home there.

“Over the past few months, we have seen an increase in interest in our more rural developments across the region as some home movers have reassessed their priorities and would like to live in a countryside location with access to open spaces.

“This development offers the best of both worlds as it’s really well located and has a number of close amenities ideal for couples and families, with access to key roads for commuters. It’s around a 10-minute walk to the town centre and a short drive from the popular Plessey Woods Country Park, which is a great setting for a walk in the fresh air.”

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 through our parent company, Tensor plc. We are a manufacturer, designer, distributor and systems integrator bringing efficient and effective time and attendance management to the north East.

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.

Your CSCS smartcard will allow you to clock in and be recorded on-site at any site with the Tensor system installed.

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 & 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 businesses with less than 50 users.