School to be redeveloped into office and apartments

23rd September 2020 2:22 pm

A former school in Sunderland will be converted into offices and apartments, creating new jobs and putting £1m into the local economy.

BDN, an architectural and structural engineering business, will convert the Simpson Street school into a new office for itself along with eight apartments. The development should create 10 construction jobs and 16 professional roles.

The conversion proposals were approved in August.

Richard Marsden of BDN said: “It’s fantastic to be able to return this stunning building to its former glory, but it is an added advantage that – in doing so – we can create opportunities for local people and businesses.”

Councillor Graeme Miller, leader of Sunderland City Council, said: “Building community wealth is at the heart of our mission as a council – and we do that by attracting investment that creates jobs and opportunities for local people and businesses.

“Simpson Street is a tremendous example of a project that is repaying the city over and over, attracting a business to relocate here, invest in a building and create new jobs and also build stunning new homes for people living here. We’re delighted to see this moving forward.”

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. 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 contactless smartcard technology enables a touch-free, COVID-secure entrance and exit policy can be implemented on site.

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 businesses with less than 50 users.