Author: Dayo Ashaye

The importance of fit-for-purpose building standards cannot be stressed enough now that housing development programmes are set to be reignited under our new government. With ambitious items on the agenda such as 1.5 million new homes over the next parliament and a set of planning reforms designed to accelerate building projects; we are all awaiting details of these changes with bated breath.

One thing is for sure, London’s boroughs would all benefit from a robust and unilateral structural movement monitoring policy reflective of the times we are about to enter.

The construction methods used to build, rebuild, and extend our structures today are designed to make the most of the unique infill spaces London has. Clearly, control measures have struggled at times to keep up with our modern building methods and public safety has often felt the brunt of these failures. So how do we make sure that the rate of structural failures don’t also rise significantly over the next five years?

Structural movement monitoring has become an essential practice on many modern construction projects, ensuring the safety and integrity of buildings, bridges, and other critical infrastructure utilising advanced technologies to track and analyse the movement and deformation of these structures over time.

There have been several notable incidents of structural collapses in London in recent years, highlighting the importance of better regulated construction practices, particularly around basements, piling, refurbishment and extension projects.

The 2020s have seen a significant number of collapses and partial collapses of buildings undergoing construction work, in a city where temporary housing is already extremely overstretched. These include two multimillion-pound houses in Durham Place, Chelsea that collapsed while undergoing basement work with around 40 neighbours having to be evacuated as a precaution. Last year, a building on Stoke Newington High Street had parts of its roof and scaffolding fall onto the pavement, narrowly missing pedestrians, causing significant disruption and the evacuation of around 20 people from nearby properties. There was also a terrace house collapse in Honor Oak Park, Lewisham again resulting in the evacuation of several properties. This is just to name a few.

For over 21 years now, our team of civil engineering surveyors has helped identify potential failures through structural monitoring; the last one being just this morning with a 7mm movement recorded on the top floor of a four-storey West London building.

From tight infill sites and changing below ground conditions, to aging structures and complex build needs. Below are seven areas where we believe contractors and developers benefit from structural movement monitoring within London’s ever-changing landscape.

1. Enhanced Safety

As safety is paramount on any construction project, structural movement monitoring helps in the early detection of potential issues such as foundation settlement, sink holes, and material fatigue. By identifying these problems early, preventative measures can be taken to avoid catastrophic failures, protecting both lives and property.

2. Cost Savings

While implementing a structural monitoring system may seem like a significant upfront expense, it can lead to substantial cost savings in the long run. Early detection of structural issues allows for timely maintenance and repairs, which are generally less expensive than major and complete rebuilds after significant failure. Avoiding such failures also means avoiding the associated costs of downtime and legal liabilities.

3. Prolonged Structural Lifespan

Regular monitoring can significantly extend the lifespan of a structure. By continuously assessing the health of a building, bridge or similar structure, maintenance can be performed when needed, preventing minor issues becoming major problems. This proactive approach helps ensure that structures remain safe and functional for longer.

4. Improved Design and Construction Practices

Data collected from structural movement monitoring provides invaluable feedback for engineers, planning officers and architects. Understanding how structures behave under various conditions allows for the refinement of planning permission, building design and construction practices. This knowledge can lead to the development of more resilient structures in future by incorporating lessons learned from past projects.

5. Real-Time Data and Predictive Maintenance

Our recent presentation on The Benefits of Automated Movement Monitoring at The Excel London’s Digital Construction Week helped demonstrate how modern structural movement monitoring systems can include real-time data collection and analysis. This capability allows for an immediate response as and when issues emerge. Additionally, the data can be used to develop predictive maintenance schedules, optimising the timing of interventions to prevent issues before they become critical.

6. Public Confidence

For public buildings and infrastructure, structural movement monitoring can help maintain public confidence; as knowing that a building, bridge or tunnel is being monitored can reassure the public of its safety while maintaining its use.

7. Environmental Impact

By extending the lifespan of structures and optimising maintenance schedules, structural movement monitoring contributes to sustainability. By reducing the need for repairs or replacements we have less material waste and a lower environmental impact associated with construction activities.

Structural movement monitoring is a vital tool for London’s unique range of building projects, providing numerous benefits that range from enhanced safety and cost savings to improved design practice, regulatory compliance and various other public considerations.

Structural movement monitoring systems will eventually become an integral part of most construction and maintenance processes within our built environment right across the country, as embracing these technologies not only protects local investments but also ensures the safety and longevity of the structures we have come to depend on.

For more about how we can help implement movement monitoring standards on your construction project visit our structural movement monitoring page or call us now on 020 72 78 07 78.

For at least 12 of our past 20 years in business, one of our mainstays at South East Site Engineers has been the topographical land surveys, GPR underground utility surveys and construction setting out of UK solar farms. During the first half of this 12-year period the solar renewable energy industry sector was booming, with year-on-year growth exceeding 80% right up to 2015 due largely to the incentives that the government at the time had put in place on the 1 st April 2010. The latter half of this 12-year period has been quite a different story, with what I would describe as the decimation of the solar farming industry by those desperate to keep hold of power, both in its literal and metaphoric form.

Ever since the UK government switched hands on the 11 th of May 2010, I’ve been amongst those perplexed by the resistance, to what clearly feels like an environmentally sensible road to take. Yes, I am biased, as well as it being one of the big six clean energy sources the UK has at its disposal; solar farms in particular offer opportunities for both our topographic site engineering services and below ground survey services. The reasons behind such a swift and brutal policy turnaround by the new government in 2010 on what is the world’s cheapest and most popular renewable energy source may not be clear in the big bad world of politics; however, for any 70’s movie fanatics out there, I need only say “Follow the money” and we start to get an idea of what is really afoot.

The solar industry’s first political strike was on the 1 st of August 2011 when feed-in tariffs got cut from 30.7p to 8.5p per Kwh for field installations over 250Kw. This would have essentially hit any development larger than an acre and affected any project capable of powering the boiler heating systems of more than 10 typical 3-bed homes at once with no reliance on fossil fuels whatsoever.

Four years later, once the inevitable slowdown started to wain from the 2011 cut in feed-in tariffs, the few clean energy developers that survived this first strike had their heads above water once again. However, the government soon struck once more by completely removing all pre-accreditation Feed-in Tariffs (FITs) as led by then Environment Secretary Liz Truss. The fact that any minister for the environment would have previously worked for four years as an industrial economist at one of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies, quite rightly, shouldn’t be enough to ring alarm bells; however, this is about following the money, so more on that in a moment.

I’m not saying that the 30.7p per Kwh wasn’t an extremely generous reward for developers of renewable energy, as I witnessed first-hand, some landowners become millionaires overnight as their fields were turned from generating wheat to generating thousands of pounds worth of electricity per day at a guaranteed price for the next 25 years. What I am saying, however, is that such a deep and drastic cut was counterproductive to our environmental ambitions of the time.

The strike on FITs in October 2015 was swiftly followed by the scrapping of all subsidy support through the Renewables Obligation (RO) agreement for solar farms in April 2016 and lends itself further to a counterproductive political agenda and why we need to follow the money, very closely. One of the problems with this policy switch, and a political opposition too weak to do anything about it was that, as developers no longer had a guaranteed price for their electricity, they started to lose confidence; so, was this the plan? The short answer is that we simply don’t know; however, what I can say is that these cuts resulted in the near disappearance of all new solar farm development projects in England in less than six years. Turning an 80% year-on-year solar power generation growth industry right up to 2015, into a real-time drop in solar power generation between 2019 and 2020. The Hill Equation curve couldn’t have been starker, as the industry was given no choice but to react to the governments disinvestment.

Given the multitude of problems we have had to face over the past six years, not least Brexit, Covid-19, and the Ukraine War; today most of us are reeling at the latest fossil fuel energy price rises, double-digit food inflation, the tripling of mortgage rates, and what is officially the first non-Covid related UK recession since 2009; to the point where we would only go as far as thinking “if only…”. However, for those that dare to think a little deeper, or choose to follow the money a little further, with what are effectively all manmade problems; the question becomes, how in the midst of all of this bad stuff, do both BP and Shell split over £15Billion in profits between themselves alone?

One of many places that following this money leads us to are the recent prime ministerial elections. For example, beyond working for Shell in a former life, Liz Truss’s biggest individual prime ministerial campaign doner was the wife of former BP executive James Hay. With other campaign donors including Lord Vinson, a peer who contributes to climate science-denying thinktank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Lance Forman, a former Brexit Party politician who has also dismissed the science on climate change, Andrew Law, a trustee at the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange who have pretty clear opinions on how to handle the Just Stop Oil protestors; as well as Jon Moynihan and Barbara Yerolemou, who both sit on the advisory council of the Free Market Forum, an initiative of the BP-funded Institute of Economic Affairs think tank. Between these six individuals alone, Liz managed to raise over half of her £300,000 prime ministerial campaign spending limit.

Liz’s successful bid to become prime minister and her “not filling fields with paraphernalia like solar farms.” Spoke directly to her plan to ban solar farms on agricultural land; something that struggling farmers themselves are strongly opposed to. Our newest prime minister Rishi Sunak promising to do the same by preventing agricultural land from being covered by “swathes of solar panels” feeds the same narrative, particularly as Rishi too accepted donations from supporters with links to oil and gas for his Ready4Rishi leadership campaign, while at one point being “too busy” to attend the COP27 climate summit in Egypt.

Although it will take time for our UK solar farm clean energy industry to get back on track, it is not all doom and gloom, as last year the government did decide to include solar back into its low carbon funding programmes for the first time since 2015. And while we all hope for the effects of this new

clean energy incentive to filter through, we can at least celebrate the likes of Greece, who last month managed to supply their entire country’s electricity demand using renewable energy only for over 5-hours; with a quarter of this clean energy coming from solar. A Eurozone country that in 2015, the same year as our government started the strategic decimation of our solar farm industry, had to default on its IMF debt due to its inability to be productive (amongst other things of course).

We have known for years that both wind and solar farms (which in themselves are comparable in production costs) are by far the cheapest forms of UK energy production. Solar energy, which is what this piece is on, now costs about 10% of what it did when we started in this field 12 years ago; however, more importantly, in normal times when there was no Ukraine War, it cost a fraction of what it costs to produce oil and gas, both in its financial and planetary form. Hence, we can choose to keep blindly following the money and have most people suffer in silence; or we can choose to put the political allegiances and golden handshakes to one side and follow the maths. That way, we can give the solar PV farming industry the attention it deserved once more.

Within the movement monitoring, site engineering and GPR services industry many now believe that the pandemic has come to an end. However, are we really seeing any light at the end of the tunnel within our now decimated construction sector?

The construction sector is the backbone of many economies and is one of the best ways of seeing if there is any light at the end of the tunnel and potential for recovery. Without ongoing civil and site engineering work, society would not be able to function for very long.

Construction site engineers get to witness first hand many of the changes taking place within the building setting out, utility surveying, demolition monitoring, and topographical survey service industries.

As inflation continues to rise it has affected the cost of everything from GPR service costs and engineering surveyor labour wages to building monitoring machinery hire rates and construction material costs. Like many others, after falling off the “pandemic” cliff in February 2020, the United Kingdom’s Construction industry currently contributes only 7% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) which means the construction industry cannot be relied on alone to stimulate the economy back to normal.

The instability brought about first by Brexit, then by the virus and now the latest Crimean War has caused all of us to rethink and try to figure out new paths and services to sustain our respective economies.

South East Site Engineers recently attained its own next step closer to sustainability via its ISO141001 Certification. This is in order to help ensure we deliver a more environmentally friendly service to our growing list of clients.

Another way we have adapted in recent years, is through developing an online quote service available via our website for services including Topographical Surveys, GPR Surveys, Construction Setting Out, Building Movement Monitoring, and 3D Laser Scanning for a more wholistic BIM package.

The challenges and consequences of the pandemic are still very much ongoing, while we keep in mind current affairs including inflation, Brexit and the Ukraine war, our site engineering within the London construction surveys industry remains vital to our built environment.