Southern Water has re-signed Costain and its existing joint venture partner MWH Treatment for its AMP7 investment programme.
Pending final determination of Southern Water’s ‘Water for Life’ Business Plan, this initial contract is expected to be worth £325m to the joint venture in an equal share over the five-year period.
Under the extended contract from AMP6, the joint venture will bring together its consultancy, design, digital, construction and commissioning skills to maintain and improve Southern Water’s water supply and wastewater treatment.
The AMP 7 contract will begin in April 2020 and will see Costain collaborating with Southern Water ensuring they optimise innovation and efficiency throughout AMP7 delivery.
Alex Vaughan, chief executive officer of Costain, said: “Having now worked with Southern Water through the previous four regulatory AMP cycles, this contract extension is further testimony to the value of our long-term, strategic relationship.”
Neil Colman, director of engineering and construction, Southern Water said: “We fully expect the delivery of our PR19 programme to be challenging and require large efficiency gains.
“Only with partners as committed as we are to delivering smart solutions can we be sure of securing a resilient water future for the South East.”
Voice activated hard hats coming to sites
Alexa-style voice activated technology is being developed for use in hard hats.
Construction workers will be able to speak commands like “show me building plans” which will prompt designs to be projected onto a helmet visor.
The voice-activated technology beams real-time audio instructions into an earpiece and augmented reality (AR) graphics onto the visor.
The system is being developed at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) using artificial intelligence.
Scientists hope the system will remove the need for walkie-talkies or consulting hard copies of blueprints.
The conversational AI technology is being developed alongside construction firms including Costain, Winvic, TerOpta, Enable My Team, and Geo Green Power.
Professor Lukumon Oyedele, who is Assistant Vice-Chancellor for Digital Innovation and Enterprise at UWE Bristol, said: “Until now, conversational AI has mostly been used in labs and controlled settings.
“Here we are bringing it into a construction environment, where workers are using their hands and need a quick and effective way to gather information.
“One of the many challenges is to ensure that the instructions are audible and stand out, given that there is a lot of background noise on a busy construction site.
“We are therefore looking at technologies including noise-cancellation to allow for this.”
The system will also provide information for project managers, who will be able to access co-workers’ timesheets and know where they are located on site at any given time, as well as the status of various elements of the project.
Professor Oyedele said: “We hope that this technology will augment workers’ capabilities, to make construction more efficient. It is about improving worker’s productivity, ensuring a faster delivery process and getting it right the first time by avoiding defects.”
Tim Reeve, Technical Director at Winvic said: “It’s a real honour to be working with Professor Oyedele on his research project. AI can have relevant applications in unexpected places, and Winvic is eager to test the voice-activated headset that our data is helping to create.
“As our main focus is meeting clients’ needs – from a practical delivery point of view and also commercially – it was a natural progression for Winvic to become an early adopter of state-of-the-art BIM technology and we remain committed to digitally transforming construction.”
The first development sites for the firm in London are an 80-flat development site at Beam Park in Dagenham and a 77-flat development site at Fresh Wharf, a major riverside scheme close to Barking town centre.
Sigma will work with Countryside Properties and L&Q New Homes at the Beam Park scheme and with Countryside Properties and Notting Hill Developments at Fresh Wharf.
The combined development cost of the two sites is £44m.
Fresh Wharf is expected to be completed towards the end of next year, with Beam Park completing by Spring 2021.
The new homes will be marketed and let under the investor’s ‘Simple Life’ letting brand.
Ian Sutcliffe, group chief executive at Countryside Properties, said :”We are delighted to be extending our very successful partnership with Sigma Capital into the London market.
“We have delivered over 4,000 private rented homes over the past five years together as part of differentiated mixed tenure approach to regeneration sites. We anticipate continuing growth from our relationship with Sigma in London and beyond.”
Sigma’s move into London follows its recent launch in Scotland, where it has entered into a collaboration agreement with house builder Springfield Properties and is targeting the delivery of hundreds of new rental homes across Scotland’s major cities, including Dundee, Edinburgh, and Glasgow.
Outside London, Sigma has delivered more than 3,000 new rental homes across the regions, through its PRS property platform.
Antobiotics in our rivers
The amount of antibiotics entering the River Thames would need to be cut by as much as 80 per cent to avoid the development and spread of antibiotic-resistant ‘superbugs’, a new study has shown.
Scientists from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) modelled the effects of antibiotic prescriptions on the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in a river. It found that across three-quarters of the River Thames catchment, the antibiotics present, due to effluent discharge, were likely to be at levels high enough for antibiotic-resistant bacteria to develop.
The study comes after England’s chief medical officer Professor Dame Sally Davies warned last week that bugs resistant to antibiotics could pose a more immediate risk to humanity than climate change, and may kill at least 10 million people a year across the world.
Dr Andrew Singer of the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, who led the study, says: “Rivers are a ‘reservoir’ for antibiotic-resistant bacteria which can quickly spread to people via water, soil, air, food and animals. Our beaches offer a similar risk. It has been shown that surfers are four times more likely to carry drug-resistant bacteria than non-surfers.”
How antibiotics get into our rivers
Up to 90% of prescribed antibiotics taken by people pass through the body and into the sewerage system, where about half end up in rivers when effluent is discharged.
Dr Singer explains: “The release of drugs and bugs into our rivers increases the likelihood of antibiotic-resistant genes being shared, either through mutation or ‘bacterial sex’. This is the first step towards the development of superbugs as the drugs used to fight them will no longer work. Environmental pollution from drugs and bugs is a serious problem that we need to find solutions to.”
The CEH-led research was based on prescription data from clinical commissioning groups for two classes of antibiotics that biodegrade slowly. Macrolides, such as erythromycin and azithromycin, are used to treat a range of respiratory and sexually transmitted infections such as pneumonia, whooping cough and chlamydia. Fluoroquinolones such as ciprofloxacin, levofloxacin and moxifloxacin treat respiratory and urinary tract infections.
Possible solutions
There are a number of different ways we could reduce the amount of antibiotics entering rivers, including:
- reducing inappropriate prescriptions, either because the antibiotics will not reduce the infection, or the course of treatment is longer than is medically necessary
- preventative action so fewer medicines are needed in the first place, such as more rapid diagnosis of medical conditions, greater uptake of vaccinations for illnesses and better hygiene controls in hospitals.
- increased investment in research and development of new wastewater treatment processes that would remove the drugs and bugs from sewage.
There was a 6.1 per cent reduction in total antibiotic consumption in primary and secondary care in England between 2014 and 2018. However, antibiotics prescriptions per person in the UK per person is still higher than several European countries and double that of the Netherlands, where their controls on prescribing antibiotics and effective hygiene measures in the healthcare system have resulted in relatively low rates of antibiotic resistance.
The study, which also involved Royal Holloway, University of London, and received funding from UKRI, has been published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Further information
Andrew C. Singer, Qiuying Xu, Virginie D.J. Keller. 2019. Translating antibiotic prescribing into antibiotic resistance in the environment: a hazard characterisation case study. PLOS ONE. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0221568
