Asite and ACT-UK: The beginning of a long term partnership

Asite participated in the ACT-UK Launch event on the 25th of January 2007 at the National Motorcycle Museum in the West Midlands.

Work began on the ACT-UK project in 2002, with an 11-strong team of partners including the Learning and Skills Council Coventry and Warwickshire, the Chartered Institute of Building, CITB-Construction Skills and industry leaders including Clive Benfield, managing director of KB Benfield Group Holdings Ltd and George Marsh, non-executive chairman of Chase Norton Construction, Coventry and Warwickshire's Construction Centre of Vocational Excellence (CoVE), Coventry University Enterprises Ltd, Universities of Coventry and Warwick, Advantage West Midlands and Constructing Excellence.

The state-of-the-art National Centre for Advanced Construction Technologies (ACT-UK) will provide innovative construction management training, first class venue facilities for hire for business meetings, offices for construction-related companies, exhibition space and Continuing Professional Development facilities and will become a hub for companies, industry bodies and trade associations from across the country.

The ACT-UK Centre will be the second virtual training facility for the construction industry in the world. The Building Management Simulation Centre will enable trainees to undergo virtual on-site training in a controlled environment without the safety or cost implications of learning on the job.

Across the UK, the construction industry currently employs approximately 2.1 million people with an output of £77 billion per annum and it is growing rapidly, both in size and sophistication. The National Centre for Advanced Construction Technologies will be a facility to support the industry to achieve excellence in everything it does.

Sir John Egan, Chairman of Severn Trent Plc and author of the "Rethinking Construction" report was a key speaker at the ACT-UK Launch event. He highlighted the need for a training centre enabling project teams to simulate the construction of a building, allowing the supply chain to make mistakes and learn from them without affecting real people or real buildings. Sir John Egan underlined this new way of training will reduce considerably the number of accidents within the construction industry. He urged construction companies to support ACT-UK in their bid for matching funding from Industry to make the project a reality.

ACT! UK will help solving the training issue of the construction industry, which was recognised by Sir John Egan in his report, and it clearly represents a step forward for the industry. Asite is proud to invest its time and effort in helping ACT-UK to build the Centre for Advanced Construction Technologies and is looking forward to a new long-term partnership with ACT-UK.

For more information please call on +44 (0)207 749 7880.