We have been at our new head office in Abbey Street since December 2011. We have made a real effort to develop a modern and efficient work space that allows our staff to share ideas whilst also allowing them to focus on their daily tasks. The building has a long history and was once a coach house, sadly the bar is long gone but our new open plan office helps to encourage team work and communication amongst our team.

Hopefully we can continue to build awareness of male cancers and raise even more money next year.

The Bank of England and its monetary-policy committee (MPC), under the guidance of governor Sir Mervyn King, has just pumped a further £75 billion into the British banking system via an unconventional process known as quantitative easing (QE). But how effective will this be at kick-starting our economy and how much of this money will filter down into the real economy?

This newly created (electronic) money has been used to buy government bonds (gilts). The theory is that by taking a percentage of safe securities off the market, investors and high street banks will seek riskier investments.  Instead of owning low yield gilts, high street banks should then seek higher yields by lending money to businesses and first-time buyers.  Investors will turn to corporate bonds and stocks, which in turn will encourage big business to stop hoarding cash and spend more.  Overall, the hope is this will increase the supply of money in the economy.

Although opinion is largely divided on the success of the first round of QE in 2009-10, when the Bank bought £200 billion of bonds, the Bank’s own analysis suggests it  boosted GDP by 1.5-2%.  Many economists believe that this growth was largely a result of lowering yields on gilts.  The problem is that yields on 10-year gilts now stand at 2.5%, which is a 50-year low and half what they were in 2009.  They clearly have less scope to fall and therefore less potential impact on growth.  And with inflation set to rise above 5% in November, surely there is a different way, a different kind of easing required.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) account for over half of UK GDP, according to the Federation of Small Businesses, and yet we have experienced a near three year slump in lending. To hope that this latest round of QE will improve access to finance for this vital and fund-starved sector of the economy I believe is foolhardy. The chancellor, George Osborne, has asked the Treasury to explore options for improving the situation but we’re lacking decisive action. David Smith, an economics columnist for The Sunday Times, is adamant that the economy is receiving the wrong kind of easing.  Mr Smith advocates ‘credit easing’ which would see the Bank buy up bundles of SME loans and boost the flow of credit to a sector of the economy that has massive growth potential.  Adam Posen, an MPC member, also believes that part of the economy’s weakness is down to a shortfall in SME credit provision.  He advocates a state-backed SME bank to meet the funding shortfall that he puts at some £30 billion.  We need brave, bold and decisive action to kick-start our economy and I for one believe in the growth potential of SMEs in the UK.  If this country has any hope of nurturing tomorrow’s big business we have to start today with the small guys.

Cloud computing is marketed as a cost, energy and resource saving solution and my initial enquires revealed that The Hireman was the perfect company to embrace Cloud technology. With excitement I began to meet with various companies who attempted to sell me their proposed solutions. The first hurdle I faced was that there are several ways of utilising Cloud technology, as ever prices vary greatly. Many of the companies were keen to sell a fully hosted solution meaning that our users would log directly on to a remote server. Although this in principal meets our needs it also creates its own problems such as being completely dependent on our internet connection and it also works out to be much more expensive than our current solution. The other alternative is to simply recreate our current setup on a hosted server. Again we would be dependent on our internet connections but this would also create its own problems; printing would take longer as the print job would be sent to the server then back down to the printer; computer updates would be problematic as data would be sent across the network eating bandwidth. These problems can be resolved using print and utility servers at each site to propagate data locally, but this in turn leads to higher costs in maintaining the servers. Before I knew it I was back to square one.

Ultimately the Cloud does offer many benefits but when weighed up against the financial commitment required it is very difficult to justify the ongoing expense. Virtualisation of our current servers seems to be the next logical step in building more resilience into our current set up. Although having a Cloud infrastructure is impractical at present we have started to embrace Cloud software services such as Google Docs to help unify our office staff and I hope that as technology moves on we will be able to take advantage of new innovations and services.

Much has been documented about the risks posed by Hand Arm Vibration (HAV) and similarly the importance of proper dust extraction and control in small tool use, and these rightly remain very high on our industry’s agenda. However, the less discussed and often overlooked need to properly test, maintain and repair small tools plays as much of a role in preventing more immediate health issues.

A Which? Magazine article of April 1st last year highlighted the need for increased consistency throughout the hire industry to help avoid unnecessary accidents. In their damning exposé, stories of damaged cables, missing fuses or fuses replaced with tin foil highlighted the frightening state of tools provided by some of the leading firms in our industry. Only last month a timber frame company was fined by the HSE after a guard was removed from a table mounted circular saw which led to a 20-year old production worker losing a thumb. These examples only serve to reinforce the need for basic tool care, including visual checks and Portable Appliance Tests (PAT), both on and off site, to ensure that accidents like this are avoided.

The Hireman’s MD Neil Graham recommends that “the first step to safe tool use is to make sure that you buy correctly... we buy only recognised brands of tools and equipment and rigorously check that they conform to the required safety standards. This includes buying all of our electrical supply equipment; generators, transformers, leads, junction boxes and RCD’s from the very best manufacturers. British manufacturers such as Blakley and ArcGen-Hilta certainly aren’t the cheapest but the quality is second to none and frankly it seems pointless to spend £1,000 on a Hilti breaker and then supply a cheap transformer and extension lead which reduce the benefits of using high quality tools”. No stranger to the importance of stringent quality control David Miller, National Sales and Marketing Manager for Blakley, says “with customers such as London Underground, Network Rail and The MoD we have a high standard to achieve, which our engineering expertise allows us to do”. This attention to detail shows in the quality of their electrical supply equipment and gives our customers confidence in the safety, reliability and performance of our tools.

Of equal importance is a regular and rigorous maintenance procedure. Compliance with the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989 (EAWR) requires that a PAT be completed at least every three months and must include a thorough visual inspection as well as a host of electrical safety tests, the responsibility for which must be borne by both the hire supplier and end user.

These basics protect the reputation of our industry, those who work in it and the training and development aspirations of young people looking for a career in construction