News

We are sponsoring the Built Environment Networking Blue Light Estates Development Conference which will be taking place on 23 June 2021. Partner Rob Ireland will be chairing Session Three: Blue Light Estates – Development Plans at 11:30 am, with a focus on quality in design and construction.

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Partner John Milner has written an article for the latest edition of the RICS Built Environment Journal on the end of gas heating in our homes. The article discusses the context, regulations, software, the role of heat pumps, whether hydrogen can play a role and looks at retrofit strategies and standards.

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As this week is Mental Health Awareness Week, it is a good time to look back on some of the things we’ve been doing over the last year to support the mental health of our staff.

Promoting and protecting wellbeing in the workplace is important to Baily Garner and is aligned to our key objective of being a great place to work. We recognise that mental health is a vital part of this and, in a year that has been difficult for a lot of people, we have put a focus on the mental health of our staff.

“How are you?” has become the first question at the top of the agenda in all weekly team meetings and in individual one-to-one reviews. Our people managers have been taught to monitor individuals’ wellbeing and be vigilant for signs of demotivation or feelings of isolation.

In November 2020, 23 of our people managers attended a Mental Health Awareness course provided by Mental Health First Aid England (MHFAE), which included how to be more aware of mental ill health in others, how to talk to others about mental health, considering our own mental health and actions we can take to ensure good mental health.

Then in January 2021, we launched our Mental Health First Aiders across the practice. 14 of our team have been trained as Mental Health First Aiders to act as someone to talk to for anyone experiencing any mental health issues and to provide signposting to other resources where needed.

Our employees all also have access to an Employee Assistance Programme through our Healthcare Cash Plan benefit provided to all permanent employees, which provides further signposting and professional help if required.

We provide ways for our staff to support their own mental wellbeing through social activities and our ‘Social, Health and Wellbeing’ Microsoft Teams channel. This week we are using this to launch our first annual photography competition, in memory of one of our former partners, to raise money for charity. The theme of the competition will be nature, to tie in with the Mental Health Awareness Week theme and it’s open for all of our staff and their families to take part.

We are also giving each of our team a gift of a ‘Little Ray of Sunshine’ in the form of a sunflower growing kit. A little bit of nature to take home and ‘grow their own’.

We are pleased to announce five promotions within the partnership, effective from the 1^st May 2021.

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We are excited to announce that we have been shortlisted at the Insider Midlands Residential Property Awards for 2021.

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Two of our projects have been shortlisted at the Inside Housing Development Awards 2021.

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A pilot £50 million Government project to improve the energy efficiency of social housing has awarded £4.5m funding to a bid Baily Garner has been working on with a number of partner organisations.

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We have agreed to sponsor the Housing Forum’s Councils Network, which is dedicated to building development expertise in councils.

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We are very proud to announce that we have achieved 2 star accreditation by Best Companies for ‘Outstanding’ employee engagement.

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We are pleased to launch a new personal development programme at Baily Garner, which aims to support and promote women in the construction workplace.

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We are pleased to be founding partners of a new knowledge portal that is designed to inform, train and connect people and companies to move into a future of Net Zero emissions.

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Join us for our first webinar of 2021 on Wednesday 3rd March at 10am.

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We are very happy to announce that we have been successfully appointed to the SEC framework which runs for the next four years.

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We are pleased to once again be involved with the HOMES 2020 conference as registration sponsors.

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Following the announcement of a second lockdown in England starting from Thursday 5^th November, we will be ensuring we work within the current Government guidelines.

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We are delighted to announce the promotion of Ben Nixon to Associate Partner on 1st November 2020.

Ben joined Baily Garner in February 2019 and since then he has become a chartered building surveyor (MRICS) and chartered construction manager (MCIOB).

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We are pleased to announce that Andrew Little has been promoted to Equity Partner. Read more >

We are proud to announce that Baily Garner has been appointed to the Procure Partnerships Framework Professional Services Agreement, which runs from 2020-2024.

Through this framework we can support our public sector clients in five different geographical regions and the framework allows clients to make direct appointments or to run a competitive tender. Read more >

Northdown Gardens won in the category of Best Individual New Home at the LABC London Awards. Congratulations to the entire project team for all of their hard work. BG provided Professional Services for this project. If you would like to read more about the project and the awards click here.

After the successful re-opening of our Head office in Eltham earlier in the summer, a small number of staff have now also returned to office working in our Birmingham office, as of Monday 27^th July.

Both offices are now operating successfully within the safety parameters required by government guidelines, but with a reduced level of occupancy.

Please note that at this time all offices remain closed to visitors.

Well done to our three new Chartered Building Surveyors from our Head Office. Jack Plummer, Max Skeet and George Gardner who all passed their APC exams and as of last week are Chartered.

It was a busy week on the quality accreditation front with Baily Garner being separately audited for 3 different accreditations over the first 7 days of June. We’re thrilled to confirm that we were successful in maintaining our quality accreditations for our ISO 9001 Quality Management System, our Cyber Essentials Plus IT security accreditation and our ISO 14001 Environmental Management System. Read more >

In these uncertain times the many challenges presented by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has seen an impact on the economy and how businesses operate. With the obvious economic impact unfolding and the deployment of staff to home working policy, tenant’s will be considering their strategy for retention and future occupation of properties, looking perhaps at early lease breaks or not renewing leases. Landlord’s might therefore be faced with a tenant vacating early requiring them to manage a re-let. Read more >

Baily Garner is now following the latest CLC guidance set out in its Site Operating Procedure Advice note (3rd) version 15/4/2020 and drawing this latest guidance to our Partners attention, to request that it is being followed on those sites currently in operation.

The Housing Forum members have put together a bulletin entitled “Coronavirus – a view from the sector” which reaffirms a Partnership approach to how the housing industry should manage the implications of the current Covid-19 public health crisis. Baily Garner LLP were keen and active contributors to this guidance which we would encourage readers to read, contemplate and share.

Our Kensington Street scheme has been shortlisted in the Completed Schemes category at this year’s Housing Design Awards. Baily Garner provided Architectural and Employer’s Agent Services for this 100% Affordable Housing Scheme in Brighton for Brighton and Hove City Council and the Guinness Partnership.

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UPDATE 24 MARCH

As the Covid-19 crisis has been deepening, day by day, we have been carefully reviewing all our operations and putting plans into place to ensure that we are following and complying with all government guidance to keep people safe and reduce the risk of spreading the coronavirus infection whilst, at the same time, also ensuring we continue to provide the appropriate service and support to all our clients and construction project partners. Read more >

Baily Garner are proud to be members of the Consultant Thought Leadership Group, a group of Chartered Surveyors, Employers Agents and Project Managers that have got together to help drive quality and change within the construction industry through collaboration and knowledge sharing. The attached open letter to all our clients discusses the impact of Covid-19 on our industry and discusses some potential ways through

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Purpose

In addition to our Business Continuity Policies, we are doing the following in order to to deal with the 2020 Covid-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak. Due to the changing nature of the risks, it is a plan that is subject to regular review and change.

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Following some changes to email settings made in a Microsoft update in January we are encountering a higher than usual number of mail delivery issues when sending and receiving emails from clients. If this is/has affected you, here’s some detail you should share with your email service provider or IT team so that they can liaise with our IT team to resolve the issue https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/use-dmarc-to-validate-email. .

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Baily Garner’s second (and now becoming annual) ‘Quality Summit’ for all its technical staff was held at etcVenues in Monument London on 22 November and was another great success.

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All our technical staff will be attending our second Quality summit at ETC Venues, Monument on Friday 22 November.

As well as receiving technical updates on cladding and Part B, we will be talking “quality – from the clients point of view” with speaker contributions from

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The quarterly publication for the South East London Chamber of Commerce, the Masthead, features Baily Garner’s own Managing Partner, Andy Tookey as it’s Big Interview for the October 2019 edition. Read more >

Congratulations to our Kensington Street project team on winning the award for Best Architectural Design at the South East Construction Awards. The team worked in close collaboration with Brighton and Hove City Coucil, Guinness Partnership and Sunninghill Construction to deliver the 12 city centre units.

Baily Garner are pleased to continue our authorship support to the RICS Built Environment Journal and Jack Thompson-Smith has contributed to our latest publication on the important issue of taking care of healthcare assets which can be read here on Page 53 

Kensington Street has been shortlisted as a finalist for Best Architectural Design at the 2019 South East Construction Awards. The recently completed Brighton-based project designed by the Baily Garner architecture team is nominated with the winners for all categories being announced on the 26th September – Well done to the architects…and fingers crossed for 26th!

Baily Garner’s Karen Crowley (PA to Managing partner, Andy Tookey) has had an article featured in PA Life Magazine highlighting her work on the ISO14001 accreditation for Baily Garner. Read here how Karen helped to make BG more environmentally-friendly.

On the 1st of July 2019 our Partner Andrew Little was invited by 24Housing to participate in a Roundtable discussion on the subject of “Clearing the confusion” debating what have we learned, what has changed and what more needs to happen 2 years after the Grenfell tragedy. Read more >

We are excited to announce that Tops Club has been shortlisted for a Housing Essex Excellence Award, Baily Garner provided Quantity Surveying services to the residential project. We have been nominated for the 2nd category – Best Housing Schemes Under 50 homes. The awards ceremony will be held on the 10th of October.

Baily Garner is delighted to have become a member of the South East London Chamber of Commerce and looks forward to joining all the other local businesses in making a really positive contribution to the Greenwich and surrounding area communities.

We are pleased to announce the promotion of Dan Bridgewater to Associate Partner, effective from 1 May 2019. Read more >

We continue to take an active role working with and supporting our local communities, a recent event saw Sarah Chisholm take part in a “Construction Youth” organised event at a school in Gravesend, giving Year 13 students an opportunity to experience a typical interview scenario. Read more >

We hosted the latest in our series of invitation only Baily Garner Breakfast briefings on Friday 18th January 2019 at the Ned, Poultry…on the hugely topical subject of Brexit.

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Applications for our 2019 Graduate and Year Out opportunities close on 31st December 2018 – please submit your CV and covering letter as soon as possible.

We are delighted to have sponsored the Homes 2018 event at London’s Olympia and take part in two well attended sessions – Managing Partner Andy Tookey, co-author of The Housing Forum’s “Stopping Building Failures” report, joined a panel examining the findings of this best practice guide, whilst  Andrew Little and John Milner’s presentation “MMC: Tipping Point or False Dawn” produced a lively question and answer session at this successful two day event.

After taking significant steps towards protecting our online systems to achieve Cyber Essential accreditation earlier this year, following a recent audit we are delighted that we have now successfully completed and been awarded Cyber Essential PLUS accreditation. The ‘PLUS’ accreditation means that, as well as our IT procedures and process complying with the standard, “at the time of testing, our defences were assessed as satisfactory against commodity based cyber-attack”. This is a great achievement which we are very proud of – huge thanks go to our IT Department for their hard work in achieving this.

Autumn is always a busy period for university careers fairs – we’ve been travelling across the country talking to students about our Year Out and Graduate opportunities and have received some great feedback so far from Anglia Ruskin, Oxford Brookes and Nottingham Trent universities. Read more >

We are delighted to announce that Os Kamil joins the partnership as an Associate Partner, effective from 1st November 2018.

Many congratulations on a well deserved promotion Os!

Baily Garner held its first Quality Summit on Friday 5th October.

Around 120 technical staff took part in a day led by our Partners and dedicated to identifying what more Baily Garner can do to drive forward the Quality Agenda in Construction.

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Baily Garner fully support the Quality in Construction agenda and on Friday 5th October will be holding its own one day Quality Summit for all its technical staff as part of our drive to make our own difference in this area.

We will be looking specifically at topics that contribute to the overall quality of buildings and project management such as Read more >

Congratulations to recent graduates Peter Fisher and Will Gregory on receiving their BSc (Hons) from Birmingham City University and to Peter who was also presented with the RICS Award for Outstanding Achievement.

We are committed to maintaining our Quality Management accreditation and were delighted to receive confirmation, following a recent audit, that Baily Garner’s quality management systems continue to meet the required standards for ISO 9001.

The Technical Stuff

Baily Garner have introduced digitally signed pdf documents using a 1024bit encryption public key infrastructure (PKI) certificate issued to Baily Garner from VeriSign. The certificates are held on a Class 2 crypto device, with access being controlled via a microsoft active directory authentication using a Strong Password Policy. What this means is that you have the peace of mind to know that signer’s digital identity is legitimate.

The ‘signature’ will appear on each document in a similar looking format and will include the name of the authoriser, the date and time the document was signed and a web link to this page to help explain digital signatures, see example

This gives you the assurance that the information has not been altered since it was authorised, as any modification made to the document after signing will invalidate the signature, and acrobat reader will allow you to see what was actually signed (the original document).

For more information see http://www.adobe.com/security/digsig.html

Our congratulations go to June Park who can now add MRICS to her qualifications after passing her APC – a great achievement following a lot of hard work and another success for our professional development programme here at Baily Garner

Baily Garner Equity Partners are delighted to be able to announce that Keith Exford CBE will be joining the Baily Garner LLP board as a Non-Executive Director from 1 August 2018.

Keith’s 30 years of unique housing sector management experience, including his former role as CEO of the largest housing association in Europe – Clarion Housing – will bring great knowledge, experience and guidance to the Baily Garner board.

We’re looking forward to CIH Housing 2018 in Manchester from  26-28 June – Join Andy Tookey at the Knowledge Theatre, Manchester Central Convention Complex on Thursday 28 June 12.00 – 12.45 exploring key themes of the Housing Forum latest report ‘Stopping Building Failures’ and ‘How the Client gets Value from Value Management’

A Housing Forum commissioned report, Stopping Building Failures: How a Collaborative Approach can Improve Quality and Workmanship, produced by a Working Group co-chaired by Baily Garner’s Managing Partner Andy Tookey, launched at the May 2018 National Conference.

Here’s a link to the full report, focusing on procuring for quality, harnessing innovation and building defect free homes, drawing on the experience of members from across the sector.

After some diligent work by our Bids team, we are delighted to confirm our recent upgrade to Constructionline Gold status. Thanks in particular to Sandra Potter and everyone who helped her secure the accreditation for Baily Garner LLP.

We are delighted to announce Rob Tyler’s promotion to Associate Partner, effective from 1^st May 2018.

Rob joined the practice in 2010, taking advantage of our in-house career support and sponsorship to complete his BSc (Hons) and to qualify as a Chartered Building Surveyor.

Many congratulations Rob!

We were delighted to take part and feature in the Women in Construction project. Read more >

Find out more on how our expertise can help you with our latest publications

Hidden Homes – how we can help transform your empty, under-utilised or derelict areas to deliver much needed homes

Building Services, Energy & Environmental  – read more on our collaborative approach to Mechanical, Electrical and Public Health services design and sustainability advice

As part of our continued growth and commitment to delivering a first class service to our clients, we are delighted to announce the launch of our new City of London office on 1 March 2018. Read more >

Islington MP Jeremy Corbyn was very impressed with the London Borough of Islington’s £6m development at Ivy Hall when he came along to open Brickworks Community Centre located in the impressive double height community hall. Read more >

When Osborne asked Baily Garner to get involved in a very special project Osborne were planning, to mark and help celebrate their 50^th anniversary, we were only too happy to help.

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Many congratulations to Suki and Alex who have successfully passed their APC to become Chartered Building Surveyors. A great achievement and testament to their hard work and the continuing success of our professional development programme here at Baily Garner

Autumn is always a busy period for university careers fairs – we’ve been travelling across the country talking to students about our year out and graduate opportunities and receiving some great feedback from under-graduates at Kingston, Nottingham Trent, Anglia Ruskin, Birmingham City, Sheffield Hallam and Reading universities.

You will find us at Southbank’s Built Environment & Architecture Fair on Tuesday 28 November – come along and say hello to Adam and Rob or catch up with Zach and Max at Brighton University on Friday 1 December.

More dates will be added in the new year.

We are delighted to be sponsoring Homes 2017 at London’s Olympia – drop by our stand and say hello on 22nd/23rd November.  Join Andy Tookey and Paul Pearce for “Treating the Quality Epidemic” at 3.15 pm on 22 Nov – a subject raising concerns across our industry.  The Homes Event is free of charge for Housing Associations, Local Authorities, ALMOs, Developers/Builders, Architects and Charities.

We are pleased to announce two promotions taking effect from 1st November 2017.

Congratulations to Mark Ellis, our new Associate Partner and to former Associate Partner Robert Ireland, who is now a Non Equity Partner.

We are delighted to welcome James Thacker who joined Baily Garner this month as Head of Commercial Surveying. James will play a key role in developing our exciting Commercial Business Plan in the coming months.

We’re delighted to be exhibiting and presenting at this year’s South East Consortium Annual Conference on 1st November. The event is free for public sector clients – find out more on what the conference will be covering. You’ll find our exhibition stand in the Emerging Thinking Zone – where Bradley Webster and Jack Thompson-Smith’s session on “Pre-Manufacture: Fad or mainstream” will be taking place between 3:45-4:30pm. Look forward to seeing you there!

Congratulations to Amy Ramsook on her recent success, adding BREEAM Assessor to her professional qualifications. Well done Amy!

Spring at Stonebridge Park has been shortlisted once again, this time the project is competing for the 2017 Building “Housing Project of the Year” Award, with winners to be announced in November.

Congratulations to everyone involved!