Hinkley Point C
PROJECT SUMMARY
Client - Costain, Skanska, Balfour Beatty, Carillion
Budget - £32 million
Timeline - 2016 - 2021
Location - West coast of Somerset
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In August 2016, Reliable Contractors (RC) opened a satellite office in in the Southwest region to support the onboarding of local and national labour for site preparation works at the Hinkley Point C Nuclear Power Station in Somerset.
Scope of Supply
Provision of sustained labour supply across a large remote site location – covering all aspects of civil engineering trades.
Timescales / Duration
2016 – 2021, over a period of 5 years.
Reference
Colin Dunkerton, Works Superintendent (colin.dunkerton@kierbamhpc.co.uk)
The enabling works involve the excavation of over 5.5 million cubic metres of material, large-scale earthworks, complex terracing structures, and the creation of an expansive road network.
RC is currently supplying a range of civils operatives, plant operators, and supervisors. In addition, we are sourcing local labour to work through various job centres, and we have 16 apprentices on site working towards their Level 2 NVQ in Construction and Operations.
Our slingers / signallers, tractor drivers, and concrete pump operators are all CPCS trained and we continually participate in safety inspections and initiatives, engaging the workforce in briefings, toolbox talks, and any necessary ongoing training.
Our Approach
In order to attract and retain the quality workforce required on Hinkley Point C, we exceeded the CIJC guidelines on rates of pay, pension, and redundancy, as well as travel allowances. Our approach proved successful and we maintained our project retention KPI of 80-100%. Our learning was that, whilst we recognise the CIJC minimum guidelines, we believe they need to be bespoke to each project.
Hinkley Pint C is an example of where the model for sourcing labour has not been best for programme and learning can be directly applied as the labour suppliers did not have the buy-in from the Tier 1 Contractor. The learning we take forward here would be the use of a Labour Desk (with investment fed from the top-down), run in partnership with fellow labour suppliers, to successfully provide a joined-up service provision to the client.
A successful initiative on the Hinkley project has been our renting of local farmland to build temporary accommodation camps for our large workforce to be based locally. This provided local accommodation for 40% of the workforce, and a legacy will remain for the local communities in form of leisure and sports facilities. Our experience on the project has taught us to utilise enhanced rates on sites like Hinkley to allow for labour needs such as staff accommodation, as well as arriving earlier to set up prior to the project starting.
The distance from home for many of our team members is understandably taxing but it has helped us improve and initiate new ways to monitoring the wellbeing of our staff living in accommodation on site. For example, our one team approach down to the same PPE really strengthens wellbeing and morale on site. We also host and greatly learn from team building events.
The use of Occupational Health Huts at Hinkley, and the overall structure and format of the occupational health programme at the project, have been identified as key learnings, and incorporated into our best practice guidelines for occupational health on future projects.
The Hinkley Point C project highlights our capability to provide resources spread over a large, rural area whilst cohesively working with several large Joint Venture (JV) partnerships and Tier 1 contractors. Hinkley Point C is located in a remote location and the main construction works will see up to 6,000 people work on site over the course of the project. As the local labour market volume was insufficient, we successfully sourced, recruited and relocated large numbers of qualified labour from across the UK and Ireland. Our extensive project-matching procedures and our training programme enable us to consistently provide a high-quality, industry-leading workforce – including providing opportunities to the 16 apprentices we have employed on the site. All our staff’s skills are developed in line with specific skills shortages on site.
