The festivals may have finished but the Autumn begins in earnest

Both the Green Home Festival and the Edinburgh Traditional Building Festival shined a spotlight on the skills and commitment of our members. I had these qualities front and centre of my mind when I spoke to representatives from Scotland’s Colleges at the end of August.

The Energy Skill Partnership (ESP) wanted me to present to the network of Scottish Construction leads (with some college Vice Principals in attendance) at their forum meeting in Stirling. ESP is the college sector agency in Scotland for construction, engineering, energy transition, zero carbon transport, and STEM.

I presented about the work of the FMB, the latest skills and construction industry forecasts for Scotland and gave I think, a fair summary of what our members in Scotland are saying about skills issues and training provision.

Net Zero

If you are grappling with how your business can help to deliver net zero or have an interest in what is going on across the building industry in this space, then it would be good to hear from you. Why indeed?

Well I am an industry co-chair of a new Net-Zero working group. There are 10 working groups covering priority areas of the Scottish Construction Accord. Each group has one chair and two co-chairs, so the 30 Chairs sit on the Scottish Government’s Construction Leadership Forum (CLF), Transformation Board.

The Net Zero working group is about: “Driving a just transition to being net zero in embodied carbon, industry operations and over asset life cycles.”

No lack of ambition here!

To date we have agreed what we will focus on, which in short, will be about mapping what is already going on around net zero across the industry. On behalf of FMB members, I am there to ensure your voice is heard at this table.

Additional FMB Scotland updates

It was a virtual table for the Scotland Board meeting on 6 September. There is a short summary here of what fellow members discussed and asked, so please take a look.

Lothian MSP Foysol Choudhury met me to discuss licensing the building industry as well as understand more about the FMB’s own membership criteria and standards. There was similar curiosity from local authority and housing association delegates at the Chartered Institute of Housing’s (CIH) event in Edinburgh. Here I talked about how vital skilled tradespeople and local building companies are both to building new homes and upgrading and improving existing homes across Scotland.

Authors

Gordon Nelson

FMB Scotland Hub Director, Federation of Master Builders

Director, Federation of Master Builders Scotland

Gordon has nearly twenty years’ experience of working in membership organisations in Scotland and joined the Federation of Master Builders (FMB) in 2014. Prior to this, he worked at the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) and for Unilever in business development, membership management and business-to-business marketing roles. Amongst his responsibilities in his role as the Director for FMB Scotland are public affairs, media relations, governance and representing member’s interests to Scottish policy makers and stakeholders within the Scottish construction industry. Gordon is the Secretary of the Cross-Party Group on Construction in the Scottish Parliament, and he is a member of the Scottish Building Standards Futures Board. Gordon represents the FMB on Scotland’s Construction Industry Collective Voice: which is comprised of the leading construction trade and professional bodies. In spring 2023 Gordon was appointed as an industry co-chair of the Construction Leaderships Forum’s (CLF) Transformation Board.

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