Timbertecs News Round Up from the UK - April 2007

Update: Timber Frame, Construction & Property News

• HBF: Measures to make homes greener could be critically undermined by local authority targets

  HBF Website

  (April 2007)

Responding to measures announced today to make it easier for people install green technology on their homes, HBF Executive Chairman, Stewart Baseley, says: “The home building industry is committed to working with Government to meet the greatest peacetime challenge in its history: building all new homes to zero-carbon performance standards by 2016.

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• Property shortage underpins robust housing market

  Telegraph.co.uk (23rd April 2007)

The last bastion of affordable property, Lochgelly in Fife, now has an average property price of over £100,000, research has shown.

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News: Environment, Climate and Attitudes

• Greens Hail Landmark Victory in Fight to Save Amazon Rainforests

  Independent.co.uk

One of the world's largest agribusiness giants was forced to close a soy export terminal in Brazil's Amazon region this weekend, marking a major victory for environmentalists who have argued for years that the plant was built illegally and became a significant cause of rainforest depletion

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• 'Gold rush' for wood flooring is destroying endangered habitat

  Independent.co.uk (17th April 2007)

British shoppers are unwittingly playing a part in the destruction of one of the world's last great wildlife habitats by buying flooring made of endangered wood from "paradise forests".

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News: Society, Health, Community & Responsible Business

• Education, education, conservation: Schools go carbon neutral

  Independent.co.uk (19th April 2007)

This week the Goverment has pledged that every new secondary will be carbon neutral. And there's one school in Liverpool that the rest can take a lesson from.

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• New GCSE builds teenagers' skills

  BBC.co.uk (22nd April 2007)

A GCSE qualification in construction and the built environment can help tackle the UK's skills "famine", says government envoy Sir Digby Jones.

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News: Finance & Economy

• Commuters push up the price of an average urban home in the UK

  Timesonline (23rd April 2007)

A house in town might seem a modest ambition, but beleaguered househunters are finding it ever harder to achieve.

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• New property millionaires in the UK double in one yearTimesonline (23rd April 2007)

The number of local communities that boasts million-pound homes has doubled in the past five years, with nearly a third of the country now living near a property millionaire.

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