APSE Scotland Building and Housing seminar 2020

Building and maintaining better, safer and sustainable communities

Thursday 6 and Friday 7 February 2020

Dunblane Hydro, Perthshire

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About the event

The setting of building maintenance and housing services continues to develop and change at a fast pace. APSE’s 2019 joint publication with the TCPA “Housing for a fairer society: The role of councils in ensuring stronger societies” sets out recommendations for Governments to enable councils to deliver more and better homes of all tenures. As well as this, local authorities continue to face ongoing budget pressures and other big policy issues which make the challenges our important services face even more difficult to overcome. Specifically, this conference will provide the opportunity for delegates to pose their questions on current and future challenges for local authorities in terms of the affordable housing targets and climate change emergency as well as other related building and housing issues to an expert panel of Chief Executives and Elected Members. During the event we will also look at how local authorities are helping to meet the ambitious affordable homes targets, with presentations on implementing Housing Asset Management Frameworks and discussing “Deep retrofit” and the whole house approach. As well as this we will be looking at the importance of safeguarding our workforce and communities with presentations on suicide prevention and meeting the challenges of changing community risk. In addition, we will be looking at health and safety training with presentations on face-fit testing and the advantages of providing training in-house. Finally, we will have our building maintenance and housing clinic which provides colleagues attending the opportunity to discuss and debate the issues which are affecting their service areas. This year we will be making this session even more interactive with a Virtual Reality Health & Safety training demonstration from Jacobs, with colleagues invited to try out the virtual reality training for themselves.

Presentations

Here to listen: suicide prevention and helping to keep people safe
David Doran, Health & Safety Advisor, East Ayrshire Council

How can we do more for our communities
Dr Kirsty Darwent, Chair of the SFRS Board and Area Commander Stephen Wood, Prevention and Protection, Scottish Fire and Rescue Service

Implementation of our Housing Asset Management Framework (unavailable online)
Blair Millar, Housing Services Manager, East Ayrshire Council

Challenges and innovations for Scotland's Housing market
Paul O'Brien, Chief Executive, APSE

Deep retrofit: How can we make homes fit for the future
Chris Morgan, Director/Architect, John Gilbert Architects Ltd

Face-fit testing
Dougie McMillan, Planning & Resource Manager and John Walsh, Plant & Transport Officer, South Lanarkshire Council

Advantages of inhouse training (unavailable online)
Neil MacGregor, Team Manager, Fife Council

Conference brochure