National Award Recognition for VHE

Faced with the task of regenerating a number of sites, National Grid had expectations that the costs of remediation would exceed the expected land values when sold on for auction. Accordingly, work needed to be done to give National Grid the confidence that remediation work could go ahead while still meeting the strict financial criteria for the sale of the land.

By grouping a number of projects together VHE and National Grid were able to demonstrate sufficient cost savings to make the remediation works commercially viable.

Working with our design partners at RSK, we were also able to help through:
1. Undertaking site investigation gap analysis,
2. Developing strategy,
3. Instigating the necessary statutory liaison including obtaining planning permissions,
4. Undertaking site works,
5. Providing completion and validation reports to enable future sale of the site.

It is expected that savings of over £1.2 million will be made against the early, anticipated remediation costs of £2.5M. Also, by achieving such savings, National Grid is now free to push ahead with the land sales, releasing further properties for regeneration and development.

Works are now finalised at Whaleybridge, Driffield and Garforth. However, the overall project is still ongoing and further works will shortly be undertaken at Workington and, in the summer, St Helen’s.

VHE’s involvement in guiding the projects through from concept to design and delivery enabled a ‘win win’ scenario to be achieved, meeting the client’s preferred financial position coupled with highly successful project delivery.

In the words of the National Grid Property Team 2015 – “The project took six sites in Northern England with a combined Provision-based clean-up cost of £2.5 Million and reduced this by over half. VHE’s commercial approach to pricing, risk transfer and delivery of the minimum standard required of the Sell Clean Policy has realised significant cost-savings”