latest news 

Many thanks to the London School of Astrology, and in particular Frank, for their recent fundraiser on behalf of PHASES. It resulted in a donation of £900 which will go towards running our training workshop. It’s really appreciated.

Stoll (formerly Sir Oswald Stoll) provide supported housing to vulnerable veterans. We’ve worked with them in the past as many of our trainees are ex-services personnel. We were pleased to learn that Zoe, who we know through her work with other charities, has recently joined their team and in fact we’ve already made a housing referral to her on behalf of one of our trainees. We look forward to lot’s of future collaboration.  

Sixteen year-old Noella, from Limoges in France, contacted us last year. She needed to carry out a project for the ‘British International’ section of her exams and really wanted to work with a charity in homelessness. After agreeing the parameters of the project with Noella, we sent her a couple of videos, one of our workshop in action, and also replies by some of our trainees to questions that Noella had devised. She’s just completed her project and apparently it went down really well. Good luck to Noella in her future career.

We decided at the beginning of this year to undertake a significant programme of repair and refurbishment works on our affordable rent properties. It’s coming up to ten years since we first brought many of these, formerly empty, properties back into use and annual maintenance costs have been steadily rising. Apart from the roof in Beckton (see February 2023) we’ve been replacing boilers, pre-empting damp issues and tackling some structural challenges. A costly business but it’s been great for our trainees on site.

We’ve been at our training workshop in Rotherhithe for about 12 years now. Our Lease from Southwark Council has recently expired but we’re pleased to inform that after negotiations with Southwark a new ten year Lease has been agreed. The less happy side is that our rent goes up about 65%. So if anyone fancies chipping in to help on this, please contact us. In the meantime, here’s to another ten years of construction training in Rotherhithe.

Our friends at the charity Action on Empty Homes have published a report this month titled ‘Retrofit Empty Homes Action Partnerships’. It looks at how communities can unlock empty homes through a process of retrofitting them at scale and at speed. The report identifies retrofitting empty homes as a crucial piece of the transition to net zero. It also explores the spillover effects of community-led retrofitting, including job-creation in emerging green industries and upskilling in local economies. Pop over to their website and have a look.

We don’t usually feature the maintenance work we do on our renovated empty properties, many of which require extra TLC as the years go by. These maintenance jobs offer great opportunities for our trainees to hone their skills. A quick mention here for some recently completed work at a three-storey house we have in Beckton, East London. We’d had recurring problems with the roof over the years so decided to invest in some tech and had a drone fly over the property. It revealed all sorts of issues which we’ve now been able to remedy ! A big shout out to our helpful drone contractors on this one – Sparks4Growth.

After two years badly affected by Covid, our trainee numbers have recovered this year as we approach Christmas. We’ve had 21 trainees through the workshop door during 2022 with over half of them ex-services personnel. Particular congratulations to our Trainee of the year, George, who, after completing our workshop course, went on to complete specialist groundwork training and found full-time work at the nearby Canada Water regeneration project.

Our friends at the charity, Action on Empty Homes, continue to call for the expansion of Government funding to support communities refurbishing long-term empty homes. The last National Empty Homes Programme, which helped PHASES to bring a number of empty properties back into use, ended in 2015. Since then, the number of long-term empty homes in England has actually risen by 38,000. Action on Empty Homes has been touring the party conferences this autumn and has the support of all the main political parties. We hope this will translate into real funding in the near future.

Our funding through the EQUIP programme (partly financed by the European Social Fund) has enabled us to increase the number of our people progressing onto further trade-specific training. In particular, four of our trainees have progressed on to courses this year at the Builder Training Centre in Croydon. Three have developed their advanced tiling skills and another has embarked on training for an electrical qualification. All of these trainees are ex-servicemen.