Sunny delight

Members enjoyed good weather and good news at this year’s AGM and Technical Update

From left: John McGhee, Kenny Duncan, Kevin Griffin, Darrell Matthews and Eric Rae enjoy the summer sunshine

Another year of successful awareness raising, outreach and training initiatives was celebrated at this year’s AGM and Technical Update.

Held at the DoubleTree by Hilton Edinburgh on 6 June, the event also saw Kevin Griffin and Kenny Duncan re-elected as President and Vice President respectively. It also welcomed Darrell Matthews as our new managing director and wished outgoing MD Newell McGuiness all the best for his retirement after 30 years at SELECT.

Kevin said this year’s technical hot topic had been the 18th edition of BS 7671, on which hundreds of hours have been spent to ensure changes are practical and meet standards. He said: “For the third year, we delivered awareness training to all local authority verifiers, travelling to eight locations around Scotland with BS 7671 and BS 5839 updates.

“These events help maintain our relationship with local authority building standards staff, which helps us represent Members’ interests around the Certification of Construction Scheme.”

The event also heard how 2017 was a strong year for our Toolbox Talks, with more than 650 Members attending the 12 events.

Training played another important role, with a 5% increase in demand for SELECT training courses. The meeting heard how, over the year, SELECT trained 2,871 delegates across 267 different courses. Some 2,044 delegates were from Member businesses, the rest from non-Member organisations.