Projects

The Digital Media Centre, photographed left, is situated in Barnsley town centre. This project began a wide range of re-development projects within Barnsley, based upon Will Alsop's vision for the Tuscan Town. Angela Vodden, the managing director of AVAC was fundamental in the procurement of the team to design, build and manage such an iconic building. This business incubation centre wasn’t complex by its procurement and utilised standard form design and build construction contracts with an underpinning facilities management contract. The efficient teamwork on this development ensured that the building completed on time and, although not often said, under-budget! The true measure of the value for money being that the iconic building has grown from strength to strength in terms of the business development opportunities it has provided for Barnsley and its people.

This £1.26bn project was a major achievement for Barnsley Council, with the internal and external legal team being led by Angela from start to ultimate completion. Whilst PFI is not a popular contractual mechanism, it is complex, it is costly BUT it cannot be argued, without such funding and true partnership working the schools which now stand within Barnsley would not be there to offer truly amazing, learning environments and educational opportunities to whole communities.

ACADEMIC BENEFIT

The lessons learned from the BSF project were significant in showing how the contractual mechanisms for PFI contracts had developed over the decades in which they had been utilised, to respond to market concerns and socio-economic fluctuations. These lessons were advance by Angela into an international academic forum, from which other academic, construction and engineering and government practitioners, have followed the success of this story and advanced their own contractual drafting, to enable contractual arrangements to be implemented to deliver infrastructure solutions.

This innovative waste collaboration of South Yorkshire Authorities was concluded with Angela and the internal BDR team at the helm to help steer the course of this project to success working with external and internal legal teams to negotiate and draft the complex PFI solution. This project's innovation coming from the use of the anaerobic digestate solution introduced to enable energy generation. As one of the more successful waste projects within the North of England which educates as part of its community ethos, it is difficult not to be somewhat very proud of being a part of the BDR team and the advisors which pulled this together.