Carnell attended the CECA Midlands Awards on Thursday 12 September at the Burlington Hotel in Birmingham. Presented with the Social Value Award for work done on the A38 Fradley to Barton scheme for National Highways. Members of the respective organisations were on hand to collect the trophy as we celebrated a great team effort with National Highways, other SDF delivery partners and our key supply chain.

It all started through early contractor involvement and making a concerted effort to ‘do the right thing’. A Community Wants and Needs Assessment (CWaNA) informed decisions of what social value options to carry out during the course of the scheme, which gave us links with the National Memorial Arboretum, Alrewas Royal British Legion, Alrewas Parish Council, Kings Bromley Parish Council and several foodbanks.

As well as these initiatives, Burton Pupil Referral Unit came along to learn about careers in construction, we spent over £1.3 million across 40 local SMEs, got a Considerate Constructors Scheme (CCS) “Excellent” rating, collected over 1,313 bags of litter and saved more than 140 tonnes of CO2e using EcoSite.

As for the scheme itself, well that went pretty well too! Ian Doust of National Highways saying, “None of this scheme would have been possible without the team at Carnell being as positive and engaged as they have been… there aren’t any negatives for me to feedback, just positives, and I thought it would be good to raise the profile of the team as we simply couldn’t have done this without them.”

You can find out more about the scheme and social value aspects here.