How to control site access using the contractors’ CSCS cards
Access control systems designed to fully integrate building contractors’ CSCS cards will become more widespread on the future, especially since the whole industry is set to grow 23% by the end of 2018, according to the latest Construction Products Association (CPA).
Dr Noble Francis, Economics Director of the Association, commented: "Our Forecasts reflect a welcome, recurring theme as growth continues and begins to broaden. Short-term activity is still led by private housing, infrastructure and commercial, and areas of public sector construction are showing the first signs of increasing strength. We believe the expansion will continue through 2018.”
Dr Francis continued: "The private housing sector’s rapid growth since early 2013 has been sustained by consistent levels of demand, the general UK economy’s return to health and government policies such as Help to Buy. We forecast starts to rise 18.0% in 2014 and 10.0% in 2015. In order for such projections to be met, however, increased capacity is necessary, particularly from SME house builders. In addition, there remain serious questions about affordability and higher mortgage repayment costs, together with uncertainty around the future of housing policies given the pending election. With this in mind, we forecast private housing growth will moderate in the longer term to 5.0% per year from 2016.”
Construction workers and other people who hold a CSCS card can use their existing card gain access to a construction site or similar, or use the CSCS card to gain access through turnstiles or car park barriers.
The software running on all of the access control systems developed and manufactured by Access Control UK also includes a CSCS card wizard. This allows system users to quickly grant contractors access to their clocks and access control system. The wizard will handle three different scenarios when granting access rights to contractors and for each different scenario, it will initially guide the user through the enrolment procedure.
The Contractors CSCS card is read using a USB card reader attached to a PC running the software.
Details are extracted from the card to update the contractors “employee” details within the system.
System objects such as a company, site, shift group and department, are assigned to the cardholder, either through selection or by default.
Templates for badges can be previewed by the user to see how their badge will appear, populating it with their personal details. Previewed badges can then be printed to any windows supported card printer.
If you’d like to find out more about the range of solutions supplied by Access Control UK, both in terms of hardware (smart card readers, biometric readers, turnstiles, etc.) and software (access rights management software solutions, etc.), just contact us, we’ll be more than happy to answer any queries you might have.