Moving a crew between sites without losing a week

The situation writes itself: twelve men, ten weeks into a fourteen-week job, and the next one starts in three weeks — say Vantage Waterton at Bridgend while the crew is still on Tata work at Port Talbot. Somebody has to decide where the crew sleeps in week eleven, and most contractors make that decision by accident: hold the old house a month too long, or run everyone through hotels for the gap.

The overlap math

An overlap week costs two rents. A hotel gap costs per-head per-night with no kitchen, no drying and no van parking. Both are avoidable, but only if the move is planned as its own workstream instead of improvised on the Friday before the Monday start. The rule of thumb: if the new site is more than about 45 minutes from the old one, moving the beds is cheaper than commuting for two weeks. Under that, pay the fuel and let the crew drive — the M4 corridor makes most South Wales hops commutable; the valleys and the west do not.

Book the second house before you need it

The day you know job B is real, hold the second house — even on provisional dates. Crew housing moves fast in South Wales right now: the Waterton campus, the EAF programme and the rail renewals are all pulling from the same stock (Bridgend crew housing). A holding date costs almost nothing compared with hunting for a house in the week the crew arrives. And know your break clauses on both properties: a house on a monthly term and a serviced apartment on weekly terms give you very different room to manoeuvre — the same flex logic as outage planning.

Move in two waves, not one

The classic disaster is moving everyone on the same Saturday: twelve men, six vans, two houses, one day — lost kit and a Monday where nobody knows where the spirit level is. Instead:

• Advance party first. Two or three men — the chargehand and the two most senior — move at the end of the week before. They check the beds, the parking, the WiFi and the keys, and they meet the landlord.
• Main body last. The crew moves with the last shift at the old site. Nobody loses a working day, and the new house is a house, not a campsite, on day one.
• Tools move separately from men. Kit in the crew van takes the van off the job. Move plant on a weekend or by courier; move men on the Monday.

Who runs the move matters as much as the sequence. Hand it to the foreman, not the office: he knows which two men can be spared for the advance party, which van carries the tools, and whether the new house is actually ready before anyone sleeps in it. The office books the houses; the foreman owns the moving day. When the two disagree, the foreman is right.

The same-town swap

When one crew is leaving and another arriving at the same property — an outage crew out, a commissioning crew in — the house never needs to empty. Coordinate the handover date so the beds stay warm: the leaving crew does its end-of-let clean a day early, the arriving crew lands the day after. This is the pattern the Waterton and EAF crews run, and it turns a changeover from a two-week gap into a two-day overlap.

One invoice across both sites

Two houses on two bookings means two invoices, two payment runs and one finance department asking which is which. Move the crew, not the paperwork: one account, one purchase order covering both sites, one monthly statement that shows the overlap weeks plainly — the same single-invoice rule as any crew of twelve.

Use the gap for the deep clean

The week between handover and the new crew arriving is when the old house gets its end-of-let clean while it is still paid for, and the new house gets checked against the spec — gas cert, EICR, HMO licence, beds, heat, parking, drying (the full compliance checklist). An empty week used properly is cheaper than a complaint in week two.

When the crew rotates instead

Some crews don't move at all — they rotate. Rail possession gangs work from a base house while the possession itself moves between Canton, Newport and Bridgend (possession crew housing). The house stays, the men change, and the only rule is that the beds are never empty twice in a row. If the job allows it, this is cheaper than any move: one house, full all year, zero moving days.

The spec that survives a move

• Hold the second house the day job B is confirmed; know your break clauses.
• Move in waves — advance party, then the body, then the tools.
• One account, one PO, one invoice across both sites.
• Use the empty week for the deep clean and the compliance checks.
• Under 45 minutes, commute; over it, move the beds.

Nobody notices a well-run crew move, which is why it is never a line on the programme. But the houses that make it work — held early, swapped cleanly, billed as one account — are the difference between a crew that starts the new job rested and one that starts it in a hotel car park.