The March 2021 issue of In Practice, the CIEEM industry journal, contained a viewpoint piece from Tilly discussing the ethics of employing freelance staff. You can read it in your March issue, or if you’re not a CIEEM member, you can download it here.
News
Vacancies
We’re already looking ahead to next year, so if you’re a freelancer in the south (including Wales), please fillin this google form: https://forms.gle/G8j6RVbZZjjpXT7c6
Our minimum hourly rate is £15/hr for new people who don’t have their own kit. We expect you to charge the same for travel time (plus 45p/mile) as for survey work – time you’re traveling for us is time you can’t work for anyone else. General maximum for things like bat surveys is £35/hr for experienced licenced people with their own kit, but if you have a particular specialism (like a hard to obtain licence, or specialist experience) that means your rates are higher, we’d still like to hear from you! We just probably won’t be calling on you to stare at the side of a low potential building very often.
Likewise, if you’re London or that vicinity, we appreciate your rates will be higher, so feel free to send us a CV etc as well.
Generally our work takes us all over the south of England, up to roughly Oxford, south Wales, but the bulk of it is in the Bristol area.
We usually pay invoices same day (if we’re in the office!), but we aim for the same week (we say our terms are 30 days but that’s only in case of us missing an email).
We have a great group of loyal freelancers we use, but we had a few bigger jobs this year, so we’re looking to expand the database. If you’re a student with zero experience, we are happy to train you (and pay you for training time!), which we did with a couple of people this summer.
Any questions, email: jobs@iesconsult.co.uk
COVID 19 & Our Work
We are following and being guided by the latest updates from both the CIEEM and the UK Government.
On the 9th April, Defra wrote to the CIEEM to clarify how coronavirus guidance relates to ecologists.This states:
“Ecologists and environmental professionals should therefore be able to continue with outdoor work, including ecological surveying and supervision, where they can continue to follow Public Health England guidelines.”
And that “… the cessation of environmental survey works would risk causing later delays in the development sector. We would like to thank CIEEM and other environmental professional associations for offering advice to help their members adhere to Government guidelines whilst going about their important work.”
We are therefore continuing to operate, and are carrying out ecological surveys. Each survey will be individually risk assessed as usual, and the additional risks associated with Covid 19 taken into account. In some cases, this may lead to an increase in fees, for example where several surveyors are required and we all have to travel separately rather than car sharing.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any queries about survey work you require to be undertaken during the 2020 season.
Winter is Coming
As the survey season draws to a close, we turn our attention to all the things we need to get done over the winter so we’re ready for the 2018 survey season. Of course, there’s all the reports to get finished, and now is the ideal time to start drafting licence applications so they’re ready to submit for next year.
We also try and do an annual kit inventory and tidy of the ecology kit store, so we can see just how many reptile tins went missing this year, and replace any broken or worn items. There’s usually a fun day spent making newt traps, and labeling kit which goes in the field so we can identify our stuff when things are being thrown in the boot of a car at 2am.
Winter is also the time to catch up on the admin tasks which have slipped slightly over the summer, hence this lovely new website! Many thanks to the ever-patient Hilary at Manners Media for gently cajoling us into finishing off the new site.
