BREEAM in the news
I have a post in the offing which is my attempt at a BREEAM primer. That will take a bit of thought, but in the meantime, here’s some wisdom from a client on the receiving end of a BREEAM rating :
“I was shocked to find out how the process works. I was under the impression that certification as “excellent” under BREEAM meant the actual building had a BREEAM rating of excellent. This may not be true.”
Joanne is quite right. What she needs is a Post Construction Review . Sadly, she needs to pay almost as much as she paid for the original certificate. In an ideal world, a different assessor could be used, but in practice, it works out cheaper if the original assessor does it, as they will be familiar with the building. These PCR’s have always been offered by BRE, and are increasingly being written into contracts to stop exactly what Joanne fears. A building cannot however have a post construction review if an original certificate was not produced. Producing a Design and Procurement certificate after the building is built is fraught with difficulty (mainly due to problems in collecting all the necessary evidence) and seldom leads to a high score.
Incidentally, the BRE have produced a pdf fact file which you can download while you wait with bated breath for my BREEAM primer…
3 posts in one day? This is some kind of record for me. It won’t last, I’m sure…
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Often doing a Post Construction Review is fraught with difficulty.
The transfer of information in our industry is generally abysmal - things don’t get read, people don’t understand what they’re given, others don’t pick up the phone and the building users just make do with what they get.
Anyway, I was in a meeting recently where the QS mentioned the LEED Standard as being something that their clients are interested in.
My comment/question is: Are they just a US centric company that needs a universal standard to tick their CSR box or are the UKGBC wanting to roll this out in the UK?
Second to that is how would this fit in with the proposed Code for Sustainable Buildings?